Critique of Pure Education: A Philosophy for the Christian Home Educator

By Robert W. Watson

Pure education prepares students to be statesmen for central, state, and local governments, the finest scholars for colleges and universities, and other leaders in society. Many of the fine merits of this book center on revealing the actual foundation of American schools and supporting a comprehensive view of instruction that transmits ideas and not just processes. This book plainly explains why there is no excellence in American schools and provides a blueprint for students to rise above mediocrity. According to the author, pure education exists only in a familial context where students are considered unique. Since they ignore the unique gifts of individual children and promote the idea of the “average” student, the public schools do not educate, but merely create uniformly trained workers for the power elite in America. If education is to survive in America, then home schools must be equipped with this vital critique to provide explicit substance while complementing parental instincts.

Included as an appendix in this third edition of Critique of Pure Education is a thought-provoking essay about education in the United States, titled “The Educator and Cultural Reclamation,” written by Dr. James E. Kibler, author, poet, and professor of Southern literature at the University of Georgia, Athens.

Parents who are concerned about the proper education for their children must read this book, because the well-being of their children depends upon it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662939396

Book preview

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

—COLOSSIANS 2:8

Why do your children go to school? This question is both to you personally and to us collectively as Americans. Perhaps you believe Francis Bacon’s dictum, Ipsa scientia potestas est, or in English, Knowledge itself is power. This statement is paraphrased in quips like, I want my children to have a better life than I had, or I want my children to be able to get good jobs. For the most part, Americans have espoused Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the superman, which posits that leadership naturally belongs to the powerful. Therefore, most power seekers would reason that if knowledge is power, then the more education one has, the more powerful one will become. But as many PhDs have discovered, being over-qualified can be a curse when honest labor is denied them. Sometimes, simply wanting to make a little extra money, or trying to find any kind of work during hard times, leaves highly-educated men and women in desperate straits. Perceiving that their jobs, positions, or companies could be in danger of being taken over by the superior, natural leaders, foremen and bosses tend to become paranoid and refuse to hire these powerful job seekers.

However, most schools, with their emphasis on technical training, fail to empower students, but rather enslave them, because the learning of processes cannot generate ideas. Without ideas, the student will readily accept the so-called superman’s calling evil, good, and good, evil. This ethic of fair is foul is the prerogative of Nietzsche’s supermen, who refuse to abide by the ethics of the weak, which of course to them is Christian morality. In fact, the weak ought to be eliminated. Undoubtedly, Nietzsche believed that his supermen possess a different kind of knowledge other than the technical kind, which merely gives human beings a minimal competency to count change or to push buttons on a machine. Nietzsche’s power is not equated with knowledge but with ideas. Without ideas, American students walk blindly in thick fog and are powerless to fight any moral battle, much less to determine what is fair and foul.

Not surprisingly then, most educators, whether home, private, or governmental, fail to know why they take time to teach. While they may have some vague feelings about getting their students ready for college or preparing their students to compete in the world marketplace, these ideas stop short of being specific. Like a good thesis statement, which provides focus and clarity to an essay, a goal is absolutely necessary to ensure direction toward the intended end. Purposeless educators, like their students, are in a fog and will revolve in circles, turn upside down, and eventually crash, because they have become disoriented by the vertigo.

Even though typical governmental teachers are enveloped by this bewildering fog of vague outcomes, apologists for public schooling have plenty of books in print to keep no one ignorant of their stated goals. In Education as Power, Theodore Brameld, founder of social reconstructionism, offers plenty of insight. The goal of public education, according to Brameld, is to create a union of nations, that is, a one world order. Even though he died in 1987, Brameld is still held in great esteem among educationalists. In fact the former Boston University professor and a signer of the Humanist Manifesto had lectured in many foreign countries about education under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department. While his ideas were roundly criticized at first, fifty years after Education as Power was published, social reconstructionism has become the norm in the public school systems. If the goal of the public school in America is to prepare the student to be a model citizen for world democracy, then the system is a resounding success, because most graduates are docile subjects of the civil government, ready to take their menial positions under the elite in the industrial-governmental cartel and willing to believe the mass media without any critical thought about the message. Reconstructionists know where they are heading, because they have the confident belief in world democracy. This confident belief is called faith.

Indeed, the primary activity of humankind is faith. Regardless of whether one claims to be religious or devoutly irreligious, all individuals live by faith. No other explanation exists for anyone getting out of bed every morning except for possessing the confident belief in the truth of an idea, even if this idea is merely making it through another day just to go back to bed. The question is not whether individuals have faith, but rather by what authority do they justify their faith. This justification uses one of four tools.

Some men turn to human reason to justify their getting out of bed in the morning. The discipline that explores human reason and logic is philosophy. However, the greatest limitation to philosophy is its inability to prove whether anything is true or false. Philosophy relies on logic, which is able to determine the validity of an argument but not the truth of its conclusion. For example, if a premise is All men are basically good and another premise is John is a man, then the logical conclusion is John is basically good. The argument is valid, but the conclusion could be either true or false, depending on whether the premises are true or false. Also, questions such as Is God able to create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? only suggest that the human mind can ask questions that poor reason is incapable of answering. Philosophy is a very poor instrument for justifying one’s faith.

Yet there are some self-reliant folks who have suspected reason to be an unreliable guide and who choose to search deep within their beings, hoping that intuition will give the justification that they seek. The reliance upon intuition is called transcendentalism. Espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalism is extremely self-centered and subjective. To find any objective standards by which to guide one’s actions is impossible. Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance explains that the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Therefore, according to Emerson, a self-imposed alienation is a good thing. However, the society of other people, particularly the family, is required, because goals are only formulated by living and working together. Isolated hermits, like most modern teenagers in their rooms, do not achieve goals. Therefore, a philosophy that will not enrich others is senseless, because values and beliefs must be explicit and obtainable. Anyone who has only intuition, which relies on fickle human emotions, should receive as much pity as Oedipus, who in a moment of intuitional passion, gouged out his own eyes with the golden pins found on his dead wife, who in a moment of intuitional passion hung herself.

On the other hand, many individuals insist that both the human mind and emotions are flawed, declaring that divine revelation gives rise to faith, and God’s Word therefore justifies faith. Indeed, since the emotions are fickle, and since the human mind is incapable of answering many questions, divine revelation is absolutely essential for learning about God and man’s need for divine reconciliation. Of course, the study of divine revelation is theology. Divine revelation is superior over philosophy and transcendentalism because it is objective and is not dependent upon human reason or emotion.

But the issue regarding this objective standard is whether the revelation is authentic and reliable. Which revelation should be followed? For the Christian, the answer is the Bible. However, a Muslim would disagree, claiming the Koran to be authoritative. The Christian must prove to the Muslim that the Bible is superior to the Koran, and vice versa. Yet even among Christians, conflicts over doctrine from or interpretation of the Scriptures indicate that Christians as a community have failed to reach any consensus for over two thousand years. Even though objective truth exists, no one could find it simply by listening to the typical sermon expressed from the modern American pulpit. In short, most Christians have fallen into subjectivity regarding divine revelation and doctrines, relying upon their own opinions, and thus becoming the final authority for their faith and practice. Because of this subjectivity, American Christians are just as lost in the thick fog as any philosopher or transcendentalist when justification of their faith is