These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)
The
Eugenics movement in the United States
began in the late Nineteenth Century and ran through the late 1940s, when the
Nuremberg Trials of Nazis brought to light that the German movement’s horrors
were patterned after American eugenic thinking. The eugenicists of America
sought the power to sterilize anyone who didn’t fit their definition of “fit to
be a parent,” or to penalize people with specific disabilities to recoup from
them the cost of having to care for unfit offspring. If you haven’t read “War
Against the Weak” by Edwin Black, it’s the creepiest book I’ve ever read.
About
the same time, folks like John Dewey[1] started to apply the same heavy-handedness, with the same progressive
zeal, to the arena of education. In spite of the claims that parents spend much
more time with their children, the goal of progressive educators has been to push
the age of their taking over the education and socialization of children as the
authority in those areas to younger ages in preschools, and keeping them longer,
during highly impressionable young adult years. There are even calls (and
pushes in some areas) to remove children from homes where “dangerous” ideologies
are practiced.
Meanwhile,
what are Christians doing? I suspect a lot of us are relying on Sunday School
and public schools to teach our children. We might try to take advantage of
teachable moments, and we might have brief family devotions. For those of us
without kids, those might be private devotions. If we attempt to be as
directive, to teach our children or ourselves at the same level of intention practiced
by the educational system, we’re not letting our children be children. In fact,
there are those who would charge us with child abuse or fanaticism. Some would
even be friends and family.
But
what does Scripture say? As you go through your day, as you do things that you
do, teach your children. I’m listening to To Kill A Mockingbird and this
is a principle used in the story. Atticus always read with Scout in his lap,
she never remembered a time when she wasn’t able to read. Calpurnia regularly
set Scout to the task of copying out the alphabet and a chapter of the Bible –
and penmanship counted – so Scout doesn’t really remember a time when she wasn’t
writing in cursive. Learning practical things was just part of life for her. And
while she may not have understood it at the time, that learning strengthened
her relationship with her father and the housekeeper.
Most
people today accept what teachers at school say. They’re the experts, after
all. And unless work requires us to learn more, that’s the end of it. But as
God’s children, we’re never supposed to stop learning. We’re supposed to walk
with God and listen to the lessons that He teaches as we sit at home or walk
along the road, when we lie down and when we get up. Scripture should be
primary and the final authority in our lesson books, but we can also learn about
God and His principles through many other subjects: the study of nature in its
unity and diversity, the study of music, art, language, history, law, mathematics,
and philosophy.
My
reaction to this is to want to set up a schedule in which I learn about this,
and when I’m done with this, I move on to that – as if one ever finishes with
this or that. But God’s lesson plan is more experiential. When you come to
something that allows Him to teach a principle, He does. It’s not always “during
school hours” and it may not seem to have any connection with what He was
teaching ten minutes ago, but it’s the thing we’re looking at right now. It’s a
natural learning style, and it may be the type of learning that works best.
[1]
Note: John Dewey didn’t invent the Dewey Decimal System. That was Melvil Dewey –
apparently no relation.
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