Chapter 9: Education
Updated: 1/2/20
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylonia came to Jerusalem and surrounded the city to cut off all supplies to it. The Lord gave Nebuchadnezzar victory over Jehoiakim king of Judah, and he gave him some of the sacred objects from the house of God. He brought them into the land of Babylonia, to the house of his god, and he placed the sacred objects in his god's treasury. The king spoke to Ashpenaz, his chief official, to bring in some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility—young men without blemish, attractive in appearance, skillful in all wisdom, filled with knowledge and understanding, and qualified to serve in the king's palace. He was to teach them the Babylonians' literature and language. The king counted out for them a daily portion of his delicacies and some of the wine that he drank. These young men were to be trained for three years, and after that, they would serve the king. Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, some of the people of Judah. The chief official gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego. But Daniel intended in his mind that he would not pollute himself with the king's delicacies or with the wine that he drank. So he asked permission from the chief official that he might not pollute himself (Daniel:1–8).
Under the kingship of Nebuchadnezzar, the empire of Babylon conquered the city of Jerusalem in the third year of King Jehoiakim. We know from historical evidence that this was in 606 BC. He made a theological statement when he took some the treasures of the temple and put them to his own treasury. He was stating that he, not the God of the Bible, was sovereign over the people of Israel. In 597 B.C., he invaded again to put down the rebellious king Jehoiakim (II Kings 24:1). Finally, he carried off the remaining Hebrews in 586 B.C.
In order to speed up the assimilation of the Hebrews into his empire, Nebuchadnezzar needed reliable Hebrew agents. He wanted the best and the brightest to fill these posts. He also wanted to train men who would not resist these unfamiliar laws and customs. He wanted rapid compliance: first by the trainees, then by the masses. He therefore had Daniel and three young men placed in an educational program run by the empire. Once trained, they would be agents of the empire who would serve as rulers over the people of Israel. They would be intermediaries in between Nebuchadnezzar and the conquered people of the southern kingdom of Judah.
There is no question what this educational program was all about. It was about conquest. It was about subordinating a theologically rebellious people who would prove just how rebellious they were over the next two decades. Only after most of them were carried out of the land of Israel and relocated in Babylon did the empire gain some degree of control over them.
Daniel recognized that this was a program of religious assimilation. There was no way that he could effectively escape this program of state education. But he wanted to maintain some degree of independence from it. Even though the treasures of the temple had been confiscated and put into the treasury of the king, he still knew that this was a temporary time of captivity. He probably did not know for how long. God told Jeremiah that it would be 70 years (Jeremiah 25:11), but He revealed this only in year four of Jehoiakim’s reign (25:1). Under these circumstances, Daniel recognized that it was crucial to maintain a covenantal-cultural separation between the Babylonians and the Hebrews. This separation would not be based on the temple. It would have to be based on something that was not tied to geography: the dietary laws. If Daniel could keep himself and the young men from being judicially polluted by the food of Babylon, he could maintain a symbolic separation from the empire. So, he went to the man in charge of the educational program, and he asked that he and the young men be allowed to eat only vegetables. There were no vegetables prohibited by the Mosaic food laws. This way, these students could eat side-by-side the other young men in the educational program. Later, they could eat side-by-side the governors of the land. They would eat only those foods which were common to both the Mosaic law and the Babylonian empire: vegetables.
In order to weaken the bureaucratic resistance of the man in charge of the Hebrews’ education, Daniel proposed a test. Let the young men eat nothing but vegetables for ten days. Then the man in charge could assess whether the Hebrew young men were more healthy or less healthy than the non-Hebrew young men in the school (vv. 12–13). “So the steward agreed with him to do this, and he tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days their appearance was more healthy, and they were better nourished, than all the young men who ate the king's delicacies. So the steward took away their delicacies and their wine and gave them only vegetables” (vv. 14–16).
These young trainees were not simply more healthy than their competitors in the program. They were also the best performers academically and practically. They also displayed wisdom.
As for these four young men, God gave them knowledge and insight in all literature and wisdom, and Daniel could understand all kinds of visions and dreams. At the end of the time set by the king to bring them in, the chief official brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. The king spoke with them, and among the whole group there were none to compare with Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. They stood before the king, ready to serve him. In every question of wisdom and understanding that the king asked them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and those who claimed to speak with the dead, who were in his entire kingdom (vv. 17–20).
From a practical standpoint, the king was wise in accepting these specific young men into the system of rulership. They understood the laws and literature of the kingdom. They could apply these laws to the legal cases within their jurisdiction. Daniel was invited into the inner circle of power to interpret king Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 2) in much the same way that Joseph was invited in to interpret Pharaoh’s dream (Genesis 41). But there were limits to their obedience to the king. They refused to conform spiritually to the gods of Babylon. When Nebuchadnezzar in his rebellion demanded that all the people in the land worship a golden idol, they refused to do so. He grew enraged. He condemned them to a fiery death. But they survived in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3). This unmistakable miracle led the king to accept the sovereignty of God.
