The American educational system is in an undeclared state of disaster, with competing ideologies and shifting worldviews undermining the very nature of education itself. In the state controlled school systems, ideologies of naturalism, secularism, materialism, and moral relativism shape the prevailing culture and worldview. A pernicious new imposition of "tolerance" as an ideology threatens to silence all voices resistant to absolute relativism. Herbert Marcuse, the radical philosopher of tolerance from the 1960s, would no doubt be thrilled to know that his ideology of intolerant tolerance has become so dominant.
At every level, the educational system bears all the marks of political and ideological battle. In the elite academy, various strains of postmodernism are at war with each other, even as various feminists, multiculturalists, and ideological theorists engage in academic battle.
Literature has been debased by postmodernist deconstruction, and texts are now treated as platforms for political posturing. According to French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, the author of the text is to be treated as "dead," meaning that it is now the reader, rather than the author, who will determine the meaning of the text. Of course, this means that there is no discernable meaning of the text at all. Michel Foucault--the radical postmodern philosopher of sexual liberation and polymorphous perversity--is now among the most influential figures in the academy, even though the living-out of his theories led to his death from AIDS.
From kindergarten to graduate school, education has been transformed from a process of learning into an opportunity for enhanced self-esteem. This is the gift of the therapeutic worldview which seeks to psychologize all issues and reduce questions of objective fact to matters of individual feeling.
Not even science is immune from these subversive developments. The politicization and ideological corruption of scientific fields was made embarrassingly apparent in the so called "Sokal scandal" of the 1990s, in which a prominent scientist wrote an article filled with undiluted postmodern gibberish--only to have it published in a major academic journal. The fact that his practical joke was taken seriously by the academic culture indicates the corruption and debasement of the scientific endeavor. An even more ominous development is the separation of science and morality, with "progress" in science becoming the only moral mandate recognized by some researchers and their supporters. Controversies over embryonic stem cell research and human cloning indicate the complete collapse of a shared worldview among scientists.
The separation of fact and value is one of the central features of the contemporary academic landscape. As Professor J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas notes, "We know as a matter of fact what the weight of a cesium atom is, but we are told that a judgment that murder is evil is simply a matter of opinion with no factual basis." Thus, we are told to look to science as a way of knowing "objective" truth, but we are then instructed that there can be no objective reality when it comes to matters of morality. This goes a long way toward explaining why a university professor would recently lament the fact that his students were reluctant to identify the Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust as "evil." A worldview that no longer recognizes evil for what it is has itself become an instrument of evil.
How can we recover a concept of authentic education? The Christian response to this question will be very different from that offered by alternative worldviews. As the psalmist instructs us, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." [Psalm 111:10]. Our worldview begins with the existence of the one true God, who has revealed himself to us, and who alone has the authority to determine what is true and false, good and evil, right and wrong. Thus, a Christian understanding of education is rooted in a worldview that takes the world seriously, because we first acknowledge the Creator of the universe. We understand that all education is moral education because we know that morality is not a mere human invention--it is the very structure of creation itself and the very substance of God's revelation to his creatures.
