British School Administrators Seek to Stop Teaching Morality and Patriotism

Schools told it's no longer necessary to teach right from wrong - Britain - Times Online

The linked article, from the times on line (hat tip to Rantburg for linking it first), discusses a proposal that English schools no longer try to teach students the difference between right and wrong, British cultural heritage, or leadership skills.

Trends in the UK seem to evidence that such teaching stopped some time back and this is just an effort to conform the rules to what is already done (or undone as the case may be). As an unjustifiably ardent anglophile and advocate of objective morality I find this news distressing none the less.

As C.S. Lewis points out in the Abolition of Man, a book discussing the same kind of trends in British education about half a century ago, good education is essential to fine tune our emotions and higher conscience to be in tune with the deep conscience and the objective moral law of God.

I remember a chapel speaker who I heard in college saying that British youth were unlikely to catch evangelical Christianity because they had been inoculated by an exposure to a weakened or dead version of Christianity in the British schools. So perhaps this current move is less of a loss than it may seem. But woe to those who teach error to children.

Bad education is the foremost tool of the malicious and the misled for spreading relativism, materialism, false spirituality, bad economics, revisionist history, homosexuality, the playboy life style, islamofacism, anti-foundationalism, devaluation of human beings, and everything else wrong with the world. It seems every advocate of some idea or form of rebellion against God has discovered that teaching young people to see the world their way is the way to dominate the world of the future. This is an epidemic problem around the world, including in the US.

After a hundred years of domination by radical political liberalism, a world view that says religion and morality are unimportant matters of culture and emotion, unfit to influence government (which should only be run based on science), the west is slowly destroying itself as the logical results of such an erroneous philosophy distort our understanding of everything. Without belief in the real objective moral principles of God people sink in to worse and worse lifestyles that bring pain and mental troubles to them and all their partners and children. We fail to understand societies motivated with passion by false religions because we no anger accept the power of spiritual things. And the dissatisfied are ever more open to irrational and destructive forms of counterfeit or evil spiritual expression since they have been taught to ignore or discount the real thing. Philosopher J. Budziszewski discusses this all at length in his excellent book The Revenge of Conscience.

We need to teach our Children the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If state schools cannot teach orthodox historical Christianity and its world view, if they cannot teach children to understand history, culture, and humanity as they really are, we need to make sure we homeschool our children or send them to be educated somewhere where the truth is taught.

But then the size of the problem rapidly becomes even greater. So many of us Christians have learned the errors of our societies and failed to seek out and learn the truth, that few of us are satisfactory teachers of anything, and none of us are satisfactory teachers of everything. Many Christian faculty at universities no longer believe in objective truth at all, let alone know much of it. May God be merciful to us, and bring us not only a revival of faith in Christ, but a revival of true learning, wisdom and knowledge, that we might not only see things as they really are, but might be able to pass on truth to future generations.