Nebuchadnezzar said, “Let us praise the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his messenger and given his message to his servants. They trusted in him when they set aside my command, and they gave up their bodies rather than worship or prostrate themselves to any god except their God. Therefore I make a decree that any people, nation, or language that speaks anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego must be torn apart, and that their houses must be made into rubbish heaps because there is no other god who is able to save like this.” Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon (Daniel 3:28–30).
As a result of his conversion, he wrote chapter 4 of the book of Daniel: his teetimomny of his conversion to faith in God’s sovereignty over history. This section is in Aramaic: chapters 2:7 to 7:28. No other section of the Old Testament is in Aramaic.
The king had seen state education as an agency of suppression over a rebellious people. Instead, it turned into an agency of independence for these people, for the young men did not pollute themselves by eating the same foods that were given to the other students. This act of independence placed the Hebrews in a unique position within the empire. It gained them a measure of independence that other captive peoples did not possess. But this took the willingness of Daniel, as an agent of the young men, to stand firm against the headmaster of the school.
In every nation in which the civil government is formally independent of the God of the Bible, there is a conflict between state education and Christian education. This conflict generally is ignored by most Christians. Agents of the educational system in modern times commonly defend it as religiously neutral. But there is no such thing as religious neutrality, any more than there was neutrality between the gods of Babylon and the God of the Bible. There is always a conflict over the question of original sovereignty. Original state sovereignty is denied by the God of the Bible. God does not honor any other gods as equals. Nebuchadnezzar began to learn this truth as a result of his experience with the young men. He learned it even more forcefully in his seven years of madness (Daniel 4:32–33), which had been predicted by Daniel, who interpreted the king’s dream correctly (v. 25). Nebuchadnezzar eventually came to his senses (vv. 34–35), and in doing so, he subordinated himself to the sovereignty of God. “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, extol, and honor the King of heaven, for all his deeds are right, and his ways are just. He can humble those who walk in their own pride” (v. 37).
Jesus announced this principle of non-neutrality: “The one who is not with me is against me, and the one who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). Daniel fully understood this principle in his years of captivity in Babylon and subsequently in the Medo-Persian Empire. So did the three young men who took a stand against the worship of a false god.
As part of the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, God established the annual ritual of the Passover. This ritual was to serve as the foundation of the Hebrews’ faith in the God of history. “When you enter the land that Yahweh will give you, just as he has promised to do, you must observe this act of worship. When your children ask you, ‘What does this act of worship mean?’ then you must say, ‘It is the sacrifice of Yahweh's Passover, because Yahweh passed over the Israelites' houses in Egypt when he attacked the Egyptians. He set our households free.’ Then the people bowed down and worshiped Yahweh” (Exodus 12:25–27). This set the pattern for covenantal education from that time forward. Fathers are in charge unless they are not the heads of their households. This is a priestly function. The sovereignty of the God of the Bible must be affirmed by the parents. While they can legitimately assign technical aspects of the educational program to teachers who may not believe in the sovereignty of God over history in general, they must remain in authority over the program of education for their minor children. They must make judgments regarding the content of the education and the formal structure of the educational program. They are not to hire teachers who undermine the authority of the Bible and its clear teaching on the sovereignty of God over history. The teachers are to conform to the parents’ standards, and if they do not, the parents must find other teachers.
There was nothing technically wrong with the teachers who instructed Daniel and the three young men. Daniel and the three young men became masters of the curriculum. They performed better than the other students. They did not accept any aspect of the curriculum that defied the sovereignty of God, but they became masters of the technical content of the program. They had no choice but to participate in the compulsory school program, but they did not conform to its diet, and they did not accept its implicit theological premise of the sovereignty of Nebuchadnezzar.
There are times when the state demands that the children of covenant-keepers be enrolled in a compulsory program of education. The parents must then intervene outside of the classroom to teach the students the truth about the God of the Bible and His sovereignty over history. Tyrannical kingdoms rely on state-funded education, especially compulsory education, but they do not survive. The church does survive. Where the conflict is obvious, and where the state does allow parents to withdraw their children from the mandated, tax-funded program, parents should take advantage of this opportunity. They should see to it that their children perform better in mastering the technical details of whatever the state mandates for a required curriculum. In this sense, the children are to imitate Daniel and the three young men who were trapped by the compulsory, tax-funded school of Nebuchadnezzar.
There was nothing ultimately neutral about state education in Babylon. That became clear in Daniel 3. It became clear to Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 4. He learned his lesson.
You are responsible for your own family’s education. We know this from the story of the first Passover. The head of the household was required to teach the children the meaning of this annual celebration (Exodus 12). This indicates where the primary responsibility for education lies.
I repeat: if you live in a society in which the civil government allows you to educate your own children, you should take advantage of this benefit. There is a familiar phrase in English: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” If you wish to retain control over any area of your life, you must retain control over its funding. To the extent that you relinquish any degree of responsibility for funding any area of your life, you of necessity relinquish a degree of control to the person or the agency providing the funding. We do not get something for nothing. This is especially true of every area of civil government. There are no subsidies that do not involve rules and regulations. All money from the government comes with strings attached.
