Tag Archives: education

In Praise of Ignorance

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What does it mean to be an educated person? I posted an introductory essay on this topic in June, 2022. I promised to continue this theme, but more pressing issues distracted me. I concluded that…

Acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion.

I want to continue exploring the idea of education, focusing today on one mark of an educated person, intellectual responsibility.

Learning and Ignorance

I have been an educator for half of my life and most of the other half I was studying to become one. I have read more books than I can count; and I have written a few. I still feel ignorant! Hence, in this essay I want to address the place of ignorance in intellectual life.

I have found it a rule that the more we learn the more we become aware of our ignorance. The deeper we probe a topic the more we realize its connections with other areas of knowledge. And those areas are connected to still others. At some point it dawns on us that the web of mutually conditioning connections spreads out infinitely in all directions. Not only must we admit that we do not know how far our ignorance extends, we must also acknowledge that things we do not know could affect the meaning of the things we believe. That is to say, becoming aware of the extent of our ignorance casts doubt on what seemed certain.

The Skeptic

Let me differentiate what I am saying from thoroughgoing skepticism—the thesis that we know nothing at all. Suppose I gain by close inspection some empirical knowledge of a certain mountain peak. I learn about its resident animals, plants, and many of its physical features. These facts will not change no matter how much I learn later about the rest of the mountain and its setting in its mountain range. These facts would remain the same even if we mapped its entire setting on earth, in the history of geology and biology, in the solar system, in the galaxy, etc. But coming to know this extended web of connections would expand our understanding of the origin, history, function, and significance of this mountain peak. Gaining such information would not convince us that our previous knowledge was erroneous, but it would show its incompleteness.

I believe we could apply this same procedure to almost any assertion of fact or truth whether philosophical, theological, historical, or scientific: that God exists, murder is immoral, the American Civil War ended in 1865, or that knowledge can best be defined as true, justified belief. If a belief is true, no new information can make it false. But new information can deepen our understanding or expand the meaning of a belief.

What does this exercise have to do with being an educated person? An intellectually responsible person knows enough about an area of study to be able to give good reasons why gaining further knowledge about that area and its connections with other areas will not falsify the knowledge they have gained so far. At the same time, however, educated people are aware of their ignorance of other related facts and truths that could deepen and expand their current understanding. Unlike the skeptic, the educated person’s awareness of their ignorance is hard won and productive of further knowledge.

The Dogmatist

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the skeptic is the dogmatist. Dogmatists identify their isolated beliefs with absolute truths, that is, truths whose meaning is fully and unambiguously present in the very words of the assertions. Dogmatists are not open to modification, deepening, and expansion of their beliefs by pursuing additional information. Like the skeptical attitude, the dogmatic mentality is not productive of further knowledge.

Neither the skeptic nor the dogmatist measures up to the ideal of intellectual responsibility. Educated people should know enough about the wider context of their beliefs to defend them against total denials but also be aware enough of their ignorance to learn from their opponents. The attitude of which I am speaking combines intellectual confidence with intellectual humility in a way productive of continued learning.

Hope

Dogmatists fear that admitting the least smidgen of incompleteness in their beliefs will plunge them into complete relativism and skepticism. Skeptics dread making commitments for fear that they will be disappointed. Both lack the Christian virtue of hope. Hope embraces unwaveringly the truth it knows, believing that it is only a taste of what is to come. Hope unites confidence and openness in a way productive of joy. Both dogmatists and skeptics are miserable.

What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?

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What does it mean to be an educated person? This question assumes that becoming an educated person is a valuable goal. Also presupposed is the fact that people are not born educated but must achieve this state through a process of learning. What, then, does one need to learn and how may one become an educated person?

Perhaps the first thing on which to get clear is that one does not need to know everything to be considered an educated person. To begin with, human beings cannot know everything. Much about nature, human history, and culture is not known by anyone or has been forgotten. Future human beings may discover and invent many things hardly imaginable today. Additionally, there is too much knowledge available even now for any one person to master in a lifetime.

The educated person of fifth-century B.C. Greece or eighth-century Persia would not be considered educated for life in twenty-first century America or France. Your ability to negotiate life in rural America won’t sustain you in New York City. Nor could the New Yorker make it on the farm. These examples hint at the nature of education and the basis of its value. Education is a process of gaining at least the minimum of knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a particular society and age.

