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The Lost Purpose of Learning THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING David Vanderpoel, Ph.D. THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING David Vanderpoel, Ph.D. Headmaster, Trinity Christian School of Fairfax © 2015 by David Vanderpoel All rights reserved. Published 2015. Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permis- sion. All rights reserved. Frontispiece: Hand Study with Bible by Albrecht Dürer Trinity Christian School 11204 Braddock Road Fairfax, VA 22030 For additional information, please visit our website: www.tcsfairfax.org 1 THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING WHY was I born? Why did you bring me out from the womb? Job 10:18 hy do we teach our children? For what reason and to what end do we seek their instruction? What are we Wpreparing them to accomplish? For what high purpose did God create them? These questions are endowed with com- pelling gravity. They possess a weightiness that was felt by Job when, in the midst of overwhelming calamity, he cried to God and asked, “Why was I born?” His question still resonates today. It is a query that shadows our thoughts, visits us in our daily tasks, and challenges our idle moments. Fresh voices speak it anew in every generation. Abraham Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian and philosopher of the twentieth century, phrased it this way: “I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?”1 It is an ultimate question, universally asked and variously answered. As we grapple with its significance, each of us becomes a tenured philosopher. It is a calling we cannot escape and is well described by Francis Schaeffer as “the only unavoidable occupation.”2 Ultimate questions are ingrained in our very nature. We can no more ignore them than we can resist breathing. They emanate from within each of us as we experience life in all of its wonder and pathos. “The most practical and important thing about a man,” writes G. K. Chesterton, “is still his view of the universe.”3 In what kind of universe do we live? Does it have any purpose and, if so, what is it? What is our place in it? From 1 Heschel, “Questions Man Asks,” Wisdom of Heschel, 4. 2 Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 279-280. 3 Chesterton, Heretics, 5. 2 where did I come? What is life’s meaning? How do I define right and wrong? What happens when I die? Questions such as these, says Ravi Zacharias, “are the fulcrum points of our existence.”4 More than idle speculation, these fundamental inquiries evoke responses that inevitably frame, shape, and direct our under- standing of reality, as well as our approach to life and education. Every place of learning confronts these questions. They are addressed, both explicitly and implicitly, in all schools. In so doing, a particular view of reality is always assumed in order to undergird and frame such questions and their answers. They cannot exist apart from a contextual shadow. Every teaching and learning approach, whether in the home or outside, in a public or private system, secular or religious, frames questions and answers on the basis of some worldview or faith commitment. They are never addressed in a neutral system, devoid of presuppositions about life and reality. As Richard Baer says, “Education never takes place in a moral and philosophical vacuum. If the larger questions about human beings and their destiny are not being asked and answered within a predominantly Judeo-Christian framework, they will be addressed with another philosophical or religious frame- work—but hardly one that is neutral.”5 Douglas Wilson, writing in The Case for Classical Christian Education, concurs: “Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed.”6 There is no view from nowhere. All of us view the world through what Charles Taylor calls “ines- capable frameworks” that shape our understanding of everything.7 “A Christian framework,” says David Naugle, “posits that God is there, that he is not silent, and that we humans are his image and likeness. A naturalistic framework denies that God is there and 4 Duin, “Interview with Ravi Zacharias.” 5 Baer, “They Are Teaching Religion in Public Schools,” 12. 6 Wilson, Case for Classical Christian Education, 26. 7 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 3. 3 says that silence is all there is and that we humans are advanced primates and nothing more.”8 Will we approach our children’s education by “thinking in Christian categories,”9 or will we capitu- late to a naturalistic framework? The question is as old as history. The first-century Roman philosopher Lucretius opted for a naturalistic framework: “The basic principle that we shall assume as our starting point is that nothing has ever been created by divine power.”10 Moses posited a very different starting point 1,400 years earlier: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 11 More recently, the film critic Roger Ebert rejected biblical theism with the stated conviction that a self-revealing God does not exist: “Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued any instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. I do not believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with.”12 In contrast, Jesus taught that God has indeed spoken to men and women: “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” 13 The assumptions with which we commence our journey will inevitably determine our destination. As C. S. Lewis phrased it in The Magician’s Nephew, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”14 So, with what presupposi- tions about life and reality should we frame and undergird the questions and answers to be used in teaching our children? 8 Naugle, Philosophy, 61. 9 Eliot, Christianity & Culture, 22. 10 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 149-150. 11 Genesis 1:1 12 Ebert, “How I Believe in God.” 13 Matthew 22:31,32 14 Lewis, Magician’s Nephew, 123. 4 The task of teaching, as G. K. Chesterton forcefully reminds us, is the task of “selection and rejection.”15 “It is not possible to teach everything,” says Richard Edlin, “or to expose students to every possible resource. Accordingly, textbook publishers and teachers carefully select the resources for teaching, and the information that will be taught. These selections are made based upon what the selec- tors believe to be the most important resources and experiences.”16 All these choices are religious in nature because they either promote or detract from the kingdom of God. What should we choose and what should we reject? How do we justify those choices? With what assumptions should we approach our understanding of education? The reason we were created and redeemed must frame every aspect of a student’s education. This means that the primary purpose of education is not to enable our students to go to the best college.17 It is not to earn a good income. It is not to prepare them for a productive career or to teach them a trade. Our first priority is not to create good citizens, nor to surpass other countries in our mastery of math and science. It is not to preserve our system of government or way of life. It is not to help our students socialize and adjust to this world. Most certainly, it is not for the purpose of encouraging a never-ending search for truth. The ultimate purpose of education is far nobler than any of these things.18 The purpose of education is to transform our students by the renewing of their minds after the image of him who cre- ated them.19 It is “bringing into conscious subjection to God what has been redeemed in and through Christ.”20 It is nothing 15 Chesterton, Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton, vol. 1, 324. 16 Edlin, Cause of Christian Education, 9. 17 The idea of cataloguing what education is not was suggested by John W. Robbins in his foreword to A Christian Philosophy of Education, by Gordon Clark. 18 Robbins, foreword to Christian Philosophy of Education, viii. 19 Ephesians 4:23, 24; Colossians 3:10 20 Bellevue Christian School, “Doctrines and Principles.” 5 less than preparing them to stand in the presence of God, to hear “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” 21 WHAT do we want our children to learn? Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” John 18:38 very worldview has an integrating principle. For the Christian, God’s existence and nature are “the independent Esource and the transcendent standard for everything.”22 They constitute the basic premise upon which everything else in the universe is built. The prophet Isaiah tells us that everything “comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom.”23 All of creation functions as an integral unity because the one God created it all.
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