I feel strong urges to write about thinking, values and wisdom relating to Christian faith. Issues can be addressed simply at outset, but become complex and evasive as we get into them. Solomon rightly related wisdom to the process of thinking (theorizing), testing (experimenting), and acting (doing). This essentially puts the educational method to work, but Solomon would incorporate more than other teachers might include. In that larger inclusion he would think values before science or engineering. Early in my educational interests I thought that right thinking would tend to focus similar conclusions for us. I now believe that the most insightful writers on thinking, attaching rightness (values), to verbal truth leading to response (assertion and action), succeed in showing that without righteousness we are not going to gain full comprehension and best action. Since righteousness is not objectified by mankind, we rely on someone else to define it. If that person is God, he defines it out of his own nature. If all this is true, as I believe it is, then my thinking must be from God to find the all truth context. My morals must be from God, and these combine to formulate a wisdom that serves life and nature. Here are the seeds of holistic education. An enemy of education to wisdom is the general loss of adequate morals/values components.
With several years of economic downturn, and slow recovery, the call across the land is to reduce spending. Since so much of public spending goes to public education of children and young adults, reductions have already touched funding for education. Complaints about cutting, especially from public educators, are many. Part of the counter from critics is that education has not lived up to expectations, that education may not be needed for many jobs in society, and that too much emphasis has been put on funding for processes rather than on the context of the persons related directly to truth. Issues include much more than we touch on here. There is no doubt that the decline, indicated in current American statistics for education, has gained considerable criticism. There is enough blame to go around. Parents see education as the ticket for their children to get good jobs with better than average salaries. Young people have assumed that college is the transition from childhood and dependence to adult life. Students experiment with conducts on the side – conducts that are often distracting and debilitating. The institutions and publics at large, expect educated youth to use education for improved professional/salary and practical/cerebral life.
So the public, in some of its parts and/or emphases, misses the main point of education. The point of education is to make better (holistic) persons, to learn values and how to form them to contribute in a society. Education has become commercial and neutral, not high value finding – in social and personal contexts. Basics for formal education, like language felicity, and its measure for speaking/listening have been downgraded – perhaps unconsciously. Language, personal presentation, thought processes, culture, and other factors of thoroughly furnished persons have been amended too much. We have given way to the competition for riches, and the success concept rather than the open secrets of life, family, society, service, civility, personal refinement, and the possibility, even consciousness, for solving human problems.
God is interested first in making well-furnished persons, not better cars, huge houses, highly paid professionals, or their like. My intellectual and spiritual life should combine to make me feel I have used the gifts of personhood, self-consciousness from God, to feel my growth as a human being, to serve self, mankind and God. No one is adequately educated who fails to find a source of virtue (values) – to wisdom. There is sufficient evidence in social studies to show how values (found in Scripture and history, taught and applied) belong not only to Christians but to common grace for all. They serve the needs of mankind for stability, and contribute to the concepts of human search for happiness in either the secular or spiritual context that the individual may choose. This proceeds to corporate society. Each person is of one, and also of many. The island is attached to the continent, even if not on the surface. Education is aided with a god factor, real or imagined, and the meaning of life – if there is God. It is interesting to follow many atheistic idealists believing we ought to live as though there is an ethical god. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020