The quest for security continues as we endlessly roll around the ball bearings that we had in our collective pockets trying to discern how we could have failed to “connect the dots.” I see a connection between this security gaffe and why we are compelled towards classical and Christian education.
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We are going to spend our way out of debt.
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We will save money by expanding Medicare because the current Medicare has too much corruption in it (and we can save this money if we expand it).
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The world is a result of a completely irrational, mechanistic, amoral explosion…and we should all be nice to each other.
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We can make ourselves safe from terrorism if we invasively search all airline passengers while we announce exactly what procedures we are going to follow so that the actual terrorists can effectively draw up plans to get their weapons past our systems.
The ill-logic of these ideas is stunning and although we have likely already drove our bikes off a cliff we seem quite content to believe that peddling faster is going to fix the problems.
Classical Christian education gives another answer. We have to teach kids to smell the foulness of these arguments and we have to teach them rhetoric so that they can help others see the folly of these disastrous ideas. It is note-worthy, I think, to point out two things. First, that there are far too few critics of the insane ideas listed above. Second, and most damning, most of the critics are engaged in preaching about the problems, but only to the choir. Few (and can think of none off the top of my head) critics of these insane ideas have through competence and character won the right to engage the majority of the citizens of our nation. Classical Christian education aims at producing people that can do just this! Pray that our schools succeed for the sake of our children and for the sake of our nation.
We are a nation that is good at fact gathering—we have Everest-high mountains of data—but we have failed at Logic. We fail for two reasons. First, we collect more data than can be analyzed and we have stopped teaching and learning logic. C.S. Lewis said it so profoundly through the saintly Professor Kirk in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, saying, “"Logic! Why don't they teach logic at these schools?” The professor was not addressing this question to college sophomores but to young children. He expected them to understand logic. The curriculum of the schools of our nation has jettisoned logic. We just pile up facts, imagine that all truth is prima fascia, argue badly (and LOUDLY! See any News channel) and wonder why we fail often “to connect the dots.” So we currently have these “truths” bouncing around our society . . . .