Prior to about 1800, education was overwhelmingly in the hands of families. To a limited degree, churches got involved in education, but usually only at the advanced level. Very few people attended college. By the end of the nineteenth century, tax-funded education, including compulsory education, had become universal in the West. State funding has transferred control over the minds of children to the state by way of state-licensed teachers and materials. Increasingly, control over both the content and structure of education was transferred to the state. This was a major aspect of state control over the lives of citizens. It was a recapitulation of the free education provided by Nebuchadnezzar to Daniel and the three young men. It was an aspect of administrative control by the state.
In the United States, it has long been legal for parents to send their children to private schools, but unless these schools were partially funded by local churches, few parents could afford to do this. They have had to pay taxes to support the local public schools, and then they have had to come up with the money to fund their children’s attendance at a private school. Very few parehts did this. After about 1980, homeschooling began to be adopted by a growing minority of Christian parents. Nevertheless, homeschooling has been a tiny movement that constitutes less than 4% of all children enrolled in school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The price of homeschooling continues to drop as a result of digital online programs. The percentage of homeschooled students is expected to increase.
Parents do not have enough time to read all of the textbooks that are assigned to their children in tax-funded schools. Politicians expect these parents to trust the textbook-screening committees of the Department of Education. The committee’s selection drastically limits choices by local elected public school boards. Most states do not have elected committees that do the screening. They are appointed by the departments of education, and they are wholly dependent on these departments of education. This transfers control over the content of education to a self-certified bureaucracy of professional educators. Parents have no say over the textbooks assigned to their children.
This creates a tremendous responsibility on the part of parents to know what is in the textbooks. But parents do not have time to read the textbooks. Whenever textbooks are not in conformity to parents’ ethical principles, parents lose control over the ethical principles taught to their children. This creates a kind of intellectual schizophrenia in the minds of the children. Their parents teach one set of principles; their teachers and their textbooks teach another set. Their teachers are inculcating a worldview established by humanism throughout most of the day, five days a week, at least 180 school days a year. Few parents sit down with their children in the evening to go over what the children have been taught during the day, course by course. I say “few.” I really mean “none.”
If parents choose to homeschool their children, the parent who does most of the teaching should go through the textbooks and materials in the curriculum. To some extent, parents have to trust the judgment of whoever designed the curriculum. No parent is an expert in everything. If the students are required to write regular essays, then the parents can get some sense of what materials are being taught and what their children are learning.
It is extremely difficult for local officials to police the structure and content of homeschool programs. This is why the state prefers brick-and-mortar private schools. It is much easier to police them than it is to police thousands of homeschool families. Cities do not have the manpower to police homeschool families. This is why the rise of homeschooling in the United States after 1980 has undermined state control over education in the families that have adopted homeschool programs.
When both parents work outside the home for a salary, they must make a great deal of money in order to afford brick-and-mortar Christian education. Otherwise, they succumb to the lure of free education offered by the local public schools. The public schools in effect offer free babysitting and child care services. But the children are left unattended after school hours and during vacation periods. These children become what are called latchkey children. They are unattended at home. The state does not prohibit this as long as the children are attending state schools during school hours. The government does not require parents to be home after a school bus drops the children off within walking distance of their homes.
Inevitably, parents must delegate most education to specialists. If they homeschool, they purchase textbooks and teaching materials, either online or in book form. Or else they use the digital materials supplied by an online curriculum. They have to trust the judgment and competence of the authors of these materials. No parent has sufficient time or sufficient skill to teach all of the courses that are required for entry into the workforce or into a university. The parent must use third-party teaching materials. This is why trust is at the heart of modern education. This trust is usually based on almost no research on the part of parents into the content of the materials being assigned. Whenever parents trust educators whose salaries are paid by the state, they implicitly are affirming their trust in the judgment of tenured state bureaucrats who cannot easily be fired. They surrender control over their children’s education because they refuse to finance their children’s education.
For a parent to make an intelligent assessment of the content of any textbook or reading assignment, the parent must be familiar with the content of the material. The Christian parent must also be familiar with the worldview of the Bible regarding the topic. This parent must be sufficiently familiar with the biblical worldview in order to make a correct judgment about the implicit worldview governing materials assigned to the children. Very few parents possess sufficient training in biblical worldview to make this judgment. Prior to the 1980s, Christian parents depended on the judgment of Christian school administrators and teachers. This in turn forced the teachers to rely on the authors of the assigned materials. Rare is the Christian textbook writer who is well-versed in the presuppositions of the Bible and also the presuppositions of the secular humanists who write most of the textbooks. Even among Christian parents who insist that the materials they assign do defend the Christian worldview, they are generally incapable of stating what this worldview is and how it applies to each of the courses that their children are studying.
This brings up the issue of self-education.
All forms of government in the life of an adult begins with self-government. The same is true of education. When we are children, we subordinate ourselves to our teachers, and we assume that our teachers know what they are talking about. But, as we slowly become adults, we begin to recognize that our teachers and even the authors of the materials they assigned were not self-conscious in their defense of an explicitly biblical worldview. Teachers adopted materials that may have been inconsistent with such a worldview. They were unaware of an implicit conflict of worldviews in their own instruction. Again, this is intellectual schizophrenia. It is important for parents to begin to consider the issue of worldview in their thinking. This worldview affects every area of life. In every area of life in which sin rains, redemption involves a rethinking of the basic premises of this area of life. This should begin with the issues associated with the biblical covenant: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. These involve five questions.
