School is starting this week in numerous states, and many parents are questioning where their children should be educated. Increasing numbers of parents are home schooling their children, while other parents opt for private schools. Still, most children are being educated in public school systems. However, all parents much be vigilant about knowing what their children are learning at school.
According to an article by Bradley Devlin published at The Daily Signal, there is “a disease running rampant through our education system.” Devlin interviewed Dr. Matthew Spalding, Ph.D., who is working on a cure for that disease. Spalding is a dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus and a Gov. Ron DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees. Hillsdale and its graduates are a large part of the conservative movement.
“What
we’re interested in is shaping minds and teaching people to think,” Spalding
said when asked about Hillsdale’s recent momentum. That momentum, Spalding
explained, is twofold.
“On
the one hand, this city is a vacuum that we can fill,” he noted. “But, on the
other hand, more and more people are realizing an emptiness in our politics but
also a certain lack of depth. And so they’re looking for something more.”
The
modern education system, from top to bottom, has turned its back on the Western
tradition’s notion of education.
“Education
should be about forming a human being, liberating them, training their mind,
and you do that by perfecting and getting better at the things that human
beings do by nature,” Spalding told The Daily Signal. “If you think through
American history about how the normal person becomes a good citizen, a good
human being, a good member of their community, it’s by learning those basic
things.”
For
Spalding, this view of education is rooted in Christianity.
“It’s
no coincidence at all that higher education at large periods of our history is
really carried over and protected by religion and Christian schools,” Spalding
said. “There was something about Christian institutions and Christian thinking
and theology that could see the Greek and Roman roots of reasoning in the
nature of things, an there was something about that philosophical understanding
of the nature of things that could see a certain coincidence with an idea of
Christianity that held that all are equal before God and equal in their being.
And I think that melding is a very important component of educational systems
in the West.”
“What
is the thing they attack most precisely? That link. You’ve got to sever reason
from revelation,” Spalding claimed.
“Modern society has placed those things under attack to a large extent because it denies that man by nature can do these things,” he added. “You need science, you need mathematical expertise, and you need academic experts to tell you these things.
Essentially what the modern project does, whether you think of it
from the point of view of reason in classical reason or revelation in biblical
or Christian thinking and theology, if you destroy the notion that the human
mind can know things … it’s all relativism and subjectivism, it’s whatever it’s
subject to, whatever you think, whatever your will is.”
“Think
about it in its more radical, skeptical sense,” Spalding suggested. “I don’t
actually know you’re a human being. I don’t know that this is a table. I have
no evidence of any of these things. I can’t prove any of this reality. I mean,
it just becomes a nihilistic breakdown at a certain point.”
Spalding
spoke of a disease in the education system that has infected too many students.
On one level, there are too many students being taught that the United States
is a wicked country that must be destroyed and remade. Wise parents will
supplement the education of their children to include accurate American history
as well as religion. By doing so, they will strengthen their family as well as
their community, state, and nation.
