We are all familiar with the adage: The mind is a terrible thing to waste. Unique to God’s creation is the gift of cognitive capacity – the ability to think, reason and gather information in order to retain it, repeat it and replicate in the mind. Working with the gift that the brain affords us as human beings grants us a unique and special ability to comprehend.
Yet with this ability comes the capacity to conceive things that are both right and wrong. We’ve all had to wrestle with the concept of “good” and “evil,” – starting with the mind because the body only does what the brain tells it to do. Because of this, the information that a person receives and digests is absolutely critical to how this person will live and function. Scripture tells us plainly, “For as he thinks within himself, so he is” (Proverbs 23:7)
America’s early educational system was founded with a high commitment to Christ-centered education. From 1636, when Harvard University was founded, to 1769, when Dartmouth University was established, higher education in this country was undertaken with the understanding that there was no such thing as knowledge apart from God. Every discipline in the universities grew out of a biblical, God-centered worldview.
We are a long way from those early days. Education has taken some major left turns in the last three decades. And there are major debates going on at school boards in cities and states across this nation, as elected representatives try to figure out what in the world an education should do for our children and young people.
As kingdom citizens, we need to be concerned with what is being taught, how it is being taught, the system available for learning as well as the motivational aspects behind learning and the environment in which learning takes place.
Verse: “For wisdom is protection just as money is protection,
But the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the lives of its possessors.” Ecclesiastes 7:12
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