Sovereignty: Who’s in charge here?
Authority: To whom do I report?
Law: What are the rules?
Sanctions: What do I get if I obey? Disobey?
Time: Does this outfit have a future?
Every worldview has specific answers to these questions. So does every social philosophy. If you understand the answers that Christianity has to these questions, then you will be in a position to evaluate the answers that rival worldviews offer for these questions. When you are in a position to do this because of your understanding of what Christianity teaches, you will be in a good position to evaluate what is right and what is wrong about rival worldviews and social theories. You will have a far better grasp of the way the social world works, and how it has worked in the past.
Christian textbooks and monographs in history, economics, philosophy, theology, sociology, education, political theory, and the other social sciences should begin with this five-point covenantal structure. They do not. The authors are either unaware of this structure or else they do not think it applies to their field of thought. By taking this attitude, they implicitly surrender to rival theories of the way the world works. They implicitly import the thinking of the authors and instructors who taught them when they were in graduate school. They are not self-conscious about the inherent differences between the Christian worldview and rival worldviews. They may understand this conflict with respect to certain issues, but they do not understand the extent to which there is a systematic and inevitable conflict between the biblical worldview and rival worldviews. It is much easier to recognize these fundamental differences if you understand the five points: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time.
The best place for someone to begin to investigate these fundamental differences is in whatever area of life he has been assigned specific responsibilities. For someone who works for a salary, this certainly applies to his job. A Christian should also be self-conscious in investigating how the Christian worldview applies to his calling. This takes considerable study. Such discernment is not taught in colleges and universities. It is not taught in programs of on-the-job training. This is why self-education is crucial for rebuilding our little segments of the world. We must start with those areas of life in which we have unique responsibilities. Only then will we be prepared to rethink the broader responsibilities that we have in areas affected by family, church, and state.
It is common for social reformers and activists to concentrate their programs of self-education on political matters. This is not the correct approach. We should start with our highly specialized knowledge of responsibilities in tasks that have been assigned to us by our employers. Here is where we have primary responsibility outside of the home. Someone holds us accountable. We report to someone. There are rules. There are sanctions. There had better be a future. To take on the reform of the world before we have mastered the reform of our lives is a form of arrogance. It is an example of biting off more than we can chew. It is a premature grabbing of the robes of authority. It is one more example of Adam’s sin in the garden.
We are back to Jesus’ warning about the log in your eye. “Why do you look at the tiny piece of straw that is in your brother's eye, but you do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take out the piece of straw that is in your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the piece of straw that is in your brother's eye” (Matthew 7:3–5). Here is the rule: first things first. Self-reform must begin with self-education.
There are two aspects of self-education that you had better deal with. The first is your narrow specialty. The second is how your work fits into the overall operation of society. It is best to begin with your understanding of how the economy works. As I have said repeatedly, the free market economy is a gigantic auction. Whatever you do for a living, you do it within a competitive framework. So, you have obligations to master the specific information and skills associated with your occupation. But you must also understand how your occupation affects the world around it. In other words, you have to have the big picture and the small picture. It is not sufficient to have mastered the technical skills associated with your occupation. You must also understand what the competition is doing, and how both you and the competition fit into the overall economy. You must become an expert in both. This is a big responsibility. But thsi is what success requires. You do not do your job in a vacuum. Whatever you do, you had better do it well. You had better be reading about how to improve your skills. If you can attend the seminar over a weekend every year or so, that is a good idea. Constantly work on improving your performance. This general principle also applies to your calling in life. This always begins with reading. You must constantly be reading in your field. You must read classic books. You must also read favorably reviewed books that present and evaluate whatever new information is important for staying current and competitive in your field. You should be visiting websites and reading specialized publications in your field. There is constant competition and constant progress going on. This degree of competition will increase as competitors from around the world enter the marketplace by means of the World Wide Web.
There was a time in history when somebody was a master of the details of how to produce a buggy whip. But his skills did him no good after buggies were replaced by automobiles. That did not take long. In the United States, it took place in about 13 years in cities, from 1900 to 1913.
It is been known for thousands of years that one of the best ways to master a subject is to teach it. The discipline of teaching is a discipline of the mind. It forces the teacher to master his subject and then transfer a portion of this knowledge to novices. In executing this task, he must be able to take complex material and extract the relevant (for the students) highlights. A good teacher honors three speaking requirements in this order: accuracy, clarity, and motivation. His presentation should fit his audience: their interests, skills, intellectual capacity, motivation, and background. It takes creativity to do this effectively. It is not sufficient for him to know the material. He must be able to rework the material in such a way that most members of his audience are able to grasp it, internalize it, and apply it. The students who do this most effectively should also be encouraged to teach it. There should be a multiplication process associated with teaching.
Effective teaching involves keeping up with the latest discoveries in the field. It also involves practical applications. There is a distinction between theory and practice. An effective teacher will honor this distinction. He will be able to relate the general principles of action, which are universal, to specific situations. This is the art of casuistry. It has to do with the exercise of judgment: the ability to recognize which fixed principles apply to which specific situations. This is point four of the biblical covenant.
