A Tremendous Faith (part two)

by Arron Bergeron

The failure of education in solving the problem of evil

Man is not qualified for remedy from within. Likewise the elixir proposed by the secularist to have man “save ourselves”ⁱ is a concocted snake oil which can never heal human souls from that which ails them. One posited ingredient is education, yet entering the last century was the age of progress, of great technological and educational advance, and yet it exited being the bloodiest century in history. Education is clearly not the answer. Consider this testimony;

“I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, woman and babies shot and buried by High School and College Graduates. So I am suspicious of education.

“My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”ⁱⁱ

Nazi Germany was at the time the most technologically advanced country in the world. What good did that knowledge and education accomplish in retrospect? Education in and of itself will only make way for greater acts of evil and dishonesty. Consider the Enron scandal; the men at the helm of that were graduates of establishments with some the highest intellectual credentials in the world. With sin infecting every component of the human make-up, education is a means by which we can find more complicated and imaginative ways to justify and commit the oldest of sins. If you educate a train robber, you will find him equipped and ready not to loot, but to steal the whole train. Fifty and sixty years ago we would watch a western where men would rob a bank at gun point. Today movies contain the most elaborate schemes to essentially do the same thing; that of stealing from others and getting rich quick. That is a reflection of reality, in that education is the means by which we can more creatively, more successfully accomplish what our hearts are after. Education just makes it more likely we can escape this world’s consequences with the loot in our sin stained hands.

History bears out the truth in the case of Rwanda, the Holocaust, and the Armenian genocide at the turn of the last century; education played an important role for the perpetrators in gaining control of a culture. They all understood a government which controls the education, especially of its youth, wields immense power over the people.

“Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child’s understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology years later.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Learning is not an evil entity, but the one who controls the content of learning is the one to be watched. Clearly education in and of itself can do nothing to help us without the absolute moral compass of God to steer it in the right pathways of love and justice. If a compass does not work, we will get led to the middle of nowhere. If the moral compass of the educator is broken, the education will do nothing more than get us further lost in the wilderness of sin.

There is also the problem of reason in education. Education is useless unless our reason is anchored to something immovable. Humanism does not supply that foundation. If we are chance chemical reactions, then each thought is a chance chemical reaction, and is therefore no more rational or reasonable than another thought. Under this philosophy it degenerates into “we can’t know anything”, which shows by its self refuting end the need for an anchor for reason, and therefore education. Under this philosophy, why would there even be a hunger to learn? Why think? It is grasping for the wind; it is futile and meaningless.

Good learning is built on a foundation of reason and is rooted in truth. If everything is an accident, a random act of chance, then truth becomes a casualty. We risk falling into the trap of equating information with truth, and living as though those with the most information are correct, and have the most truth. This is faulty and extremely dangerous, as is proven by Hitler’s henchmen. If a lack of information causes problems, how much more so would a stymieing abundance of information without solid foundation?

Without a point of reference, we can never tell where we have gone, where we are going, or if we have even moved. In morality, reason, and truth, we must assume God as the ultimate point of reference, or we have no basis for any meaning in any ethical or intellectual pursuits. The secular humanist and atheist hoping in education and progress today is essentially on this pathway, unwittingly hoping in confusion and despair.

Notes:

1. “The humanist manifesto II”. The direct quote is as follows, and is found in the paragraph dealing with religion; “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”
2. Chaim Ginott, “Teacher and Child”, Macmillan, New York, 1972
3. Sebastian Haffner, “Defying Hitler: a Memoir”, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2002, pg 16