I think it is helpful to distinguish between acquisition of technical skills—brick laying, cooking, farm animal care, or welding—and acquisition of social skills, the so-called “liberal arts.” In our society we don’t consider a person “educated” simply because they are skilled at husbandry or car repair. We reserve the label “educated” for a person who possesses the knowledge and skills that enable them to engage fully and gracefully in all sectors of the dominant society in which they live. Of course we need to understand our subculture as well, but we don’t need a formal education to achieve this goal. We acquire this knowledge in the same way we pick up our local dialect.

(Note: Acquiring “cultural competence” is all the rage in education circles these days. It seems to mean learning about other people’s subcultures–especially “marginalized” cultures–when what is needed is for everyone to learn how to live in the national/international culture.)

Usually, then, acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion. Since each of these institutions has come to be what it is today over a long period of time, study of their history is an essential part of understanding their present constitutions. Communicating effectively and gracefully with people from different places and backgrounds is an essential social skill. Reading, writing, and speaking well are, therefore, essential marks of an educated person. And no one can learn to write well or speak well without reading examples of well written literature.

The process of education requires some institutionalization: libraries, schools, presses, and publishers. The reason for this is simple: the knowledge and skills needed for education has been produced over centuries by millions of people living at great distances from each other and speaking different languages. This knowledge must be collected, winnowed, concentrated, and, for the last 2500 years, usually written in books. Becoming an educated person is a process of assimilating the knowledge and skills discovered and developed by many other human beings. Becoming an educated person is a social affair, a process of socialization or even humanization.

As a cautionary note, something has gone terribly wrong if education itself becomes a narrow subculture that so alienates students from the major institutions of society that they cannot skillfully and gracefully live within them.

Questions for future essays: What does it take to be an educator? What does it mean to be a theologically educated person? What does it take to be a teacher of theology?

School — No Place for a Child

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Some days I need to yell, “The world has gone crazy!” This is one of those days. Let me tell you up front that my wife and I homeschooled our children, and we’d do it again. So, this essay is not a cool analysis. One more caveat: I come from a family of public school teachers. I think many teachers do the best they can given their situation, and they are all underpaid. This “yell” is about the system and the culture, not about the individuals trapped in it. Okay, ready?

Yes, I mean it. A school is no place for a child. As a child nears 5 or 6 years of age she or he is made to believe that starting school is a glorious coming-of-age transition. You’ll become a big boy, a big girl. You’ll learn to read and write and do all sorts of fun stuff! You’ll get to make decisions for yourself—which actually means that you will give in to pressure to do what your peers are doing. At six years old the baby bird must leave the warm nest and learn to fly. At six! Is that crazy or what? You’ll learn to deal with ubiquitous bullies and pick up the ways of the world from older kids. Why? Because the world is full of bullies and you’ve got to face the world sooner or later anyway! (Actually, the only place I have ever been bullied is at a school.) Away from the protection of mommy and daddy you will be taught and protected by an underpaid and over-stressed teacher, who has 30 children to look after. And teachers are all-knowing and all-seeing. They always know what goes on in the play yard, the hallways, the athletic fields, and the restrooms. You might get a teacher who views the world like your parents and your church does or you may end up with teacher who views God, morality, life, and love in radically different ways. You don’t know in advance.

And what will you learn in the education factory, the state-run orphanage for parented kids? You will learn the least common denominator of moral values. Government schools are supposed to be religiously and morally neutral, and that “neutrality” is the heart of their religion and morality. You’ll read the books, hear the stories, and engage in the sort of activities that are designed to make you exactly like everyone else, a compliant, tolerant, and uncreative citizen. Excellence, creativity, thoughtfulness, and individuality are discouraged because they are disruptive. Everyone is equal, everyone is special, everyone is gifted, and everyone is right. And no one thinks.

The parent-child bond must be broken (at six years old!), because parents teach their children all sorts of crazy stuff about religion, race, and gender. Useful skills like language, writing, and mathematics must be subordinated to the really important task of socialization for life in a “pluralist society,” that is, of teaching children not to judge anyone for anything…except of course for believing in the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and good and bad. Or, for believing in the superiority of one’s own culture or religion. And the informal “socialization” you learn is how to survive in a school culture with 10 adults and 200 children near your own age. Such a social skills have nothing to do with those you’ll need in the real world.

Okay, I’ve had my “yell,” my rant if you like. I am not asking you to join my chorus. I just wanted your attention. My main goal is simply to plant a question in your mind: Does it have to be this way for me and my family? I want you to know that if you feel like there is something not right about giving up your parenthood when your child is five or six years old, that there is something crazy about that notion, you are right. And you don’t have to do that. You are not the crazy one.