I do not know what percentage of the population has the ability to teach, but the ability to teach well, as with every other skill, is limited. I assume that only about 20% of the workers in any profession are capable of teaching well, and perhaps only 4% have the capability of becoming really effective teachers. This is a Pareto distribution. I cannot prove it here, but I think it would be unwise to assume otherwise. This means that somebody who develops the skill of teaching will have leverage far beyond what his peers in the profession possess. Most people who are capable of teaching do not seek out opportunities to teach. There may not be sufficient payment. It is a lot of extra work. Most people do not like to stand in front of other people and deliver a lecture. Someone may be willing to teach on a one-to-one basis, but he is not willing to teach in a group setting.
Very few people develop the skill of public speaking. The skill can be learned by most people. It takes practice. It takes the willingness to stand in front of a group and risk making verbal and intellectual mistakes. But, through a program of competitive speaking, most people can learn the skill of public speaking sufficiently so as not to embarrass themselves when called upon to make public presentations. Very few people go out of their way to develop this skill because they do not go out of their way to seek opportunities to speak in public. This creates opportunities for those people who are willing to sacrifice time, energy, and public embarrassment in order to develop the skill of speaking in public.
A good way to begin teaching is to work as a tutor. Teach one-on-one. Get feedback from the student. Get a sense of his confusion. Make assessments of where he must concentrate his efforts in order to overcome his lack of knowledge and his lack of self-confidence. I began tutoring in high school. I made a little money, and I helped a young man who was having trouble in a beginning course. It was good training for me. I do not know whether it was good training for him. I did not do this for long, but I did it long enough to gain self-confidence in my ability as a teacher. That self-confidence and that skill has been basic to my career ever since. I was a teaching assistant in the field of Western civilization when I was a graduate student. I taught briefly as an economics professor at the college level. I produced 1,250 video-based lessons for the Ron Paul Curriculum, 2013–17. I taught courses in the history of Western literature, the history of American literature, American history, economics, government, and business. I did this toward the end of my career, between the ages of 71 and 75. I had begun teaching 60 years earlier. Even before this, from the age of ten, I had the ability to speak clearly and motivationally in public. This skill was basic to my entire career. I strongly recommend that you develop this skill.
Anyone who continues to add to his knowledge but refuses to do any teaching is missing a tremendous opportunity to become even more proficient in his field. He is also missing an opportunity to help others develop their skills. He has boxed in the knowledge that he possesses. The process of Christian dominion always involves evangelism. Evangelism is a form of teaching. When you teach someone the basics of Christianity as it applies to any area of life, and you also encourage him to continue this program of evangelism, you help to extend the kingdom of God in history. Jesus made this point clear.
Jesus went about all the cities and the villages. He continued teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of disease and all kinds of sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were troubled and discouraged. They were like sheep without a shepherd. He said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore urgently pray to the Lord of the harvest, so that he may send out laborers into his harvest’ (Matthew 9:35–38).
If you begin teaching, you will soon identify your strengths and your weaknesses. You will have to study to overcome the weaknesses. If you find that you lack information, you must seek out this information. If a student asks questions that you cannot answer, you must find answers. This keeps you developing your knowledge as well as your skill of imparting this knowledge.
There are many ways to teach. Tutor somebody one-on-one. Speak to a Sunday school class. Start a book club where people meet once a week to discuss a book. If you start a book club, choose a topic that you know something about. It can be mostly intellectual. It can also be a how-to book, such as something on money management, time management, or investing. Invite friends to attend. Produce a one-page flyer showing the benefits of attending. Pick a topic that people are interested in. Limit the first book to six weeks. Limit the meetings to 90 minutes. Include fellowship time. Then pick a second book if people show interest in another six weeks’ session. You will gain experience leading a discussion group.
You do not need to teach face-to-face. Produce a series of online videos. Produce written support material for these videos, such as PDF workbooks. It is easier to become a teacher today than at any time in history. The communications technologies become ever cheaper and easier to use. For very little money, you can produce high quality teaching videos that can be viewed by ten people or ten million. They can be posted free of charge online. They can be produced with inexpensive equipment for only the cost of your forfeited time. Build your reputation as an expert. Serve as a model for other people who will also become teachers. This is how you can have influence from the beyond the grave. Once posted, a video remains available permanently.
Writing a blog is free of charge or close to it. Write on a regular basis. Through search engines, people who are interested in the topic you write about will be able to locate what you have written. If it impresses them, they will come back again to read more. Nothing like blogging was available until 1995: the introduction of the graphical user interface, which opened the World Wide Web to the masses. Then everything changed. It changed within five years. I launched a website in 1996. By the year 2000, I had 35,000 email subscribers. By 2006, I had over 100,000 subscribers. I delivered this information by email for very little money. I made a good living, and I also built an audience for the books I had written on Christian economics. I took advantage of the opportunity early, when almost nobody did. It took only minimal technical skills to do this. It has paid off ever since.
