She'll Be Right, Mate

Secular Humanism's Enlightenment

One of the great battles of our time wages in the realm of education.  Education--both what is taught to the next generation and how it is to be taught--reflects the dominant religion of the day.  This is inevitable.  The dominant religion of our age is secular humanism: its doctrines have been inevitably insinuated into our schools. 

One of the characteristics of secular humanism is that it has rotten, crumbling epistemological foundations.  Which is more important: to know multiplication tables or know how to do the rumba?  Secular humanism has no settled answer to that question.
  "It all depends, really" is the oft-heard response.  Another conundrum is whether an older generation imparting truth to children is helpful or a hindrance to the child becoming genuinely self-authenticated.  Secular humanism has no final answer to the issue.  Should one culture be dominant or should the ethic of multi-culturalism and diversity require that our education system reflect all cultures, with no certain way of discerning the good and bad in all human culture?  Secular humanism cannot decide definitively and finally: it seethes between the two polarities.


The absence of any standard by which education, educators, and the curriculum is to be judged has many consequences.  One of them is the official syllabus becomes an ever-burgeoning list of subjects to be taught in schools.  Curriculum creep is destroying the secular humanistic government education systems.  What has to be taught (officially) is now so vast that schools can only spend an inadequate amount of time on all subjects listed in the curriculum.  Pupils are graduating as jacks of all subjects, masters of none.

Is a passing grade in "community tidiness" equal to, more, or less, important than a passing grade in reading competence in the dominant language of a nation?  Secular humanism has no final, settled answer to that question.  Common sense would say, reading competence is by far the more important.  But common sense is a fickle matter.  Years ago common sense would have told you that homosexual marriage is an oxymoron.  Today's common sense has a different narrative.  Common sense is nothing more than a reflection of the commonly held religion. 

Every so often the secular humanist pendulum swings back.  Government's try to rein in curriculum creep and establish some subjects as core.  We are in the midst of that in New Zealand with an attempt to focus government schools on reading, writing and maths.  The UK is going through a similar phase.  We believe it will not last, nor will it be successful as long as people deny the Christ, for it is the Scripture which gives authoritative warrant to the notion that reading, writing, and mathematics are the key to all other learning and subjects of study.  Take away the Scriptural warrant and you end up with a wretched combination of "she'll be right, mate" and "everyman must do what is right in his own eyes". 

She'll be right.  The epitaph of a secular humanist education system.