“Why Don’t We Hear This in Church?”

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Last week two prospective students visited my “Christianity and Culture” class. A few days before, when they asked if they could visit the class, I told them that I would be conducting a review session for the upcoming exam but that they were welcome to join us. The class material is divided into three sections: (1) How did our world become secular or why it’s tempting to live as if God does not exist; (2) Why we should take God seriously anyway (part 1): the human condition; and (3) Why we should take God seriously anyway (part 2): God and the self.

In the review I covered all the material in section 2 in 50 minutes. The premise of this section is that living in our secular culture distracts us from those experiences that raise the question of God. But consciously thinking about those experiences can show that we cannot escape the truth that the questions of our meaning, destiny, and happiness are inextricably linked to the question of God. It is the most urgent of all questions.

After I finished the review, the two guests came up to me to express their appreciation for my allowing them to sit in the class; they also told me how much they enjoyed the material. One of them said, “Why don’t we hear these things in church?” The other expressed agreement with that sentiment. I said, “One of my main goals in life is to do what I can to raise the level of the church’s teaching, especially its teaching of the young.” My writing, teaching, and blogging—everything I do—is aimed at this goal. The question asked by these students (“Why don’t we hear these things in church?”) moves me deeply; it makes me sad and a little bit angry. And here is why.

As far as I can tell, the church is doing a poor job of teaching on all levels but especially in teaching the young. We are not even doing a good job making our people familiar with the storyline of the Bible much less its doctrinal teaching. But even if we were doing those things, it would not be enough. We live in a culture dominated by sophisticated philosophies, moral teachings, social structures, cultural practices and values that contradict subtly or openly the most basic Christian beliefs. Knowing the Christian faith thoroughly is essential to living in this world, but even that is not enough! We need to know how the secular world thinks, what it thinks, and exactly why we believe and practice Christian faith instead of accepting the world’s philosophy. We are failing, failing miserably, to prepare our children for the world they will face. And it makes me sad.

Why are we failing? I don’t claim to know all the reasons why, but I know that we are failing. One thing is certain: many of those who are supposed to be responsible for teaching the church are unaware of what is needed or unprepared to do what is necessary to meet the challenge. Do you elders, preaching ministers, youth ministers, campus ministers, children’s ministers, parents, and Sunday school teachers take your tasks seriously? It seems to me that some church leaders think that providing exciting worship services, preaching light-weight and entertaining sermons, providing family-friendly church spaces and programs, creating a network of friendships, and hiring lots of ministers to keep all these things humming will keep people coming to church services and protect them from the world. Such an approach may give the appearance of working in the short term, but it will fail over the long term. Don’t we see that if the young learn only a superficial version of Christianity in church they will be overwhelmed by the sophisticated criticisms of college professors and subtle allurements of secular culture?

And of course it’s not just the young. The process of “dumbing down” has been going on a long time. There are many young and middle aged adults that don’t know their right hand from their left when it comes to faith. You can be a sophisticated lawyer or doctor or CEO of a huge corporation but completely naïve in Christian knowledge and practice. Everyone, young and old, needs to be immersed in the deepest and most thoughtful form of Christian teaching available. In my view, Christianity is demonstrably and vastly superior intellectually, morally, and spiritually to anything the world has to offer. The church has always been the champion of reason and thoughtfulness and studiousness! But we need teachers who embody this ideal and can demonstrate the coherence and relevance of Christian faith in confrontation to secular alternatives.

Elders, preachers, and all who would teach…are you prepared? Do you know what being prepared means? Are you willing to educate yourself? I’ve been a minister for 43 years and an elder for 25 years. The process began before my time, but even in my lifetime I’ve seen elders reconceive the focus of their work from teaching, protecting, and pastoring to managing. Ministers have also become administrators and entertainers instead of teachers and evangelists. I hope this trend reverses soon. Yes, it takes time to read good books and ponder the Scriptures. But if you are going to put yourself forth as a leader and teacher of the church you have to give time to preparation. Not to do so is spiritual malpractice. It’s ecclesiastical suicide.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, during his frustrating conversation with the children the professor kept muttering to himself, “Logic, logic! What do they teach them in the schools these days?” I share Lewis’s frustration with secular schools. (Don’t get me started!) They don’t teach people how to think clearly or to be thoughtful; and they teach much that is half-baked and down right false! But I am even more frustrated with the church’s education program. And so, I ask the same question as that asked by those two visitors to my class, “why don’t we hear this in church?”