You do not know how much influence you will be able to develop if you become a teacher. You must learn by experience. You may have extraordinary skills. You may have only average skills. But in a world in which almost no one develops his average skills, possessing average skills gives you a permanent advantage over at least 80% of your peers if you pursue a life of teaching. If you hesitate because you do not think you are good enough, then serve as a tutor until you gain greater skills and greater confidence. Start small. If you do something long enough, you will get good at it.
Scholarship is not simply intense study. It is intense study that is structured by mainly formal academic requirements. An inventor may study a topic intensely, but his goal is not the publication of an article or a book. His goal is to produce a technical device that performs a specific operation. His procedure is not governed by academic standards of documentation. The same is true of an investor. He wants to make money, not get published.
Very little academic scholarship ever directly affects the thinking or the lives of more than a handful of people. Most consumers do not pay scholars directly to be informed of the results of their scholarship.
There are rare books of scholarship in every field that set the pattern for scholarly investigation for decades or even centuries. A handful of these books are read by generations of scholars, not because of unique information in these works, but rather because of the impact that these works have had on scholarship in a particular field, and from there to decision-makers of society. Probably the most widely quoted statement on the impact of scholarship on the general public was offered at the end of a major work of scholarship that had indirect influence over the thinking of economists and politicians throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The statement appears in the final paragraph of the most important economics book of the twentieth century, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. It was written by John Maynard Keynes, and it was published in 1936.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
He exaggerated the power of economic ideas. The public support of influential self-interested members of special-interest groups is crucial for most decision-makers most of the time. But Keynes was correct in this sense: politicians justify their anti-market political actions by an appeal to some economist, or at least a simplified version of his ideas. Of no economist in history was this more true than of Keynes, whose exceedingly incoherent ideas justifying national governments’ deficits misled generations of academic economists who in turn justified and promoted their governments’ policy of deficit spending. Indeed, the major Western governments by 1936 had already adopted this policy. Keynes was accepted as the guiding light of economic policy only in retrospect. Economists and politicians have used bits and pieces of the General Theory to justify the massive build-up of government debt that had begun in 1931 and which continues today. The book was unreadable in 1936, and it remains unreadable. Rarely does anyone quote the book’s theoretical sections. Rarely do economists actually read the book. In this sense, it is like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). It is honored verbally. Brief extracts from them are quoted, but almost no one has ever read either of these books from cover to cover. Of those few who have, almost no one has had his mind changed by what he has read. True believers read these books after they have been converted to the faith by something less turgid, much shorter, and more coherent.
There are four major formats for scholarship: the academic journal article, the academic monograph, the treatise, and the textbook. I will explain what these are, how they are used, and what their impact has been.
The article is published in a peer-reviewed journal that is aimed at the academic community. Almost no one reads these journals. I mean this literally. Other than the editor, no one reads an academic journal cover to cover. Their primary purpose is academic and professional. At major research universities, which pay the largest salaries, junior faculty members are promoted to senior positions based on the number of articles they have had published in the most prestigious journals. Rarely does an article change the mind of more than a handful of people. Published articles are mainly tools for receiving tenure at universities that pride themselves on being research centers. Because of the Internet, it is possible to trace how often a journal article is quoted in subsequent journal articles. Very few of them are ever quoted, and the number of quotations of any article declines steadily every five years for all but a handful of articles.
The most widely quoted journal article in the field of economics was written by Ronald H. Coase, who won the so-called Nobel Prize in 1991. (Wikipedia reports: “In 1968, Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which, although not being a Nobel Prize, has become informally known as the ‘Nobel Prize in Economics.’”) Its title: “The Problem of Social Cost.” It appeared in the third issue of an annual journal published by the University of Chicago: The Journal of Law and Economics (1960). That article became the foundation of a new academic discipline: law and economics. It was not simply an erroneous article. It was an evil article. It was an indirect assault on the concept of private ownership. Yet it was regarded at the time, and is regarded today, as a defense of the free market. I wrote a book refuting it: The Coase Theorem (1991). I wrote an article against it: “Undermining Property Rights: Coase and Becker” (2002). He never responded. He had 20 years to respond. He died in 2013 at age 102. His final publication appeared in 2012: a journal article. His first three publications, also journal articles, appeared in 1935: a 78-year publishing career. He wrote mainly articles.
Then there is the monograph. The monograph is a narrowly focused book. Its goal is supposedly to throw new light on either a forgotten topic or a topic that has been widely misinterpreted. It usually is published by the book-publishing division of a university. Sometimes a monograph is published by a commercial publisher that is known as an academic publisher. These books are sold primarily to university libraries at extremely high prices: at least three times to four times the price of a commercial hardback book of similar length. A book that has been favorably reviewed in several major academic journals can be invoked by a junior professor who is seeking tenure at a research university. Tenure means that he cannot be fired for anything other than a moral or legal infraction. It is a highly sought-after plum in academia: a high guaranteed income for life for almost no work. Tenure has faded in importance in recent years because it is granted far less often than it was in the second half of the twentieth century. A monograph can establish a scholar’s reputation. It can shape the thinking of hundreds or even thousands of scholars. Keynes’ General Theory was a monograph. So was the book by Keynes’ critic, F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944). A highly influential monograph in numerous academic disciplines was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). It popularized the word “paradigm.”
