Secular vs Christian education

The secularist approach to education is destroying education

Some years ago, while I was at college, I did a course about public theology (i.e., how the Bible relates to the world at large, rather than personal or moral matters). Everyone taking the course took turns in presenting about one particular topic. Helen, one of my fellow students, did her session on education. She started by writing up “2 + 2 = 4” on the whiteboard, and then saying, “Do you need to teach that God exists to teach this?”

It sparked off an interesting discussion on the day, but it’s remained in my mind ever since. As I’ve started thinking more and more about education over these last few weeks, I’ve come to understand that education is far more complicated than I thought it was! What I’ve begun to realise (as I started to explain last time) is that the operating assumptions underlying our current education system are intrincically flawed. In fact, the assumptions underlying our education system are actively undermining education itself.

Let me explain what I mean.

God’s not welcome in education

The education system today seems to have the operating assumption that religion (and God in particular) is utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of the curriculum. Religion is still taught in a small section of the curriculum known as RE - which even in my day was a bit of a joke subject - but the majority of education is taught without reference to God.

The operating assumption is that the things you really need to know in school - maths, English, science, history, etc - can be taught whether you believe in God or not. It doesn’t matter whether the teacher or pupil is Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist - subjects can be taught regardless of those beliefs.

In short, schools assume that there is a body of knowledge which can be passed on to the next generation, and that body of knowledge has got nothing to do with beliefs about God. God is irrelevant. And, let’s face it, divisive: why divide a class who have all sorts of different beliefs when you can just focus on the facts?

I would go as far as to say that schools are imposing a secularist agenda - secularist being the systematic exclusion of religion from all areas of public life. Case in point: the primary school my girls attend teaches children about the English Reformation and Henry VIII. As far as I can gather, what they learn is mostly about how Henry wanted to get a divorce and so broke away from the Roman Catholic church. I haven’t seen any evidence of them discussiong justification by faith alone - which is surely an essential for understanding the Reformation.

As anyone who knows anything about the history of the Reformation can tell you, to teach this period without referring to the ‘religious’ dimension is disingenuous to the point of utter dishonesty. But sadly, this kind of thing is nothing new. When I was in school, I remember learning about the English civil war. I remember learning a bit about the parliamentarians and royalists, the roundheads and cavaliers. What I don’t remember learning about was the deeply religious background of the English civil war and what was motivating people like Oliver Cromwell. I still feel like I have a lot to learn about the Civil War - and, more generally, the history of England - because my teaching about it was so abysmal.

Perhaps the education system doesn’t like to teach English (and European) history because these things are so bound up with Christianity?

Either way, schools today seem allergic to teaching anything about history - or in any subject at all - which focusses on God. To the point where Nottingham University is putting a trigger warning on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales because they contain expressions of the Christian faith. (I know the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” gets used a lot, but… really, you couldn’t make it up!!)

However, there is an extremely serious side to all of this. In eliminating God from the education, schools have been undermining everything they are doing.

How do we know anything?

If you have any experience of a toddler, you’ll know that the question ‘why?’ can get old very quickly! Most toddlers go through a phase where they will keep on asking ‘why?’ until you get angry with them and have to say “Because it just is!!!” Of course, that’s toddlers for you - but there is a serious point. Why should we be expected to believe in some things and not others? How do we know what’s true and what isn’t? In philosophy, this is known as epistemology - how we know what we know.

Schools at the moment are teaching things and expecting children to believe it because it just is. It’s an appeal to authority: “We’re the teachers, you’re the pupils. We know more than you, therefore, accept what we tell you.” Teachers (and pupils) are not thinking through the question of how we know anything at all. This is a huge problem, because how we teach will depend largely on that question of how we know anything.

How does this relate to the question of secularism in education?

The problem is secularists don’t have an answer to the question of how we know what we know. There is nothing coherent or consistent in a secularist, atheistic understanding of the world - there is no foundation.

The problem was eloquently summed up by the retired mathematician and Oxford professor John Lennox. I remember him saying, he used to like to tease atheists by quizzing them about the human brain. He would ask them how we knew what was logically and rationally sound if all we had was our brains: “This brain has evolved over millions of years by random chance … and you trust it?” (He put it a bit better!) The point he was making is - the secularist, naturalistic view of origins undermines its own case. If you believe this world is all there is, and there is nothing but the material world, you undermine the case for all knowledge.

Perhaps this is why the concept of truth has diminished so rapidly over the last few years: so many people think that truth simply doesn’t exist any more. Even science, which many atheists would look to, has succumbed to post-truth. When you have scientific journals arguing that there is no such thing as biological sex, you know science is in a bad way. This has even provoked notable atheist Richard Dawkins to wade in.

By focussing on facts, figures and skills, and ignoring the question of how we know anything at all, schools have undermined education itself. They have pulled the rug out from under their own feet. If you do not have a solid base for knowledge, then you cannot educate. It’s no surprise that we should see the problems in education that we are now seeing.

God and the truth go together

This is where the Christian perspective on education comes in. God and truth go together - in fact the one is necessary for the other. All truth in every area of life comes from God. This is what the theologian Herman Bavinck said:

He [God] is the truth in its absolute fullness. He, therefore, is the primary, the original truth, the source of all truth, the truth in all truth. He is the ground of the truth – of the true being – of all things, of their knowability and conceivability, the ideal and archetype of all truth, of all ethical being, of all the rules and laws, in light of which the nature and manifestation of all things should be judged and on which they should be modeled. God is the source and origin of the knowledge of truth in all areas of life.
(Source)

God is the “source of the truth”, and is therefore “origin of the knowledge of truth in all areas of life.” To put it simply, all truth is God’s truth. This runs totally against the secularist view.

The secularist view seems to be that there are a list of ‘sacred truths’ - which matters only to believers - and ‘secular truths’. The secular truths are true regardless of the sacred truths. But the God of the Bible is not so small. Every truth in the world derives from the fact that God is there. Going back to the example I started with, “2 + 2 = 4” because God made it so.

The only reason mathematics ‘works’ is because there is a rational mind behind the universe. Mathematics is, in a sense, an unveiling of the mind of God. You can do mathematics without believing in God, but only in the way that All Saints covered the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ song Under the Bridge: the words and tune may be the same, but the meaning is gone.

It’s a similar story with science. This is why so many early scientists were Christian - because they believed the universe was rational and coherent, and they believed that exploring the natural world was uncovering God’s work in his creation. For example, Robert Boyle - one of the founders of modern chemistry - once said:

But as the two great books, of Nature and of Scripture, have the same author; so the study of the latter does not at all hinder an inquisitive man’s delight in the study of the former.
The Excellence of Theology (1665)

How many schools today teach chemistry, and the other sciences, without saying anything about the beliefs which led to their creation?

Understanding the context

Looking back over the last hundred years or so, education has changed hugely, and it’s easy to focus on those changes without looking any further. But we have to realise that education happens within a context, and the context of the surrounding culture shapes the education within it.

So, for example, one hundred years ago schools may have been teaching “2 + 2 = 4” without explicitly saying that God is the source and ground of all truth. I don’t know if schools back then taught about the beliefs which motivated the early scientists such as Robert Boyle. However, the context of society was very different back then. When most people’s basic assumptions and morality are taken from within a Christian framework, schools took some of these assumptions as read and didn’t teach them. This is fine within a broadly Christian context. It’s very different within a secularist context which has been systemically erasing God from public life for decades.

The point here is that things which were taken for granted a hundred years ago cannot be taken for granted today - and that must change the way we go about education. The upshot of this is, for those pursuing Christian education, is that we must be explicit about God being the source and ground of our knowledge. I believe Christian education needs to explicitly, in every subject, show how these subjects relate to God.

At the end of the day, if all truth is God’s truth, then there is no area of the curriculum where God is irrelevant. There are countless scientists, mathematicians, writers, playwrights, musicians, politicians, and so on - who have all sought to think through how God relates to what they do in life. I believe this is the task we now have as Christians.

We must resist the secularisation of education by unashamedly proclaiming Christ as Lord in every area of life, and showing children and young people how it makes a difference to them. And we can inspire them by showing them how people from previous generations saw God relating to their work.

What I’d like to do in subsequent posts is explore some of these subjects to see how the Christian faith relates to each one. If you subscribe to this substack, you’ll receive any updates - and please do share this post if you think others will appreciate it.