Christianity and Education

When taken seriously, education, formal and informal, serves humanity well.  Educated persons tend to live longer, provide better informed leadership in society, offer more than ordinary culture, call upon the uses of search for success in achieving objectives, and move persons more in the direction of intellectual control and objectivity above emotions.  There are other advantages – like creativity.  Omission and evasion of education is found in many students at any age, but often marked among the young, who are at the height of their energies, health, passions, potentialities, and just about whatever else relates to the development of fully furnished persons.  They may waste those raw factors in distractions – commonly perceived as being the culture of youth.  Many parents seem not to have adequate perceptions for preparing their children for education – again, for both formal and informal education.  Families often fail to investigate the interests, development, habits, beliefs of youth, and to plant adequate ideals and expectation for preparation and motivation to adult life and service to mankind.  The son or daughter may go on to college with the primary purpose of simply breaking away from dependence to independence, to adult life, and has not been prepared for the transition.  One fellow noted on the internet: I was like most young college kids at 22.  I just wanted to drink, party and meet girls.  (Most seem to want some distractions.)  He awoke one morning unable to navigate his body, as he had the day before.  He was diagnosed with a debilitating disease.  Everything was changed.  My own response to his life was: Why do we have to have some negative experience to wake us up to the serious business of life meaning and development?  His brother, a student at a Christian college, went to his aid, gave attention to the physician, pressed for his own helpful answer to the problem and with a regimen awakened hope and, through teamwork, the recovery was remarkable.  The solution was both medical (natural) and spiritual (divine).

Having long experience and relationships with both secular and Christian higher education I am convinced that retreat from some serious values and conducts from college life has been costly to the general purposes of education.  Recent to this writing a news item appeared that, like so much related to secular and religious education, divides the two areas so to create a kind of serious silliness for both the Christian and the humanist that leads to ill will and treatment of knowledge as though to pursue knowledge by contradicting each other.  The specific item was that students taking a test in some day schools were seen as falling to religiosity by resisting the idea of gravity.  Some wrote in that they did not believe in only gravity.  It was presumed by the critics that the humanist answer was the correct one, that gravity is real – which, of course, is true.  The problem comes from both directions.  Some students cited that God’s word kept things in place and in motion using gravity.  In this exchange the humanist scientist has the best of the argument in that there is gravity alone in the proofs.  If the Christian student together with the teacher were to suggest that gravity is the way God sustains the creation in motion we might do better in a cooperative approach to understanding, and together research this or that concept for knowledge and improvement in human adaption and management.  The point is not that difficult. We need to explore the differences and similarities that may occur in either/or as well as both/and.  We need more information.  

Gravity is an enormous force, but I can interrupt it – if present to catch Newton’s apple while it falls.  The word of God gave gravity as his means of space control.  The differences and similarities relate to the meaning of gravity with or without accompaniments – depending on the context of the conversation.  Context generally determines what ought to be included, and that left out.  Some information may not be necessary to general education.  The laws of gravity are the same whether they came from God, or from the force of the Big Bang. The conversation may now move over to the Big Bang.  If the Big Bang is verified (as gravity is) did it come from an act of God?  Let’s find out what we can in nature and get on with agreement so to discover some factors we do not yet know.  God told Adam to discover the forces of nature and learn to understand for the benefit of those multiplied from the first parents.  I deplore the ignorance of the living scenario from both sides of the issue of origin.   We may try to make elements out of compounds