A treatise is rare. This is a book that attempts to restructure the intellectual premises of an entire field of study. The most important treatise in the history of Western civilization is Augustine’s City of God. He died in 430. It was written in the decade prior to his death. It shaped the thinking of Western theologians and scholars for over 1,000 years, most notably John Calvin in his treatise, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). In economics, by far the most famous treatise is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) is a treatise. Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action (1949) is a treatise. The book you are reading is part of a treatise.
Finally, there is the textbook. A textbook is used primarily in public high schools and then colleges and universities. It introduces first-year students to the basic ideas of a particular academic discipline. It is noncontroversial. It rarely mentions conflicting contemporary interpretations within the academic discipline. It does not mention what appear to be irreconcilable aspects of these rival schools of opinion. It glosses over them. It gives the impression that the academic discipline is a coherent, consistent enterprise. It has to satisfy a textbook-screening committee of a commercial publishing firm. This committee must in turn satisfy the various conflicting viewpoints that are found in the departments of large universities. Textbooks are by definition never innovative. They are almost never read a second time by a student who has finished the course. They are revised every few years in order to generate enormous profits for the publishing companies and the authors. Textbooks are priced higher than almost any other book of comparable length. They are deliberately unmemorable in terms of their style. The textbook publisher’s committee sees to this. By far the most famous and most profitable economics textbook was written by Paul Samuelson, a self-identified disciple of Keynes. It was first published in 1948, and subsequent revised editions are still being published 70 years later. It made Samuelson a very rich man. The book was an attempt to make Keynes’ General Theory coherent to literally millions of college students. A textbook carries no weight for establishing tenure. A textbook is rarely quoted as authoritative in any scholarly journal article, monograph, or treatise. It is the main way for a scholar to become exceedingly rich through book royalties.
If you are serious about becoming a scholar, you should prepare yourself for a life of disappointed hopes and plans. First, most Christians do not take scholarship seriously. Second, the general public does not take scholarship seriously. Third, very few people structure their lives in terms of rigorous ideas. Your audience will be small. Fourth, you will find it difficult to gain permanent disciples. They come and go. Few disciples are willing to risk suffering a lifetime of frustration with low or no visible payoff. Fifth, the more controversial your ideas are, the more difficult you will find it to gain disciples, and the more difficult they will find it to support themselves financially while developing these ideas in specific areas of life. Sixth, your disciples, if any, will find it difficult to gain permanent employment in non-Christian educational institutions. Seventh, if your ideas are controversial, your disciples will not find jobs in Christian institutions of higher learning. Small private colleges must raise funds from donors. Controversy scares away donors.
At some point in your career, preferably early, you will have to make a decision about what you believe is the final voice of authority. If it is the Bible, as it should be in any Christian’s thinking, then you have a moral obligation to re-think your chosen academic discipline in terms of biblical revelation. I have done this in the field of economics, but my efforts are unique in history. No one else in any academic field has ever written 31 volumes of support materials based on verse-by-verse exegesis of biblical passages. Second, I have gained few academic disciples. As far as I know, my economics books have never been used in college courses. But, from the day I started out, my primary goal was not to gain disciples. My primary goal was to find out what the Bible teaches about economics. It has taken me six decades to achieve this, but I have achieved my goal. This multi-volume treatise is the summation of what I have discovered.
The unwillingness of Christian scholars in every field to go to the Bible in search of authoritative pronouncements that govern the presuppositions of their academic or professional fields has been legendary from the earliest treatises. It goes back to Justin Martyr and the apologists in the middle of the second century after Christ. They imported Greek philosophy to provide co-principles of truth. Greek philosophy was understood to have equal authority with the Bible. But God does not accept anyone’s speculation as equal to His. There has always been a debate over the doctrine of creation out of nothing, which is taught in the first chapter of Genesis. The Greeks denied it. Scholars and popularizers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment denied it. Obviously, Charles Darwin denied it. There has been an implacable battle between six-day creationism and all rival theories of origins. This means that there has been an implacable battle over the issue of sovereignty, because sovereignty is always a question of origins. The best way to discover what the foundations of any social philosophy is to examine in detail its a doctrine of the origin of the universe and the origin of man. There, you will find the sovereign agent or source within the system.
As a Christian scholar, you may be able to get your narrowly focused academic articles published in a secular scholarly journal. This is easiest with respect to history. I recognized this as an undergraduate. You simply discuss the historical details of the topic at hand. This can also be done in other fields. These articles must be mainly descriptive. They will be evaluated by your peers in terms of the coherence of your arguments and the relevance of your documentation. This will help establish your reputation. It will help throw light on a particular topic. But it will not be seen as Christian, and it will have little or no influence in the thinking of other Christian scholars. The same is true of a monograph.
When you get to the treatise, there is no way to cover up the implicit and explicit confrontation between the biblical worldview that you think should govern the field of study that you have pledged yourself to develop vs. all other prevailing academic explanations of how the world works and why. If you want to shape the thinking of future generations of scholars, you must write a treatise. The treatise should be internally self-consistent. It should deal with the fundamental issues of sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and the time. It should start with an announcement of the authority of the Bible as the primary source of knowledge about these five issues. It should return again and again to biblical revelation to make its points, support its points, and drill these points in the thinking of your readers.
