Kareem Elnahal is a young man with brains and guts. He also has a grasp of life’s most important questions -– something his elders seem to lack.
Elnahal graduated in June as the top senior at Mainland Regional High School in Linwood, N.J., an institution ranked among America’s best high schools by Newsweek magazine. He’s headed for Princeton University in the fall. His future looks bright.
In his valedictorian’s address at the commencement ceremony, however, Elnahal didn’t exactly blow kisses to his teachers. Instead, he lambasted the school for offering an educational experience devoid of meaning.
"[T]he education we have received here is not only incomplete, it is entirely hollow," Elnahal told a stunned audience, according to a report by Cybercast News Service. "Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost. I know how highly this community values learning, and I urge you all to re-evaluate what it means to be educated....
"Is there a creator? And if so, should we look to [Him] for guidance? These are often dismissed as questions of religion, but religion is not something opposed to rationality. It simply seeks to answer such questions through faith."
School administrators were not amused, but many of his fellow graduates apparently agreed with Elnahal. They reportedly stood and applauded his words.
"I felt like the most important questions were not asked," Elnahal later told Cybercast News Service, reflecting on his high school years. "Things like ethics, things that defined who we are, were ignored. So in that way I thought it was hollow."
Hollow. If there’s a better word to describe the state of public education, I can’t think of it.
But this isn’t another attack on public schools; many teachers do the best they can in the face of a relentless tide of secularism and enforced "diversity." This is a plea for listening to young people such as Kareem Elnahal.
I don’t know whether Elnahal is a religious believer or an agnostic seeker of truth. But he’s asking the fundamental questions most teens and young adults eventually ask as they search for meaningful ways to live. Classical education, whether public or private, once encouraged them to find the answers in a spirit of enlightened inquiry. Such inquiry is now considered off-limits, at least in the public sphere. Secularists have undermined the whole idea of education as the pursuit of truth; relativists deny objective truth even exists.
Students like Elnahal have the gumption to seek answers to the big questions anyway. More power to them.
Christians, meanwhile, have a different challenge as they approach the education of children and teens. In evangelical schools and churches, truth is readily available in its purest form. Biblical teaching and preaching are abundant.
