Recovering the First Principle of Education
Transmitting Whole Worlds to the Next Generation
If education, in its most generic sense, is the “process of passing on to the next generation the parents’ understanding of the nature of their world,”1 then what parents believe matters. It also matters who writes the curriculum. It would be silly at best and a betrayal at worst if parents who believed the earth was flat sent their children to be educated by “round earthers.”
We could begin to imagine the implications of one generation who believed the earth was planar and held to a medieval firmament cosmology but outsourced their children’s education to those who believed the earth was an oblate spheroid with a heliocentric cosmology. The dinner conversations might be out of this world, but the children’s trust in cumulative inquiry would be set in direct opposition to their parents’ own irrational standards of privileging perception over demonstrable coherence.
In terms of my illustration, I of course jest, but the absurdity of my scenario highlights the absurdity of what many Christian parents have normalized in terms of educating their children.
The first principle of education is not simply that the child learns that they live on a rotating planet as it were; what is essential is that they learn what kind of world they actually inhabit. And, when I speak of “world” here, I’m not talking about their physical environment only; I am talking about that but also the whole order of reality: what is ultimately true and who man is that he should inhabit it? A similar illustration might be that it’s not about teaching children how many planets there are in the solar system as much as it is teaching them why they should love creation, and more importantly, why they should love the God who created the planets.
What’s at stake here isn’t a disagreement about facts, per se; it’s the distinction about how truth is known and what is worthy of our attention and affection. To this point, consider the pedagogical architecture of the Hebrew Shema, and let it serve as our model:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. “And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” -Deuteronomy 6:4–12
The Shema provides an unmistakable pattern for Christian parents today. First, we witness the Lord revealing reality to them (i.e., God is Lord and he is One). Then, the Lord commands the parents to love Him with all their heart, all their soul, and with all their might—continually keeping His Word foremost in their own hearts. Finally, the parents are to enculturate their children with the knowledge of reality they themselves have received and experienced, and they’re to do so through didactic lessons and the routine activities of daily life. The point of their education is to know and love God themselves and to pass that heritage and knowledge on to their own children.
By command and by implication, what they are not supposed to do is the opposite: allow some foreigner’s false perspective about reality to be passed on to them through didactic lessons or through the routine activities of daily life.
Parents who are educating children in the twenty-first century need to understand that the Enlightenment thinkers divided knowledge from belief and trained several generations to treat knowledge publicly while relegating faith (i.e., belief) to one’s private life. But what post-modern thought has proven (and what Christians have always known) is this bifurcation of knowledge and belief is untenable in reality. All knowledge is interpreted by means of some presuppositional belief. Knowledge and belief are not separate compartments of life; they are life in totality.
Reality, then, must be understood and experienced holistically by the parents, and then passed on to the next generation faithfully. Stated more clearly, and to our point, parents who want to give their children a Classical Christian Education must first be Christians themselves—real Christians who live out their convictions because they know God intimately through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Then they must diligently teach the same Christianity to their children both didactically and as a natural part of their daily routine.
In sum, this means education is not merely information transmitted and managed; education is the passing down of one generation’s understanding of the world (i.e., reality) to the next generation. One of the most painful messages parents often learn too late is “the world” is divided for the parents (i.e., between knowledge and belief), their children will be divided within themselves. But if the parent’s world is whole and they pass it down as such, their children will be whole—that is, they will think rightly and live faithfully within the reality God made and they have inherited.
Douglas Wilson, Why Christian Kids Need a Christian Education, 9.