Modern Secular Educational Philosophy

The great myth of education in the Western world is that it is possible to have a purely ‘secular’ education. Christians have typically bought this lie, thinking that secular education will give their children value-free, neutral ‘facts’ about the world, to which the parents can season and mix in some Bible facts every Sunday. They think schools are simply information mills, cranking out facts that will equip the child to one day ‘get a job’. Interestingly, very few other religions agree. Orthodox Jews educate their children in their own schools . Devout Muslims begin their own schools. Hindus, Buddhists, and others who take their faith seriously see to it that their young are educated in schools of their own making. They do so because they do not believe that secular schools are amoral information factories. Secular schools are also religious schools.

The goal of education today is to understand the universe and man’s place in it from a completely rationalistic, naturalistic point of view. God is excluded from the universe and the university. A foundational assumption of education is that man is a natural result of random evolutionary forces. A child’s mind is a blank slate that must be filled with the kind of information that will make him a productive citizen and a good employee. Education is simply a mechanism for equipping individuals with the skills to stay out of trouble and to achieve their own personal goals.

Tolerance  is the byword in education today. Students must learn to accept other people and their viewpoints without judgment or criticism. Tolerance demands that students abandon their beliefs that their own understanding of truth has any more validity or value than any other person’s point of view. Any claims to absolute truth will not be tolerated.

Values are simply opinions. There is no objective basis for judging right or wrong. All historical events, created works and individual actions may or may not have value depending upon a person’s opinion. The ethics of secularism are situational. All must do what they believe is right, and be true to themselves without harming others. And no one’s morality must be forced on anyone else, because what’s right for you isn’t necessarily right for someone else. Moral education is impossible in such an environment. Students are free to form their own values on whatever basis they choose.

Education should be designed to insure a student’s economic success (a good job), personal fulfillment (happiness), and social stability (fit in with the group). Curriculum must represent a wide variety of viewpoints and cultures. A left-of-center political viewpoint is commonly reflected in textbooks.

Other alarming trends in public school education:

1. “student-directed learning” – children, not teachers, decide what to learn 
2. focus on “how to learn” rather than on acquisition of specific information and skills
3. no objective standards to judge achievement
4. low expectations for student achievement; lack of academic rigor 
5. lack of discipline, an immoral environment 
6. sex education; homosexual rights indoctrination

Results? Colleges typically have to re-teach half of the entering freshmen in basic math and English, and businesses that have to spend money to teach entry-level employees how to read, write and compute enough to function on the job.

Our children are not only confronted with this religion in the ‘Life-Skills’ class. They hear it when the biology teacher pontificates on the millions of years it took for certain things to evolve. They hear it when the science teacher speaks about ‘Nature’ and ‘the Laws’ as if blind chance rules the universe with such elegance. They hear it when the English teacher tells them that all interpretations of a poem are valid in their own way. They see it when Music class is dispensable, and attendance at sports is compulsory. They hear it when their preachers continually tout the importance of having  “marketable skills”. And of course, they hear it in prejudices and opinions of their peers. For seven hours a day, our children are discipled into secularism. Their cultural mentors are their peers and teachers, who teach them how to construe reality, what to love, and how to love it.

Many Christian parents have withdrawn their children from government schools and have enrolled them in Christian schools,  or pursued home education. Some Christian schools do better than the public schools. Too often , in the South African context, a Christian school is fundamentally secular (the curriculum is the national curriculum, or IEB, or Cambridge) and the teachers are not themselves mature Christians, so it is really Christian in name and vision-statement only. Sometimes a ‘Christian’ curriculum of inferior quality is taught.  Often these schools either represent some brand of charismatic Christianity, or some form of Protestantism without a clear Gospel (the form of godliness, lacking the power thereof). Furthermore, the children attending these schools are not often from strong Christian families or from healthy churches, so the social problems or negative influence found in public schools will be only slightly less than those found in public school.

This movement away from public schools has drained them of the “salt and light” that accompany believers. Christian kids left in public schools face extreme pressures to conform. All parents must determine what educational avenue would be best for their own families. They should consider the pros and cons of their options carefully and realistically.

  – David De Bruyn, Professor of Church History, Shepherds’ Seminary Africa