Volume 8, Issue 1, October 1998

EDUCATION FOR TOMORROW

A popular slogan of today is, "knowledge is power." Children are frequently told to study to "get somewhere in the world," and to "get a good job."

The apostle Paul showed great insight into the meaning of the spiritual aspect of education in the following statement he made in his Letter to the Philippians, chapter 1, verses 9 and 10: "And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best."

Love is the basic virtue of life. Link learning and love and you get a Louis Pasteur, bending his crippled body to the task of finding the "truth that makes men free" from disease.

Link learning and love and you get a political leader like Nelson Mendela who spent his life overcoming appartide and showing the world we are all responsible for one anothers welfare.

Link learning and love and you get students intent upon making themselves useful to the world.

Education begins with love for its motive. It is enriched by knowledge, and then it is blessed by insight.

What is the use of studying mathematics, science, history, philosophy, etc, without glimpsing the eternal meaning in them? Insight starts with facts and ends with meanings; it begins with "the things that are seen" and ends with eternal things "that are not seen" with the eyes.

Knowledge and love without insight are like biscuits without baking powder or bread without yeast.

It is insight that makes us sharers in the creative divinity of the world.

Unfortunately we are trying in our public education system to separate spiritual insight and education as if it is possible to have one without the other.

Nothing perhaps is more harmful, states The Interpreter's Bible, #11, than the easy good nature which is willing to tolerate everything; and this is often mistaken for the Christian frame of mind. Love must fasten itself on the things which are worth loving, and it cannot do so unless it is wisely directed.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.