Sixth and Seventh Passages

I will clean this up later...

The improved education of the vastly expanded middle class in the last half-century has also weakened the family's authority. Almost everyone in the middle class has a college degree, and most have an advanced degree of some kind. Those of us who can look back to the humble stations of our parents or grandparents, who never saw the inside of an institution of higher learning, can have cause for self-congratulation. But—inevitably but—the impression that our general populace is better educated depends on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word education, or a fudging of the distinction between liberal and technical education. A highly trained computer specialist need not have had any more learning about morals, politics or religion than the most ignorant of persons. All to the contrary, his narrow education, with, the prejudices and the pride accompanying it, and its literature which comes to be and passes away in a day and uncritically accepts the premises of current wisdom, can cut him off from the liberal learning that simpler folk used to absorb from a variety of traditional sources. It is not evident to me that someone whose regular reading consists of Time, Playboy and Scientific American has any profounder wisdom about the world than the rural schoolboy of yore with his McGuffey's reader. When a youngster like Lincoln sought to educate himself, the immediately-available obvious things for him to learn were the Bible, Shakespeare and Euclid. Was he really worse off than those who try to find their way through the technical smorgasbord of the current school system,, with its utter inability to distinguish between important
and unimportant in any way other than by the demands of the market?


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I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been
educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have
any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the
relations between men and women, parents and children, the human
condition, I hear nothing but cliches, superficialities, the material of
satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people
have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer
to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access
to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and
philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there,
and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish
a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the
potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.