day no. 15,908: a prey to emotion rather than a master of intellect

"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined?" -- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

Literacy without logic is more dangerous than illiteracy. The illiterate may be taken advantage of by the learned, but the illogical literate may be taught to thank the learned for taking advantage of them.

"It has been the great tragedy of our time that people were taught to read and not taught to reason." -- G. K. Chesterton 

Knowing how to read without knowing how to reason only produces fodder for propaganda, but knowing how to reason what you read reduces the utility of propaganda.

"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of 'subjects'; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education— lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it."  -- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

The brain is a battlefield. As C.S. Lewis once noted, "the head rules the belly through the chest." In other words, our thoughts lead our instincts through our desires. Our brains must lead us into battle. Education is not merely being taught what to think, but being trained how to think. It is not learning a lot about something, it is learning how to see everything in anything.

1 Peter 1:13

Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind.

Get your head in the game.

Ephesians 6:4

And, you fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

"In this passage, Paul requires Christian fathers to provide their children with a 'paideia of the Lord.' To the ancient world, the boundaries of paideia were much wider than the boundaries of what we understand as education. Far more is involved in paideia than taking the kids to church, having an occasional time of devotions in the home, or even providing the kids with a Christian curriculum." -- Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God

God has given parents, and fathers in particular, the charge to ensure that their offspring are raised in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. We cannot fail them in this without being held accountable. We must dedicate ourselves and discipline ourselves to discipline and instruct them.

The word "education" is derived from the Latin word ēducātiō (a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing) from ēducō (I educate, I train) which is related to the homonym ēdūcō (I lead forth, I take out; I raise up, I erect) composed from ē- (from, out of) + dūcō (I lead, I conduct).

Education is about leading someone somewhere, It is leading them out of something and into something else. All education is therefore, religious. It all believes and begins with a doctrine of origins and ends with a doctrine of eschatology. There is no neutrality because everything has value. Everything is either complementing or competing with where you're trying to go or how you're trying to get there.