Educating Our Children To Be Experts Is To Train Them To Be Fearful

The belief that education is merely the learning of things has led to the proliferation of expertise. Expertise and experts as they are used now, as mediators between you and the truth and as final authorities, are diabolical.

Amateurism and enthusiasm in study are the saving grace of education.

(One of you will ask: what is amateurism? And I shan't define it. I leave it to you.)

Education is supposed to be about the formation of humans, their shaping and orientation toward God and the world.

Expertise is almost a surrender. It is hearing that of many books and much learning there is no end, and deciding that there therefore can be no truth or true direction, but only systems and the gaming thereof. Expertise leads to niches, to the purposeful limiting of possible knowledge into sets, which can be dominated or gamed. In this sense, expertise is a natural fruit of post-modernism. Keep truths localized and manageable. Find your corner of the cosmos and try not to get blown away.

Philosophical expertise is born of insecurity. It is the prohibition of interaction between different modes of thought.

To bemoan the phenomenon of expertise is not to say that people shouldn't dedicate their lives to one tiny, true, and beautiful thing. Studying ladybugs all your life is true and beautiful. Enthusiasm for ladybugs can lead to a lifelong dedication, to a discipline of ladybugs. But expertise in ladybugs leads to the prohibition of amateur opinions on ladybugs. It creates a hierarchy of learning for ladybugs. It makes for a knowledge set through which one must move, as if it were a secret cult, a Scientology of ladybugs, and the world divided into cognoscenti and ignoranti.

This is part of the reason I hate what the word scientist has come to mean, and what the word science itself has come to mean. I wish to return to natural philosophy. Science has become A Great Noun, which does things on its own (like Nature), and which we always hear capitalized. But the word science used to mean simply awareness. Science is now an expertise, while natural philosophy is the stuff of amateurs.

When we educate our children we ought to be encouraging amateurism. That is how we learn to think, which points us in the right directions. Education as it is practiced now is about dominating limited sets. Don't do that to your child. Do what you can to make of him a full human. The image of God in us, the innate creatorship we have, must be encouraged. Amateurs are able create. They can take the next step, they can look down the road. They have the possibility of connecting what they study to the world, to life.

God is not an expert. He is an omnious and perfect amateur. We were not created out of necessity, but out of the overflow of joy and complete satisfaction. We live in a world of necessity, and yes, we must educate our children for that. But that doesn't mean teaching them to be subject to need. It means shaping them as Lords on the earth, as greatlings, as inheritors of the universe. It means that whenever possible, mankind ought to be creating out of enthusiasm and joy. It's the divine and exalting thing to do.

Information threatens to rule us all, and experts are those men ambitious enough to wish to be the greatest slaves of this casualistic god, no more free than their fellows, but with nicer rooms. 

When we educate our babies, we mustn't be looking at it as a climb up Information's ladder. We must educate as if we were forming up the very children of the Living God, the brothers of Jesus.

I will leave the practical outworkings to you, dear reader, or perhaps I will leave them to another post. For now the question I leave you with is this: are the decisions you're making for your children's education dictated by fear of the world, or joy in God? that is, fear or love? You can mold a carpenter or a poet the first way as well as the second. More important than whether our children are carpenters or poets is whether they rejoice in or fear the faith of their fathers.