The American Enterprise Institute has done a lot of good for our great country. For one thing, they had the guts to expose the great liberal conspiracy that is called “education”. I want to give a personal view of the sad effects of this conspiracy.
A true story
When I was young, I had a friend who was a lot like me. We went to the same church and Sunday school. But I went to the church’s private school and home school while my friend went to a public school sponsored by big government. Upon graduation, I went to a private Christian college, then seminary, then a private Christian graduate school. My friend went to a private secular college and then a public graduate school. The ideological differences between my friend and I today are huge: he is an ultra-liberal and I am a moderate conservative. It’s not hard to figure out what went wrong with him.
The schools he went to were “liberal arts” universities. As if that label weren’t enough, the ideals of these institutions of higher education included the following:
- Ask questions
- Challenge assumptions
- Consider other points of view
- Engage in rational discussion
- Learn
- Change your mind at the whim of evidence or logic
and so on. They come right out and say these things in their mission statements!
Secular Learning
The highest ideal of the secular education system is learning. Psychologists define learning as “a more or less permanent change in behavior potential that occurs as a result of practice”. Notice that it is a change. In order to learn, one must change one’s mind and/or behavior! It’s almost a requirement at these schools! Dogmatism is blatantly scorned! No! You cannot be dogmatic there! You have to learn!
If a person goes to a school with that kind of blatant brainwashing, of course they will have problems. Of course they will see that they were not right about everything. Of course they will start to see value in other points of view! Of course they will see that their assumptions make no sense at all to people who weren’t raised in conservative evangelical Sunday school!
True Learning
In evangelical seminaries, we don’t buy the secular psychologists’ definition of learning. Ours is much better: learning is acquiring and reinforcing Truth. When you think of a learned man, you don’t think of the person who has changed his mind the most; you don’t think of the most intellectually capricious flip-flopper; you think of the man who has acquired and dogmatically retained the most truth.
In the schools where I went, we were told the Truth and we believed it. If another point of view was ever presented, we were forewarned of its falsity and debriefed afterward. The things I already knew from Sunday school were repeated with bigger words like “soteriology” and “homiletics”. We were carefully protected from from anything that would tempt us from the Truth. Thank God for these schools because if it hadn’t been for them, I might… I shudder to think.
The conspiracy
Some say that it is just a coincidence that educated people become liberal. But consider: in the 2000 US presidential election, almost 90% of people with PhDs voted for the liberal democrat Al Gore. More than 90% of uneducated rural evangelicals voted for the conservative republican George W. Bush.
More evidence: what do the liberals always want to do when they are elected into public office? They want to spend tax money on education: raising salaries for teachers, building science labs, buying books. Then they say, “it’s not a conspiracy.”
We must protect our children from secular education. We must help them remain dogmatic. Teach them rhetorical devices that allow them to hang on to the Truth in any storm of logic and evidence. Support schools that allow only professors who believe the Truth. Keep your kids away from public or secular schools for their own good.
Danger!
But schools like our University are in danger. The slippery slope from the rock of conservative dogmatism to liberal mud is very, very steep. How steep is it? We all know that if only one of the Truths we were taught in Sunday school is refuted, then there is no God and all of Christianity is a sham. (Parents: be sure your children know that axiom or they might start mixing secular ideals with the Truth or changing their beliefs as their culture changes.) In spite of this, there are professors here who enjoy dangling their students over this precipice by a thread. They intentionally expose their students to questions about the inerrancy of scripture and the creation of the universe. How can they expect students to believe the absolute Truth when they expose them to questions? I ask you: HOW???
Well folks, you can trust Royal to protect students who come into my classroom from rational engagement with any ideas other than what they learned in Sunday school. But the insidious conspiracy of education is beginning to infiltrate here.
Courage.
4 Replies
[...] spends the next few pages remarking on the symptoms of the liberal conspiracy called “education”. Since I have already exposed this conspiracy in an earlier blog post, I don’t need to go [...]
[...] Oh, and don’t forget the other lesson from all this: being patient and charming with them has no effect. They are too brainwashed by their liberal education. [...]
[...] “YOUR EXPECTATIONS”, “YOUR LIFE”, etc. This all goes along with the secular theories I have already blogged about concerning what learning is. Secularist say that learning is related [...]
[...] and international relations and a Juris Doctor from Harvard! This guy is totally entrenched in the liberal education conspiracy. He even taught constitutional law for twelve years at the University of Chicago law [...]