What Do You Know?

Education is a hot topic around the country this year. It’s no longer about testing and accountability, but about curriculum itself. Although there’s an additional level of complication with the disagreement over why different groups have different outcomes. We no longer know, if we ever did, what to measure or how to measure it. Should we engineer outcomes so that all groups are the same? And how do we test for that, if we test at all?

One of the root causes of the problem is that there’s a big disagreement on what the point of education actually is. It started fairly simply, with two principal points of view: acquiring information or learning how to think. For a long time, the prevailing opinion was that children could learn to think logically and to communicate clearly, independent of the value of the information they were actually working with. The classic book on the subject, if you’re interested, is E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. Hirsch shows that you cannot think or communicate unless you have adequate raw material to work with. Of course this was a reaction to the limited value of simply stuffing children’s heads with facts. As usual, what was needed was not either/or, but both/and.

But then the argument got heated up, with arguments over the curriculum itself, with the classics of Western Civilization being demoted in favor of cultural diversity. Since then, demotion became disapproval, and is now demonization. In many places, the purpose of education seems to be to replace Western Civilization with something else altogether, and “dead white males,” particularly straight ones, being the enemy. What is the line between indoctrination and education? In the first, facts – independently verifiable data – don’t carry much weight. Acquiring facts - which used to be a goal - has been replaced with acquiring the right opinions. Indoctrination is about ideology, and ideology uses emotion to control people who haven’t been taught to think, or who have gotten out of the habit.

A similar reaction against knowledge-based religion took place last century among Christians. Multiple polls have shown that although many Americans believe in God, they don’t know who God is. One survey of 1,037 adults found that 30% described themselves as “spiritual” but not interested in attending church. “I can go on a 40 mile bike ride and get as much from it as I can from going to church,” Stephen Kelley of Brooksville, Fla., a onetime Roman Catholic, told USA Today. “Nature to me is what God is all about. It’s a renewal.” About 54% of respondents said they are religious, but 45% of those said they are more likely to follow their own instincts than denominational teachings. “People are saying, ‘I have faith, I believe in God, but I don’t believe in church,” Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches said. That can lead to ignoring traditional religious beliefs. For example, 79% said they believe God will decide who goes to heaven or hell, but 44% said that atheists, if they are good people, will enter heaven. Many churches now hold “pride” events for what is called the LGBTQ community, forgetting that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Recently, a Lutheran church in Minnesota recited something called “The Sparkle Creed,” structured like the Apostles’ Creed but denying its content at every point.

Do-it-yourself religion isn't the issue in the more conservative denominations. When I was a new Christian, the Evangelical Free Church was still heavy into Bible study and rote memorization, and what people had to be warned about more often than not was that knowing the Bible was no substitute for following Christ. Somehow a lot of the people who knew the Bible best seemed to take it to head rather than to heart. But Mark Noll in The Closing of the Evangelical Mind warns that even as church membership in evangelical churches soars, the emphasis has switched from knowing the Bible to having a personal relationship with Jesus. Whether it’s a cause or an effect of the dilution of Bible teaching is anyone’s guess, but more and more the emphasis seems to be on feeling rather than thinking, on warm fuzzies and mountain-top experiences than sound doctrine. But just like in the education debate, what’s needed isn’t either/or but both/and. And Christianity has a real intellectual content -including facts - and requiring effort and discernment.

Just like your car needs both a steering wheel and a gas tank (among other things), so your faith needs both head knowledge and heart commitment. Love for Jesus fills your tank, gets you going and keeps you moving, but your head tells you where to go and keeps you from running over cliffs or into swamps.

There’s a popular saying among pastors, “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s true. It’s Biblical. It is, in fact, a one-sentence summary of 1 Cor 13:1-3: