“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” Such is the wisdom one can expect to find on a car’s bumper. Wisdom, however, is found in God’s Word, which, surprisingly, says not a peep about “education.” Yet it does call us to seek wisdom. Even as it calls us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. It speaks of truth, and it speaks this truth — that Jesus is the truth that sets us free.
We, once upon a time, understood education to be that which both grounds us and sets us free. It has now become that which sets us loose and costs us everything. And all because we serve the false god of mammon. Consider first how a modern, or should I say a postmodern, education sets us loose. As Allan Bloom taught in The Closing of the American Mind, our universities fervently affirm there’s no truth and no right and wrong. Ninety-eight percent of all incoming college freshman enter the hallowed halls persuaded of relativism.
Over the course of four years, that assumption is systematically entrenched. Thus, students walk away from their college educations utterly adrift. But they are not free from another perspective. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of learning the truth that there is no truth to learn. They walk away slaves to debt.
Why would anyone make such a trade? Foolishness. We’ve learned that a college education is key to a well-paying job or to a better graduate school. Which in turn is the key to a well-paying job. We need a well-paying job so that we can afford either private education or to live in the “good” school district. So our children can get into the best colleges, so that they can get into the best graduate schools. They can then, in turn, make the money to keep the process going for our grandchildren. I call this “hell’s hamster wheel,” and it is time for all of us to get off.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with learning a set of skills that increases our productivity. Studying a trade or a profession can be a good and healthy thing, a tool toward fulfilling the dominion mandate. We did not, however, originally create the university for this purpose.
Education once aspired to be “liberal.” Liberal in this context isn’t intended as a political designation for those who desiring a more intrusive state. Neither does it describe theological liberalism, which denies the truthfulness of God’s Word. Instead, liberal here refers to the liberty of the graduate. We equip a liberally educated person not for a mere job but to think God’s thoughts after Him. To see His world as He would have us.
A free man, for instance, is not prone to accepting the status quo. He doesn’t assume four years down at the state university is an undiluted good. A free man is not given to buying into a deadly nostalgia that assumes his alma mater hasn’t changed in the twenty-five years since he went there. A free man rejects the wildly implausible notion that sending his son or daughter off to Vanity Fair for four or more years is a great way to bless his heirs.
Free men are wise enough not to buy into the lottery-like unspoken pitch that if you don’t spend a hundred thousand dollars on an “education,” your child will starve. A free man thinks deliberately about his own future and the future of his children. He finds wisdom where God keeps it, not in the knowledge of the experts but in the simplicity of the Bible.
Fathers, I understand, worry. A sound, biblical education may prepare children for heaven, but how will they live? Steeping our children, as they prepare to enter adulthood, in God’s Word will surely feed their souls and adorn them with beauty, but how will they find food, clothing, and shelter? We are not the first to struggle with such worries. Nor are we likely to be the last.
Jesus says, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:31–33).
Jesus’ truth here must set me free. May I never lose sight of the truth that our daily bread, to mix a metaphor, is the fruit of God’s provision through hard work. It is not the result of my wisdom in pursuing specialized training. Better still, may I be free enough to know that I am, with my children, a slave of Jesus Christ. He, and not the priests of higher education, is my Master. Such means that I am free.