Intelligence Plus Character:
The Importance of Classical Christian
Education
by Charles Colson
“Education which stops with efficiency may
prove the greatest menace to society. . . . We must remember that intelligence
is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of
true education.”
You may remember that I quoted these lines, which
come from Martin Luther King, Jr., when I was talking about a student’s
convocation speech at Dartmouth College. But they are worth pondering,
because they raise a very profound question: How, in today’s society,
do we provide the kind of “true education” that King was
talking about, that develops both character and intelligence?
Never have we needed more urgently to find an answer
to this question. The modern secular university cannot cultivate character
in a value-free environment, because if there is no truth, there is
no standard of ethics by which we can measure character. So the university
has simply given up on it.
And not only are our schools and colleges not teaching
character, but they’re increasingly abandoning academics as well.
The typical student at a great secular university will not learn much
about the history of Western civilization. My alma mater, Brown University,
an Ivy League school with a great reputation, no longer has a core curriculum.
You can go through the school without ever knowing who Plato, Aristotle,
Darwin, or Freud were. In fact, you could major in African drum-beating.
So from my perspective, the modern secular university has abandoned
both the pursuit of classical learning and the development of character.
That’s why they’re particularly dangerous places today,
and it’s why Christian students must be well grounded before they
go there.
And this is also why I so strongly support the Christian
classical education movement that is beginning to spread across the
country. It combines, you see, the two historic goals of a liberal education:
the cultivation of knowledge and the cultivation of character. It shows
us the continuum in the intellectual history of the West that goes back
to the Greco-Roman era and, therefore, enables us to better understand
our own postmodern era. If we cut ourselves off from the past, we can’t
understand the present. And it’s particularly critical, in my
mind, for Christians to understand the philosophical and cultural currents
that have shaped our society.
Let me give you just one good example. Galileo,
as everyone knows, was thrown in jail for challenging Aristotle’s
philosophical assumptions about an eternal universe. But, as I mentioned
in an earlier broadcast, Francis Bacon, sometimes called “the
father of modern science,” was influenced by the Protestant Reformation,
and he embraced Luther’s idea about abandoning the constraints
of tradition and going back to the root: the Bible. He applied this
principle to freeing science from philosophical assumptions and instead
looking at what God has made—go back to the root of things, as
Luther did. This allowed modern science to pursue truth uninhibited
by philosophy.
Why is this relevant today? Because we’re
dealing with the same issue. Naturalism is the philosophical assumption
that binds modern science. And this is at the heart of the intelligent
design debate, but you only see this when you know your own history.
I believe that every serious Christian needs to be classically grounded,
not only to understand the history of our own civilization, but also
to contend for truth in the marketplace. So I hope that you will check
for a classical Christian school in your area—as a place for your
kids and as a cause to support.
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"From BreakPoint, November 8, 2005, reprinted
with permission of Prison Fellowship, www.breakpoint.org
"BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a daily commentary on news
and trends from a Christian perspective. Heard on more than 1000 radio
outlets nationwide, Breakpoint transcripts are available on the internet.
