Secular Education and Christian Education
compared ---For many Education is the teacher
standing in front of their children teaching them maths, languages and history. ---Is that all? ---Educators are telling you it is not. ---The teacher comes into the class with a
baggage from his past, his present and also included, is his/her ideas of the
future. ---But what future? ---Future is not yet. ---Dreams are necessary. What dreams? ---It is here that the egg hits the fan. ---It is best to list five areas to be
compared. ---Orientation. Focus, Motivation.
Perspective. Source. ---Secular Education is interested in
horizontal empiricism. Religious Education is interested in horizontal empiricism
that is washed clean by vertical Revelation or the Bible or biblical views of
the Bible as “glasses” to look at. ---Secular Education shut themselves in,
is thus actually introspective although they claim to look out. They look only
as far as Mars. Why? Because that is where empiricism stops. It stops where the
lenses went. No further. ---Religious Education include the Owner
and Creator of the vast Universe. So they are Macro-focused not micro-focused
like Secular Education. ---Secular Education is working only with
the five needs of Maslow but Religious Education works with the sixth one that
Maslow added later, the need to interact vertically with the universe. ---Secular Education hates it when you
start analyzing their philosophy or worse even their epistemology. ---Remember that one’s deontology, that is
the product of our Education, the talk, idea, paper, presentation, book,
handout, manual, gossip, is actually just the product of our methodology. ---That sounds simple enough and usually
Education stops here. ---They do not like that you go deeper
into their epistemology. ---Behind any methodology is an
epistemology which is a philosophy of life that emphasize certain aspects and
undo others. ---So here Secular Education do not wish
to trod. They consider it private ground. It is an individual sacred area how
they think. ---But, epistemology is not enough either.
Christian Education goes deeper. Behind every epistemology of a person or
teacher or Educator is ontology. The way they live! ---When you get here, Secular Education
asks you to please leave and do it quickly. ---“What I do in my house is my business
and has nothing to do with you”. Is their motto. ---Not for the Christian Educator. Paul
asks us to live such that we are an open letter to be read by anyone. ---Are we to drink, smoke, dance according
to the Bible? No. Oops. Secular Education do not want to hear any more. ---So what Secular Education does is that
it wants to discipline by control. ---They suggest a “tension creating
machine” called peer-review, student review, self-review as a first phase in
the process. ---What they do not tell the teachers, is
that they have an office Ivory Tower “manual” they composed by computer as to
what a perfect teacher should do or be. ---Then they come two times a year to
inspect the teacher’s performance. They Admin with the Ivory Tower “Ideal
teacher” model. ---Teachers are horrified at this. They
are hired only one year at a time and wonder if these two visits are going to
give them the “we regret to inform you…”. ---The level of stress of the teachers and
the level of distance between teachers and Admin shots sky high. ---Then there is a third phase that they
have thought out in the Admin, someone who did their doctorate on “perfect
teaching somewhere”. ---The third phase is to collaborate with
the teacher by providing either a dialogue with him/her or a report or both. ---Again a lot of stress. No one likes to
be interviewed by superiors. The artificiality of all this is horrified. ---Finally these Admin “generals” wish in
their army all soldiers will improve in the long run and be a better teacher. ---My goodness. Did it work? ---No. First the teachers got fired one by
one through the years and later even one of the chief Admin people were fired!
All because of this model suggested by Educators from who knows where. ---Adventists who reads Ellen White’s “Education”
properly do not work with this kind of tactics. ---Where vertical focus and perspective is
involved and God is that vertical Owner with His Revelation and Bible, the
group dynamics is more natural and spiritual and God directed. ---The healing, and cleaning, and
spiritual upliftment leads to physical improvement and mental improvement as
well. ---Revelation from God has enough markers,
signifiers, commands, advice as to how we should deal with discrimatory remarks,
neighbor behavior, attitudes, moods. It outlines how we should react to our
superiors and the loyalty that is involved to those over us. ---There is no back-biting of superiors. ---So can you see the problem with Secular
Education? Can Secular Education outline for a Religious Education institute what
proper behavior and moods and motivation and purpose and class orientation and
discipline and focus is? ---Their sources are themselves and
culture in the environment. ---They only use books that supports their
own permissive lifestyle, list of behaviors not necessary but eating habits,
newstart shortcomings are all involved here. ---So can someone who is living “wildly”
have a proper “thinking=epistemology” to set up a methodology [how to Educate]
and bring out a manual or talk or command even, how a Religious Educator has to
do their teaching? ---Ellen White in Education gives us all
the answers as to how when where who and why and from Who. Right? ---She says that Nature and Bible are two
sources of God’s revelation. John Calvin said the same. ---In Africa there is a saying: “If you
play with snakes as pets, there is a great likelihood that they will bite you
in future”. African wisdom. True. Correct?