Author Topic: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism  (Read 2342 times)

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Offline LadyVirginia

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Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« on: October 26, 2011, 10:40:29 AM »
This article is full of things to think about.  As is his habit though, the author Dr. Birzer presents a lengthy article.  It's worth reading the entire thing.  LINK       Many interesting observations.


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Wednesday, October 26, 2011Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
By Bradley J. Birzer

A friend of mine recently told me about a banner she saw hanging inside the entrance of an American public elementary school. “You’re all number one,” the banner read. I must admit that my reaction to this was rather strong, if not downright irate.


...a seductive slogan such as “you’re all number one” indoctrinates the youngest members of American society with an illogical falsehood. We might as well have “war is peace.” Aristotle has every right to roll in his grave. Since the War of 1812 and the Second Great Awakening of the early part of the nineteenth century, American society has continued to democratize, promote egalitarianism and nationalism to absurd degrees. Such public school pronouncements as “you’re all number one” reveal how far (and how low) American society has come in the past two centuries.



...the arrogant generation is intellectually and morally impoverished, though believing itself the greatest and most important. Second, and perhaps the logical outcome of the first point, the West will cease to be the West if it loses its religious roots. From the beginning, the cult was the basis of western society—the mixing of the classical, Jewish, and Christian worlds. Dawson best explained the end result of this trend toward secularization:

For more than two centuries Western civilization has been losing contact with the religious traditions on which it was originally founded and devoting all its energies to the conquest and organization of the world by economic and scientific techniques; and for the last fifty years there has been a growing resistance to this exploitation by the rest of the world—a resistance which has now culminated in a revolt which threatens the very existence of Western society.[20]
In his many learned works, political philosopher Eric Voegelin explained that separation of the religious from the material has resulted in a revival of a secularized form of the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism. “The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in the enterprise move away from the life of the spirit,” Voegelin wrote in 1952. As with Dawson, Voegelin argued that this conflict between the flesh and the spirit, the latter being “the source of order in man and society,” will end in the collapse of civilization.[21] Of like mind, Kirk also warned that “if the Garden is not cultivated, soon we find ourselves in the parched Waste Land.”[22]

...education encouraged the freedom of the individual from becoming an unthinking member of a collective—whether the collective was a nation, a business, or a union. As Kirk puts it, education should promote order of the individual soul and of the Republic.[23] Education certainly should not be for mechanization—either of a bureaucracy of administrators or of the individual. Kirk further explained:

If college and university do nothing better than act as pretentious trade-schools; if their chief service to the person and the republic is to act as employment agencies—why, such institutions will have dehumanized themselves. They will have ceased to give us young people with reason and imagination who leaven the lump of any civilization. They will give us instead a narrow elite governing a monotonous declining society, rejoicing in a devil’s Sabbath of whirling machinery. If we linger smug and apathetic in a bent world, leaving the works of reason and imagination to molder, we all come to know servitude of mind and body. The alternative to a liberal education is a servile schooling.[24]

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Offline Libertas

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2011, 11:44:10 AM »
"In the twentieth century, westerners have almost completely secularized education, and the results have been disastrous. First, by severing education from its religious roots, we have separated the generations one from another. Each generation must begin anew, not only starting from the beginning again, but also believing itself the best generation to exist. This results in a form of temporal provincialism, and the generation is cut off from the continuity of the wisdom of its ancestors."

And what is liberalism, socialism and communism...if not a means to sever ourselves from our morals and traditions?!
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline LadyVirginia

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2011, 12:20:23 PM »
"In the twentieth century, westerners have almost completely secularized education, and the results have been disastrous. First, by severing education from its religious roots, we have separated the generations one from another. Each generation must begin anew, not only starting from the beginning again, but also believing itself the best generation to exist. This results in a form of temporal provincialism, and the generation is cut off from the continuity of the wisdom of its ancestors."

And what is liberalism, socialism and communism...if not a means to sever ourselves from our morals and traditions?!

They have nothing to build upon.  And each generations seem to have less and less to offer.
"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Online Pandora

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2011, 01:27:00 PM »
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... what is the role of true education in twenty-first century America? During the Cold War, as the West was attempting to find and define itself in the early 1960s against our communist enemies, historian and social critic Christopher Dawson made a fundamental point. Culture, he argued along the lines of the great Anglo-Irish statesmen Edmund Burke,

    is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of ‘folkways’ into which the individual has to be initiated. Hence it is clear that culture is inseparable from education.

