We Need A Revival In Education

I have closely followed the pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the U. S. and around the world the past few weeks. I’ve taught in many YWAM schools worldwide and serve as a professor at Faith International University in Tacoma, Washington. (FIU houses the only seminary in the state of Washington.)

In all the schools in which I’ve been privileged to speak. I’ve never witnessed law-breaking demonstrations of any type. Judeo-Christian-based professors and students try to move in the “opposite spirit” during times of tension. That includes intercessory prayer and promoting reconciliation and healing among opposing viewpoints.

I will share my thoughts on the protests next week. First, let’s ponder what has happened in education to spawn the current chaos.

We Need A Revival In Education

I can’t state better what’s happened to modern education than Armstrong Williams, an African American political commentator, entrepreneur, author, and talk show host. He’s one of my favorite “teachers” on contemporary issues.

Williams writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, previously hosted a daily radio show, and currently hosts The Armstrong Williams Show, a nationally syndicated television program. 

He is the owner of Howard Stirk Holdings, a media company affiliated with Sinclair Broadcasting that owns numerous television stations. Williams is a longtime associate of former HUD Secretary Ben Carson and is also a part owner of the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

Armstrong Williams is a smart and successful American leader. Here is his take on our great need for an educational revival.

The Decay of Education

By Armstrong Williams 

The decay in American education is an alarming national security threat. Most high school or college graduates know about little more than their sexual orientation or Taylor Swift’s juvenile lyrics and strutting. They are unable to write a single, succinct, evocative sentence, like the magnificence of a “rosy-fingered dawn.” They could not pass the civics test required for naturalization.

They do not know the fundamentals of citizen duties, including informed voting and participation in politics, eternal vigilance over their government servants, and petitioning for redress of grievances.

They do not know the majestic, inspiring gospel of the Declaration of Independence.

They do not know the United States Constitution or about the separation of powers, its crown jewel finding expression in judicial review.

They do not know the Federalist Papers, the greatest assemblage of political wisdom in the history of mankind.

They do not know President George Washington’s farewell address or President Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, both warning against the bane of extreme partisanship.

They do not know the unhappy history of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Missouri Compromise, the Trail of Tears, or Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”

They have not mastered the Bible, the Holy Quran, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucius, Seneca, or Epicurus.

They are clueless about Aristophanes, Sophocles, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Plutarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, John Donne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Balzac, Alice Walker, Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and countless other literary giants.

Parents should be complaining about what’s not in school libraries and classrooms more than what is there. Indeed, if education was made vastly more demanding in reading, writing, and arithmetic, there would be no school time remaining to squander on obscenity or sexual orientation.

The survival of the United States is more and more a race between education and ignorance. The new generation is incapable of self-government. They do not understand the importance of process over personality. They are easily swayed by demagogues because their cerebral faculties have left their innate hormonal urges undomesticated. They feel worthless, lack faith, and believe in little beyond themselves. They are lonely and suicidal. They crave being part of a cult rather than marching to their own drummer, searching for truth without ulterior motives and acting accordingly.

Jefferson advised:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Washington, in his first State of the Union address, elaborated:

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.

To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways—by convincing those who are entrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last, and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.

We desperately need a new birth of education. No student should be permitted to graduate from high school or college without passing an exacting civics test and writing a lucid essay about the principles of natural law and government enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

During the regular school term, students should be required to devote at least eight hours per day to reading or writing. Debate contests should be preferred to athletics, the thinker to the armored knight. Parents should be required to visit teachers monthly and be tasked to encourage and monitor the study habits of their children. They should read an age-appropriate book with their children at least one hour each evening.

Self-government without education and critical thinking is a fantasy. Aristotle advocated state-supported public education for all to foster good judgment and wisdom. But education should not end in the classroom. It should be with us every moment of the day, like inhaling and exhaling. It is our deliverance from an animal, hormonal existence.

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I couldn’t agree more.

There are many reasons for the decay of education in America and the West. First, was the rejection of our biblical heritage and its love for learning. The next domino to fall was the disintegration of the nuclear family through easy divorce, sex out of wedlock, marriage confusion, and single parent homes (increasing poverty and violence).

Then came secular worldview teaching (social indoctrination) that Armstrong Williams clearly outlines above de-emphasizing reading, writing, and arithmetic and a love of learning. Into this void of Bible and classical liberal arts education strode entrenched teacher’s unions who are not looking our for the kids (think of the educational disaster of the Covid years). 

Of course, why would you love to learn if you were being taught that you are a biological accident in a meaningless survival-of-the-fittest world with no personal hope and probable nuclear war?

And by the way–you can’t even know whether you’re a man or a woman in this destructive and meaningless educational world. That’s even “too complex” for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. who attended public government-run schools in Miami, Florida.

Thank God that millions of families and children are fleeing the failing institutions to receive a better and hope-filled education at home and in private schools.

Let’s pray for an even greater exodus from the failing schools.

And a revival of hope-filled learning that begins with salvation in Jesus.