"The end of learning," wrote John Milton, "is to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him. . . ." If this be so--and the Bible says it is so--then the aims of education in America are all wrong.

The purpose of education is NOT:

• to enable students to earn a good income.
• to preserve our...political freedom.
• world unification.
• to teach young people a trade.
• the never-ending search for truth.
• harmony with the cosmos.
• to raise the consciousness of students...
• to prepare students for ... careers.
• to integrate the races.
• the social adjustment of the child.
• to stay ahead ... in technology.
• to create good citizens.

Yet the educational system in the United States is hostile to such education. It regards men as trousered apes, and its products, understandably enough, behave like untamed animals. If American education has a focus, it is not merely on this world, but on the most unimportant things in this world. The various educational philosophies in vogue in the last half of the twentieth century agree in only one thing: their opposition to Christianity.

The public school system anti-Christian origins were explained more than a century ago by an Unitarian turned Roman Catholic, Orestes Brownson. He was a part of an utopian socialism movement in the early nineteenth century of which Brownson wrote:

“The great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science. Although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could. The plan was not to make open attacks on religion. but to establish a system of state,--we said national--schools, from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children.... The first thing to be done was to get this system of schools established..... [T]he plan has been successful ..., the views we put forth have gained great popularity, and the action of the country...has taken the direction we sought to give it . . . . “

Now, after more than a century of government education, the effects of this anti-Christian educational system are becoming clear. But while even some non-Christians see the problems--the crime, the drugs, the promiscuity, the diseases, the illiteracy, the ignorance, the disbelief in truth--they do not see the solution. Non-Christian Professor Allan Bloom in, The Closing of the American Mind, offers a brilliant analysis of the moral and epistemological relativism that now controls our entire culture, including education, the view that all values are relative, and there is no truth, but only various "truths." But while his analysis is acute and, at times, brilliant, Bloom is like the doctor who diagnoses the disease but never prescribes a cure. Or worse, the doctor prescribes a treatment that will exacerbate, not meliorate, the disease.

Bloom criticizes the modern American university because it is not a university, but a multiversity: “The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines.... This democracy is really an anarchy... There is no vision, nor is there a competing set of visions, of what an educated human being is.... There is no organization of the sciences, no tree of knowledge....”

Students want today a comprehensive and unified view of things. That is precisely what American education cannot give them.

Another critic of 1967 says:
Directly or indirectly, the influence of philosophy sets the knowledge standards and methods of teaching for all departments... The consequence is a chaos of subjective whims setting the criteria of logic, proof, communication, demonstration, evidence, which differs from class to class, from teacher to teacher... It is as if each course were given in a different language, each requiring that one think exclusively in that language, none providing a dictionary. The result--to the extent that one would attempt to comply--is intellectual disintegration.

Add to this: the opposition to "system-building," i.e., to the integration of knowledge, with the result that the material taught in one class contradicts the material taught in the others, each subject hanging in a vacuum and to be accepted out of context, while any questions on how to integrate it are rejected, discredited and discouraged.

Add to this: the arbitrary, senseless, haphazard conglomeration of most curricula, the absence of any hierarchical structure of knowledge, any order, continuity or rationale... and consequently, the necessity to memorize, rather than learn, to recite, rather than understand, to hold in one's mind a cacophony of undefined jargon long enough to pass the next exam.

What is Professor Bloom's solution to this anarchy in higher education? At the end, he writes: "Of course, the only serious solution is the one that is almost universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts,... letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them. . . ."

But this, of course, is not a solution at all, and it is certainly not the only solution. For the "bewildering variety of courses" offered by contemporary universities, Bloom would substitute a bewildering variety of philosophies. "Just reading" Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Augustine, Aquinas, Rousseau, Calvin, Darwin, Descartes, [31 others] is simply substituting one carnival of sideshows for another. Professor Bloom's solution, in several hundred thousand books, is no solution at all. What is needed is a comprehensive unifying philosophy of education, and he offers none. Is this the intellectual bankruptcy of humanism?

Where Professor Bloom fails, Gordon Clark succeeds, and brilliantly. Clark presents a coherent philosophy of education, a philosophy that can guide not only the university, but the kindergarten as well. The end of education is...Christian men. Guided by Christian philosophy, from kindergarten to university (Bloom does not discuss the first 13 years) can aim at instilling the love of truth and of God in the minds of the young.

Solomon explained the purpose of education long ago:
To know wisdom and instruction,
To perceive the words of understanding,
To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity:...
To understand a proverb and an enigma, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.... If you cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and...understanding;...