Lying Educational Standards

In the Bible, you face your Creator on His terms as a unique individual. You then walk in His Laws as a member of Creation and of your community. Should things work as they ought, you never stand alone after that initial surrender to the Lord. Everything that follows presumes some degree of communion and cooperation with other creatures, but most significantly, humans. That is, humans remain the one element in Creation with moral volition. Humans are fallen; Creation is not fallen. It is deeply afflicted by the implications of our fallen natures, but you and I are the only fallen part of Creation. Redemption requires that we help each other recover and maintain some effort to reconnect to the rest of Creation.

The fundamental issue will always be the moral fabric of which Creation is woven. Nature needs no correction from us. Whatever is wrong in Creation does not require we wrestle and tame nature, but we fight our own fallen natures. When we are restored to some semblance of adherence to the Creator’s moral character, we find nature there waiting for us and ready to cooperate with participating in the Creator’s glory. His glory is primarily reflected in our obedience to His Laws, along with the resulting shalom blessings the necessarily follow from that.

So it should seem odd and out-of-place that Western educational traditions place so very much emphasis on you standing alone before the academic tests. You aren’t going to fix the world’s problems alone. You will never face the task of redemption alone, so why should your education force you to stand alone? (As a side note, think of the implications for how we do “human resources” and structure our business world.)

I’m not interested in that stupid touchy-feely empty education bullshit I encountered in teacher’s college. But I am most certainly opposed to that Western individualist bullshit, as well. The moral guidance of our Creator sufficiently distinguishes between individual tasks and groups tasks, and most of what we actually do in life isn’t some constant clash and negotiation between sovereign identities. It may seem that way to those morally blinded, but where God rules it’s not like that. Rather, we are all family and we literally carry those who are less able, or even unable, to contribute directly. And if that causes the family to fail on some imaginary objective standard, then God can take care of things by His miracle power. He promised just that kind of thing; it’s hard-wired into Creation itself.

No, it’s not like a slot machine or some measurable input-output scheme. It’s people willing to discount bald material considerations in favor of moral considerations. An immoral system deserves to collapse, and our Western way of things bears the seeds of its own destruction. It looks good on paper and seems to work, but only if you measure things Westerners value in the first place. And then it all comes apart. And communism is still another flavor of Western materialism that offers a sick perversion of moral family ties.

In Christ, we transition to something even less materialistic, because that family communion doesn’t rest on DNA. It’s a covenant relationship that rests on the hand of God moving in the hearts of those who earnestly turn to Him. So in these latter days as the Western Empire crumbles, we simply reach out with our message of offering family ties to anyone who is driven by a desire to be family with us. The call for us includes educating our young to be aware of this factor as the truth of God far above the lies of the world.