day no. 14,855: education is indoctrination

"If you believe that education is fundamentally about preparing your child to get a job, you are believing the lie that's at the center of why the church loses all her children."
- Ben Merkle

The chief aim of education is not vocation, but indoctrination. That sounds harsh since we've been trained to associate indoctrination with unfair, one-sided propaganda peddling. We've also been trained to assume that only religious wingnuts do this sort of thing and that the public school system is the last bastion of neutrality, simply teaching the facts and letting the hearer decide. But there is no such thing as morally, intellectually neutral education. All education seeks to raise up certain doctrines and strike down others. Education is intellectual warfare. And one of the best maneuvers the public schoolmasters have accomplished is convincing most people that what they are doing is void of doctrine and that indoctrinating anyone is a cardinal sin.

The word "education" has its etymology in the the words ex (out) + ducere (to lead). In other words, "education" means to lead out. It therefore assumes that the student's greatest need is to be moved from where they began to where the teacher believes they ought to be. There is no education without indoctrination. It is not a question of will the students be indoctrinated, but rather into which doctrine they will be led.

So education is meant to lead someone out of somewhere by some means in order to get them to some other place.

Education is leading its students somewhere, and sooner or later they're going to get there. But from where are they being led out and by what means? And to where are you trying to lead them? However you answer those questions is your doctrine of education.

Christians are not called to sit idly by living their faith out in the corners of their homes hoping that their children catch a whiff of it at some point. They are called to teach their children the faith, to raise them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, or in other words, to teach them the doctrines of God in the hope of them making their way into their heads, hearts and out of their fingertips -- or what the old-fashioneds would merely have called, "indoctrination." 

For more on the matter, read HERE.