A Christian Philosophy of Education (Part 1)

For long periods of time human history moves placidly along, troubled only by minor disturbances. Then in a short span of years, everything seems to happen at once. A storm overtakes the race, breaking up all the fountains of the great deep; and when the waters subside, the course of history has been set for the next epoch. The sixteenth century was such an age of storm. Henry VIII, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Francis I, Ignatius Loyola, Caraffa, and-a little later-Philip II, Queen Elizabeth, Henry IV, the Duke of Alva, and John Knox all lived in the fifteen hundreds. During this period it was settled that Germany should be Lutheran, Scotland Presbyterian, England Episcopal; the Inquisition determined by murder that Italy and Spain should remain Romish; the mass murder of some 75,000 Calvinists on St. Bartholomew's Eve in 1572 made France half Romish and half infidel. These results have endured for four hundred years.

Not only did the sixteenth century witness the Reformation, it also saw in the Renaissance the birth of the modern scientific mind. While inventions and detailed scientific applications have been multiplied in more recent years, the general scientific world-view-based on the application of mathematics to problems of physics-was fixed for the coming centuries, even before Descartes was born.

The twentieth century bids fair to rival the sixteenth. Two world wars have already occurred and with a third a constant threat, this century will truly be one of upheaval. Hitler wished to set the direction of history for the next thousand years. He may well have done so-aided, of course, by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The twentieth century, so far, lacks indications of impending religious cataclysms. Its changes, therefore, may parallel more closely the social and educational revolution of the Renaissance, or, more likely, the breakdown of the Roman Empire, than the spiritual quickening of the Reformation. From all that can be seen now, humanism and Communist hatred of Christianity will be the prevailing philosophy of the coming age.

While the political situation that makes newspaper headlines occupies popular attention, the use which dictators have made of the means of education shows clearly that the role of schools and universities is of more profound significance. Educational policy in the new society, whether for good or evil, will be a basic factor.

It is true that our best-trained men can invent radios and radar; it is true that they can reduce typhoid and infant mortality-more power to them; it is true that they can produce bigger submarines and better explosives; but it ought to be as clear as a flare and as emphatic as a bomb that who uses these for what is a tremendously more important matter than their invention. In fact, the impact of Pearl Harbor, Korea, and Vietnam ought to have focused educational attention on this basic question. Telephones will multiply, but their wires may carry commands to massacre Jews and Christians; radio and television will be greatly developed, but it may be used for totalitarian propaganda; and young men who have not died of typhoid may make excellent KGB agents. Every mechanical aid, by which some judge that a society is good, can be used by bureaucrat or dictator to make his society bad.

How can the people of the United States become competent to judge and therefore withstand the barrage of propaganda? The barrage has come. Time, Newsweek, and the news programs on television are supposed to be news media. They are actually propaganda outlets. For example, on Friday, August 15, 1969, Chet Huntley ended his news program with a vicious denunciation of Protestants. There was no news at all. It was unadulterated invective. He stopped just short of saying that the Roman Catholics of Eire should invade Ulster and massacre the Protestants. And of course the news is slanted, too. How slanted must the populace already be that such interpretation should be allowed on television? If some form of education prepares people to detect slanted news and thereby prevent a social climate where hate propaganda is accepted, it is not the present form of American education. Least of all is it a narrow technical training that produces expert ignoramuses. This is not to deprecate engineering, much less to oppose physics and chemistry. But something additional, something more important is needed. What is it?

There is only one philosophy that can really unify education and life. That philosophy is the philosophy of Christian theism. What is needed is an educational system based on the sovereignty of God, for in such a system man as well as chemistry will be given his proper place, neither too high nor too low. In such a system there will be a chief end of man to unify, and to serve as a criterion for, all his activities. What is needed therefore is a philosophy consonant with the greatest creed of Christendom, the Westminster Confession of Faith. In such a system, God, as well as man, will have his proper place. This alone will make education successful; for the social, moral, political, and economic disintegration of a civilization is nothing other than the symptom and result of a religious breakdown. The abominations of war, pestilence, and economic collapse are punishment for the crime, better, the sin, of forgetting God.

This article is excerpted from an essay which originally appeared in the May/June 1988 issue of The Trinity Review. It is reprinted with permission of The Trinity Foundation, P. O. Box 68, Unicoi, TN 37692. Available online under "Review Archives" at www.trinityfoundation.org.

Gordon H. Clark (1902-1985) was one of the twentieth century’s leading Christian philosophers and theologians. During his life he was the author of more than forty books and the Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Butler University.

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