When you do Christian scholarship, you had better be willing to stand alone. You should be willing to pursue ideas wherever they lead, despite the fact that no one is likely to pay you to do this work, and very few people will follow you in your conclusions. You should strive to develop disciples, but it is far more important that you develop the treatise, the monographs, the popular articles, the lectures, the workbooks, and the training materials than it is to disciple people one-on-one. The time that it takes to disciple people one-on-one is high. The kingdom of God will get a far higher rate of return on your efforts if you print them, record them, and make them available on the Internet or whatever the mass communications technology is in your generation.
Your work is necessary but not sufficient to change other people’s thinking, and in turn to begin to change the social order. The work of the Holy Spirit is necessary for you to gain permanent and reliable disciples, who will extend your efforts down through the ages. Your work cannot substitute for the work of the Holy Spirit. But your work can be worth the Holy Spirit’s efforts to promote your reconstruction of the field that you make your calling.
Only a tiny handful of people should devote their lives to pioneering Christian scholarship. Far more people can become effective teachers. This includes teachers at colleges and universities. They do conventional scholarship. They do not pioneer anything new. They usually do not write much. They give their lectures, and their students dutifully take notes. Anyway, a few of them do. Then the students take the final exams, throw away the textbook or sell it back to the local campus bookstore, and never think about the material again. This is normal. This has always been normal. A tiny number of your students will commit to a lifetime of scholarship. But do not despair. Sir Isaac Newton never taught a student at Cambridge who left any trace. Yet his single treatise, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), reshaped the modern world of science and scholarship. He was a secret unitarian. We could surely use a Trinitarian with comparable intellect and impact. We could use dozens.
Education is a major area of Christian Reconstruction. R. J. Rushdoony focused on education in his early books: Ii>Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American Education (1963). He continued in The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (1981). But education is something far broader than classroom education. Classroom education has always meant formal education, which ends when the student becomes an adult and leaves school. Only in the twentieth century have large numbers of adults continued their education in the setting of a university. University education began on a very limited scale in Western Europe about the year 1100. Formal education expanded after 1900 in universities that granted advanced degrees. After someone graduates from a degree-granting institution, he rarely studies in a classroom setting again, other than in a Sunday school. He may attend a workshop at a weekend seminar, but there is no degree granted. The experience lasts only for a few days at most.
Classroom education is cost-effective for training beginners. In bureaucracies in ancient Egypt, priests lectured to students who took notes. Today, classrom education is slowly beginning to lose appeal because of the existence of online videos as substitutes for the classroom. For the first time in history, it is possible for a student located anywhere in the world where there is access to the Internet to view lectures by professors at major universities. There is an ancient saying in English: “If the mountain cannot go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.” This is no longer true with respect to formal education. The mountain, meaning the lecturer in a university, goes to the student by way of the Internet. This is not tutoring on a one-to-one basis, but it is far closer to it, organizationally speaking, than classroom education is. A teacher can reach far more students online then he can reach locally in a classroom.
Today, the monetary cost of typesetting a digital book and posting it online is close to zero. An author who can do simple typesetting and website management can post his books virtually free of charge. This has changed publishing. Print-on-demand book publishing is now possible. This has revolutionized the publishing of physical books. Amazon has revolutionized the marketing of e-books and physically printed books, especially paperback books. All of this took place in a period of about 15 years, 1995 to 2010. The tools of education are now available to anybody almost free of charge. It takes time and effort, but it no longer takes much money.
Education will become increasingly decentralized. This will reduce the power of the state to shape the minds of each generation. The world of Nebuchadnezzar is now facing a technological challenge like nothing since the development of the physically printed book sometime around 1450 in the West. But it is even more revolutionary than books printed by movable metal type. The costs of book production are now almost exclusively a matter of time rather than money. Distribution still costs money, but the physical production of books no longer needs to.
This means that almost anybody can become an online educator. He can teach somebody something. He can teach a million people as inexpensively as he teaches one person when those million people are receiving their education by means of free videos online. This has changed the financial structure of education. The teacher who has reached more students in history than anyone is Salman Khan. He started the 100% online Khan Academy in 2006 by accident. He began teaching his cousins basic mathematics by means of YouTube videos. The videos were free to post, and they were free for anyone to watch. Thousands of students began to watch. Word got out. He began getting some donations to help him. He has taught tens of millions of students, but he was not trained as a teacher. He was trained as an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then he was trained as a businessman at the Harvard Business School. He is now teaching students all over the world day and night. We have never seen anything like this in history.
You may not be able to match him in terms of his audience and his influence, but you can certainly match him in terms of his technology. There is no longer a major monetary barrier to entry. The barriers are now a matter of your knowledge, your creativity, your self-discipline, your mastery of a few computer skills, your time-management skills, and above all, your tenacity. I cannot stress this enough. Tenacity is the key to any successful endeavor, and this includes education. “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62b).
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To read the entire book, go here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department197.cfm.