Wednesday, September 16, 2015

What worldview is best and true?

"But now we have fallen into an 'ocean of arguments' no less deep and wide than Plato's Parmenides. Suppose the child, the human being, is an evolutionary product, simply a more complicated animal, without a soul, especially without an immortal soul. The late Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, said, 'I can see no reason for attributing to man a significant difference in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand. . . . I wonder if cosmically an idea is any more important than the bowels.' Bertrand Russell's famous passage, quoted in chapter three, builds life and therefore education 'only on the firm foundation and unyielding despair.' The end of man is a doom, pitiless and dark. All the labor of the ages is destined to extinction and must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. Suppose on the other hand that God created man in His own image and breathed into him the breath of life, with the result that those redeemed by Christ shall glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Teachers teach pupils. But whereas a teacher with the first view of what a pupil is teaches despair along with arithmetic or social consciousness; the teacher with the second view teaches hope.
In these two views, naturalism and theism, are interwined all the strands of philosophy. Even the question whether the government should control education for its own ends and ban God from the schools, or whether the church, home, or private corporations should do the educating, depends on what man is. Once admit that the teacher teaches pupils, it is impossible to rule out any part of philosophy as irrelevant.
Among the considerations that have come under review, some mention has been made of the effect of government on education. Mention should also be made of the effect, or alleged effect, of education on government. Americans often speak of public education as if it were the main support of democracy. Without an educated populace all sorts of evils would proliferate, and the professional educators claim that unless legislatures appropriate almost unlimited amounts of tax money for the schools, the nation will shortly collapse. The fact of the matter is that with hundreds of billions already appropriated for public education, all sorts of evils have proliferated and the nation is already collapsing. A Justice of the United States Supreme Court was forced to resign in the 1960's because of suspicious financial arrangements. The 1970's and 1980's have seen a series of national scandals in all three branches of the government. No wonder America raises its crime rate faster than it inflates its money." -Gordon H. Clark, A Christian Philosophy of Education, Pg. 8-9

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