Mankind at birth is bankrupt, dead in his tresspasses. Of course, to tell someone that they have failed the test before they even take it, well, that offends people, to say the least.
Most people want to trust in their capacities to do, think, and say what they want to get wherever they want to in this life. This line of thinking has taken over epic narratives, like the account of Gilgamesh, Oddyseus, or Monkey in "Journey to the West." It's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
Except what is the point of going anywhere if there is no "there there", as Gertrude Stein once quipped.
The journey is meaningless without a destination that is worthy of being the "destiny" of another.
Youth, or anyone for that matter, do not need to be educated as much as inspired.
It's not enough to tell someone that they must know something. The individual audience must be informed as to why it is important to learn anything.
When anyone passes over the academic surveys in our public schools, small wonder that many students are bored, frustrated, devoid of interest, and in some cases downright hostile.
What is the point of learning science, if we are nothing but the accidental descendants of chips and apes? If we are justt animals of a higher degree, why not eat, drink, and be merry, since tomorrow we die, and even living today it is not as if our lives have any really meaning, any real purpose.
The history books currently offered in social science classes also offer an undeniable veneer of fraud. We have all experienced the flights of fancy and failure which follow the human race. To assusme that students are going to accept wholesale the prettified accounts of men and women from our past is simply bunkum. The accounts rendered in history books are santized, distorted, or just plain false.
A more dominant theme, which has wrenched a great deal of value and consideration from human learning, is the despicable concept that human beings are basically good. This ancient Greek canard has brought nations and peoples into bondage. However, statesmen such as James Madison and his fellow Framers at least acknowledged the fallen nature of man, his innate corrution and cooruptibility. We must not look to the state for our salvation, yet we cannot look to ourselves. If the circumstances are circumspect, and our own nature is unknowing and untrustworthy, then man is an awful way.
Students do not need to be educated, to the degree that values must be drawn out of them. And the learning which they receive has little value if not connected with a great sense of organization with a world and a worldview beyond oneself. Community, comity, and common sense are that -- common, and one element that is in common in all of humanity is a dead nature, a fallen state that learning alone cannot remedy.
Every one of us needs to be inspired, we need the Spirit of God to indwell us, to help us overcome, to make us more than conquerors in a fallen world, one that only spreads the failure and defeat, even for those who receive victory in temporal matters.
When man is inspired on the inside, when he lears how to sit in high places in Christ, then he can walk in the Light, walk in the Spirit, and then stand in the evil day, stand against the emptiness, the harshness of a dead world. Education is meaningless if there is nothing to draw out of someone, and unless someone is born again, born of the Spirit, then not only is a man dead, but he is beset with an infinite debt, a grand vacuum which nothing in this world can remedy.
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