The Need for Lowly Education

You often fear you’re not enough, that your son or daughter will come through this process with “gaps” or “lacking” somehow, somewhere. We want them to have a superior education and especially a superior world-view, grounded in reason, logic, ethics, sound judgment, etc., but here’s something I’ve discovered recently.

“Well Educated” does not equal “Highly Educated.”

Maybe it should, but this statement simply isn’t true. “Highly” reveals specific credentials and hoops, but these may or may not be well-instructed. A person can graduate with history courses and be wretchedly educated about history. The issue is that the secularized world around us sees education as a road climbing up hill, and some of us are simply “farther” up the road than others, and should be listened to and trusted—neverminding that person’s actual trustworthiness (or lack thereof), the truth of their instruction, of their claims, of their anything.

One very common interaction I’ve encountered in moral debates is the condescending calling-into-question my (or your) education, the un-examined assumption being, “If you were more learned, you would agree with me, because I cannot possibly be wrong,” and when it’s pointed out that you may actually be more “highly” educated, the tendency is to respond with a claim that the people they learned from are still higher educated than you. During my time in both university life, apologetics, ministry life, etc., I have often encountered the division of what is perceived as the “higher educated” person, a curious assumption that the higher the degree, the more de-facto correct one is in a moral position, as if morality were a question of information! It’s hardly innate in higher education, something I fundamentally believe in and defend, but not the way the term has come to be used.

As a father, I don’t want my children “Higher” educated but “Well” educated. Now, these are not mutually exclusive, so please don’t draw that conclusion, and in fact, they should be nearly synonymous, never fully, but ideally close to it.

Where they see a singular road, we see a frontier to explore, the many paths people have taken up many hills, and we can see how many paths lead to untruth, despite how lofty the peaks. To be “Well Educated” is to understand deeply, to discern logically, to not be governed by feeling, to disallow arguments of emotion or moral claims based upon no underlying ethical framework that is logically consistent and in congruity with reality, to fear no facts, and to be willing to explore any avenue. Most importantly, it means to be humble, to be aware that we are only at the beginning of what could be learned. Without humility, educated is wasted.

Homeschoolers outperform their public counterparts by nearly every metric one could use, but you both know that and (I hope) don’t care. Your child doesn’t need to be held to an arbitrary standard made to assess a system you’ve already rejected, but here’s the rub: we need “Lowly Education,” Not “High Education,” education that rests on contrition, not assumption.

If our children come out of this experience with more reasoning capability that their peers but lack the humility to rightly reflect the whole point of the process, we have failed.

Your son or daughter absolutely will have “gaps,” but here’s the reality: the public counterparts are guaranteed many gaps too, growing and worsening all the time. For pity’s sake, students came into my college classes with an average of a fifth-grade reading level. I’ll spare you the horror stories for today. The purpose isn’t about corking every possible thumb-hole in the Dutchman’s dam but sending them into the world with wisdom, and wisdom is never a matter of amount of instruction but quality of its essence.

Whether you’re a Christian or not, there is such a beautiful lesson in the healing of the blind man by Jesus Christ. He is dragged before the Sanhedrin, the “highest educated” of the land, essentially forced into an informal hearing to reveal some condemning thing about the one who healed him. He is uneducated. He is no discerner of theology or miracles, and he confesses all of this. And then he tells them, “I only know one thing: I once was blind, and now I see.”

The thing he knows is unassailable, indomitable, and impervious to the assault of the “elite” before him, and all else he knows is life is founded upon that. He was lowly of spirit.

You are all your children need. Arm them with the best education you’re able to give, knowing that nobody can teach them everything.

Educate them on what they need.

Educate them towards wisdom.

Educate them lowly.