There are three things for which I hope I would die: God, country, and family, but there are three basic ideas that no free woman or man should betray if they work in education. Maybe I would not die for these ideas, but I would never work for a school that betrayed those ideals because such a place would be no school whatsoever.
We must educate dialectically and the dialectic is dangerous. The essence of education is learning to ask better questions. When I find truth through reason, experience, or revelation, the questions do not stop, but grow. A truth is a doorway through which we step to new questions in science, philosophy, and all of life.
I am thankful that in the philosophy program at the University of Rochester I was allowed to express my ideas, hear many opposing perspectives, defend my ideas, and change my mind. My professors almost surely disagree with most of what I now believe, but on this we agree: calm, civil, and reasoned discourse is essential to the life of the mind.
A school may have a point of view, every school does, but any school must challenge students and help them grow, but this growth must change the teacher as well. I have never taught a class where I have not learned and never had a student, who was really a student, who did not have something to teach me.
Education is dangerous. Every time I read Nietzsche, I do so as openly as I can: all my ideas are on the line against his great intellect. Every time I read Plato, there is something new to be learned. Education is explosive because even when my basic idea does not change: God is real, the Bible is true, and Jesus is Lord, my understanding of these deep ideas changes.
I was not treated by my teachers at New Covenant Christian School or the more secular teachers at the University of Rochester as if I were a “precious snowflake” about to melt. I was treated like a mind . . . and my opinions were taken seriously enough to be attacked.
We must seek virtue, wisdom, and joy. You could learn job skills while being paid in an apprenticeship program. We have moved apprenticeship to the University, but do not be deceived: the University is there to teach moral excellence.
There can be no moral excellence when the University hypocritically pushes education to part-time people.
There can be no moral excellence when administrators multiply, paying themselves handsomely, while charging students more tuition.
There can be no moral excellence, when grifters in gowns are given jobs teaching nothing to nobody, but placating some party line.
The pursuit of wisdom cannot be cut off from the past. We are humans, have been humans, and will be human if we wish to avoid becoming inhuman or beasts. Wisdom begins, like all sobriety, in the fear of the Lord and ends in the humility of how little we know.
University life should be joyful. Any person blessed enough to teach or any student blessed enough to get time to study, is privileged beyond the dreams of most people who have ever lived. We might criticize what is, we must, but from an attitude of gratitude and joy.
We must have integrity in all we do. Too many schools are run by narcissistic leftists who do not believe in any god but there own opinions. And then there are the secular schools.
God save the educational system of the United States from the illiberal forces that would destroy genuine education.
The musical Hamilton is one of the great works of art in the last decade and a song in the musical urges us “not to waste our shot.” I urge traditional Christians not to waste their shot at an education and find places like The Saint Constantine School in Houston that will never abandon the values of a liberal arts education.
We will not waste our shot.
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