I may be misunderstanding his use of the word "artificial", but I don't like it in this context.

Other than that, I agree and I believe the transmission of our culture is what the left seeks to interrupt and replace.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

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Offline Libertas

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2011, 09:15:57 PM »
“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything.” —G. K. Chesterton
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline BigAlSouth

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2011, 06:53:33 AM »
Solution? Private Christian School
The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living
are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.
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Offline Libertas

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #6 on: October 27, 2011, 07:28:34 AM »
And, especially if you are not an engaged parent - anything but public schools!

 ::thumbsup::
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Online IronDioPriest

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #7 on: October 27, 2011, 09:42:35 AM »
Dennis Prager refers to the West as suffering from "cut-flower" religiosity and ethics. We have a large majority of 300,000,000 calling themselves "Christian", yet the roots of the faith, traditions, and Judeo-Christian ethic have not been passed along generationally. The "flowers" have been cut and passed on, but cut flowers eventually wither and die, and lack the ability to germinate new growth.
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson

Offline LadyVirginia

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #8 on: October 27, 2011, 10:27:09 AM »
Dennis Prager refers to the West as suffering from "cut-flower" religiosity and ethics. We have a large majority of 300,000,000 calling themselves "Christian", yet the roots of the faith, traditions, and Judeo-Christian ethic have not been passed along generationally. The "flowers" have been cut and passed on, but cut flowers eventually wither and die, and lack the ability to germinate new growth.

i like that analogy.  I've been trying to think of one. 

People are holding on to the flowers and think they have the whole plant still.
"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Offline Delnorin

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #9 on: October 27, 2011, 10:50:38 AM »
Solution? Private Christian School

Part way through 1st grade we yanked our daughter our of public school.
At the time I just became unemployed and had no hope to find work either... but it was important enough to just go on faith and do it anyway.
After 1st grade, 2nd grade (found a job), 3rd grade and 4th grade we then started to Homeschool in 5th grade.
We've now homeschooled through 5th, 6th and into 7th and plan on going all the way through highschool like this.

We didn't have any social/political issues that spurred our move (I have many issues with the public schools, we just didn't personally run up against them).. but it was the schools lying.  They had our daughter in a special reading comprehension program that was supposed to be 5 days a week, 1 1/2 hours each day.  They were only giving her 1 hour each week.. 1 day a week.  But they were telling the State of Michigan they were doing the whole program.  $$$$$$$

Typical schools that are all about the money and couldn't give a hoot about the kids education.

We yanked her for that reason.

She was an F student in public school.
By the end of that 1st year she was a c+ to B- student.  Next year a solid B (about where she's plateau'd now).

Not too bad.. moving from F to B.
BTW.. we use much of the same curriculum homeschooling (exact same books) that they used in the Christian Private school.

Anyway... I started out as a small post.. it got larger. Heh

Offline LadyVirginia

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #10 on: October 27, 2011, 11:56:25 AM »
Quote
(I have many issues with the public schools, we just didn't personally run up against them).

I was in the same boat 20 years ago.  I looked at my daughter and knew she wouldn't thrive at school.  The rest as they say is history.  All the way through high school.  Two have now  finished college.  People ask me about high school.  Frankly, by then I expect my kids to be pretty self-directed. None of the subjects are any harder than what I had in high school. 

One of my kids volunteered while in college at a school once a week through the school year in their 2nd grade reading buddy program.  It's a 30 min a week per kid.  The teacher said for most of these kids that's all the reading they do a week!
"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #11 on: October 27, 2011, 12:20:53 PM »
Dennis Prager refers to the West as suffering from "cut-flower" religiosity and ethics. We have a large majority of 300,000,000 calling themselves "Christian", yet the roots of the faith, traditions, and Judeo-Christian ethic have not been passed along generationally. The "flowers" have been cut and passed on, but cut flowers eventually wither and die, and lack the ability to germinate new growth.

i like that analogy.  I've been trying to think of one. 

People are holding on to the flowers and think they have the whole plant still.

Of course my paraphrasing is to Dennis Prager's actual thought, what a snapshot is to a wedding. I can give you a good idea of what he said, but his eloquence and articulation must be experienced first hand to really get what he said.
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson

Offline Weisshaupt

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Re: Liberal Education and Christian Humanism
« Reply #12 on: October 27, 2011, 01:09:37 PM »