And hello there...

For those who were rejoicing in my absence, my reduction in online presence is due to a tragedy striking my laptop's hard drive, which has gone to meet the great motherboard in the sky. I don't have as much time on my parents' desktop, so I've not been on here; I'm just updating right now to let you know that, yes, indeed I'm alive. Not much is new here, except that we've finished Dad's blacksmithing shed behind our garage, and we fired up the forge last Saturday and hammered away at some old railroad spikes. We have also tapped 12 of our maple trees for syrup, and the first batch is on the stove. Once we have some pictures of the whole process, I'll put some up!

I filled out this survey, too. Mayhap I ought to post my "Mother of all surveys" survey sometime (My DL friends and Michael K. should remember that one), just to get all possibilities for future survey questions out of the way. Ha!

Finally, in Freedom's Foundations, we are discussing the Constitution and the Federalist Papers; one of my classmates took the optimistic view that Americans are more educated than any other people in history, so are well equipped to make good political decisions--in short, we ought to be thankful and not be too worried about America. That prompted this essay, with which I shall leave you for now:

The Insufficiency of a Godless Education
By Colin Cutler

"Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!"

So opens Charles Dickens's Hard Times, with the schoolmaster being impressed--willingly--with the importance of "Facts." The novel is a bitter invective against this idea that "facts alone are wanted," and I would concur in Dickens's indictment.

It is said that the modern American is more educated, on average, than nearly anyone else in history. I disagree. I concede that more facts are being presented to more people in America than in most other countries at any given time in history. I disagree, however, because a debatable and insufficient definition of education is being used. First of all, education based solely on facts (as our public school system, by and large, is) neglects the personal aspect of humans; it reduces them to "reasoning animals." Ultimately, it can only teach them what has happened before them, not what they ought to do--and thus deprives them of direction for their reason.

More specifically, however, the emphasis of "education" upon facts is empty if one cannot understand those facts. Cornelius Van Til spoke of materialism as a system of uninterpreted facts--"brute facts," in his phrase--which, precisely because they simply existed without interpretation, could not be interpreted unless the materialist was willing to take a "leap of faith" in projecting a subjective interpretation of the fact. This would, of course, be a denial of everything materialism stands for. In other words, facts may be, but they have no meaning. And it is at this very point that materialism fails--and with it, the typical model of "education," which is indubitably founded on materialism.

A short digression: though the non-materialistic New Ageism has made some inroads in public schooling, as well, it is not the foundation of it. Further, I would agree with one of my professors in saying that the rebellion against God takes the form of a Janus face of rationalism/irrationalism. They are two sides of the same coin and, whether the proponents of each side realize it or not, are indispensable to each other. I make this point to qualify my identification of public schooling with strict materialism, but there is another point here that I will revisit below.

Yes, the children of America are taught facts. But are they taught how to analyze those facts and discover what they mean? Many high school students have read Shakespeare, but how many could tell the significance of Shakespeare's work and why it is relevant to us? You and I can see a statement of the human condition and the universe in Shakespeare's tragedies--as well as Shakespeare taking a shot at explaining why things are as they are--but how many students are taught anything more than "Shakespeare was a great author and you need to read 'Julius Caesar' for English so that you can see what great writing looks like"? Then they are lost because they can not see what is so great about Elizabethan language. They are told to define a "theme," "plot," and "tone," and can probably tell one what they think the theme, plot, and tone of a given story are, but how many can analyze that theme and tone in light of what it ultimately means and whether or not it is an accurate summation of reality?

It is analyzation that America's "education" fails to teach, and precisely analyzation that materialism implicitly forbids, if taken to its ultimate conclusion. The teachers are then reduced to asking the students what they think of the works and what it means to them. Here we see the irrationalist side of rebellion. Though few take it as far as Derrida's Deconstructionism, the emphasis is on subjective interpretation, with little or no regard for the objective Facts of who the author was, his historical context, his religious beliefs, etc.

Further, we as Christians are to see the Facts in their historical context as a part of God's plan of history. A Divine "plan of history" is, of course, wholly discarded by materialists; there are fatalists, naturally, but their sense of destiny is deterministic, not based in a Divine Providence. We must be careful that we also do not divorce the facts of history from their meaning as a part of God's plan for His universe. Frankly, if a person is not taught God's interpretation and purpose in history (and thus the meaning of the facts of history), he is not educated. If a person is taught in a materialistic mold, not only is God excluded, but he has no way of making any sense of the facts. He has no purpose, and facts--his "education"--will do him little good in such a state.