Fractured Education
One of my goals this summer is to catch up on the reading that I never can get to during the school year. Part of that, of course, is current events. It is amazing to see how inconsistent people can be in their ideas and it shows up at all levels of society. Probably it is related to pervasive postmodern culture which has no problem with conflicting “truths” all being true. The obvious result is, “If they conflict, then one is really very false or both are false!”
Take a look at this simple example in the area of education. An article in “Christian Today” talks about the debate in Germany over the possibility of allowing theological questions about the origin of the world into biology classes. An interesting issue, no doubt. The very nature of biology leads us to ask questions about origin; and the classroom is one important venue for the sharing of ideas in a free society, right? What really gets me though is a comment by a member of the Protestant Church’s theology committee! He says, “Frau Wolff is ignoring the differences between natural sciences, religion and philosophy. That does not correspond to the Protestant view.” What is that!? If he believes that God made the world and everything in it, then what exactly are those differences? It would be helpful to know what “differences” he refers to. Is it differences in fact or differences in method? Either way these fields of study, taken honestly, should cross paths periodically and support a cohesive view of the true human condition and the world we live in. Is it acceptable to say that God made us in religion class, that we are a product of chance in biology class, and that we “made” ourselves in philosophy class? That approach is part of what I call fractured education.
I’ll leave the resolution of the issue to your own detailed research. But, take into account another little article from “The Christian Science Monitor” – a site I RARELY read! An article about a linguistic project talks about the probability of a common language root. Sound familiar? Take a peek at Genesis 11:1. Then there is a comment about human genetics tracing its ancestry “to as few as 1,000 individuals”. The years may need some adjustment, but it is very interesting to see how science falls into line with biblical truth. Of course I don’t want to “prove” the Bible through science, we must come to God in faith, but it supports the idea that fractured education is a worthless means of learning!