Article June 3, 1916 Issue

Education in Truth

ROBERT NALL

The spread of Christian Science, the scientific knowledge of God and the real man, is revealing the disastrous effects of false education. These can be seen on every side. To the observer there is an appalling mass of evidence showing irrefutably that the human race is the victim of its own mistaken apprehension of what constitutes true education. And yet this is not surprising when we remember that many leaders of thought have been misled in the same way.

Matthew Arnold, for instance, in his "Thoughts on Education" denied that the aim and office of education was to make "a man a good citizen or a good Christian." Its prime, direct aim, he said, "is to enable a man to know himself and the world." Arnold of course was writing from the purely materialistic or naturalistic standpoint; and that is just where his pronouncement lacked vital force. Spiritual consciousness would have impelled him to recognize that education in its highest sense relates to the true nature of God as Spirit and of man as spiritual. Once that is conceded, then for a man to know himself is to know his spiritual capacities and powers, his real status in the universe, his eternal unity with his divine source, his rightful place in the kingdom of heaven.

In every civilized community perfectly legitimate stress is laid on the education of children, but in the light of Christian Science it is beginning to be seen that there is right and wrong education. Pedagogy is often nothing more or less than an effort to cram into the minds of the young a mass of useless information. Now "information itself," as Bishop Butler once said, "is really the least part" of education. True education is the unfoldment as well as the impartation of truth; it is the dispersal of ignorance, especially the ignorance which presents itself in the concrete form of incrustated false beliefs to which mortals cling with such tenacity. A knowledge of the world may and frequently does mean merely that race beliefs about supposititious laws of matter and mortal mind are more securely held until of course the awakening comes and the whole educative structure topples over because it was a mass of erroneous concepts. It is now very generally admitted that the most highly honored material theories are usually given up within a decade, displaced by other material theories which in their turn are rejected for those that are less cumbersome and have at least a greater promise of good for mankind.

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