Why Higher Education Institutions Would Do Well to Heed Proverbs 1:7

Prompted by Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, American Founding Father John Witherspoon (1723-1794) emigrated from Scotland to America in 1768. Witherspoon, Rush and Stockton would each go on to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Witherspoon became president and head professor at a small Presbyterian college in New Jersey, now Princeton University. The college’s primary occupation was training ministers and students. All were required to take Witherspoon’s moral philosophy course about ethics and “what one ought to do and why.”

He became a leading light in early American education with its emphasis on right and wrong and good character, which America’s founders considered fundamental to sustainable freedom. Witherspoon was the only active clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration of Independence. He later signed the Articles of Confederation and supported ratification of the Constitution.

In their high regard for the importance of learning, America’s founders deemed the Bible central to all education, in accordance with Proverbs 1:7a that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”

Can there be any starker contrast to the mindlessly perverted ideologies of contemporary education theories?

Founder Fisher Ames, who co-authored the First Amendment to the Constitution, became in 1789 so concerned with the drift from biblically based education that he voiced his deep dismay: “We have a dangerous trend beginning to take place in our education. We’re starting to put more and more textbooks into our schools. We’ve become accustomed to putting little books into the hands of children, containing fables and moral lessons. We’re spending less time in the classroom on the Bible, which should be the principal text in our schools.”

In his 1796 farewell presidential address, George Washington issued an equally stern warning. Describing religion and morality as “indispensable supports,” the “great pillars of human happiness,” and the “firmest props of the duties of men and citizens,” he alerted us to the harm that would come if America ever drove religion and morality from our society: “Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Present-day American government education bureaucrats, Big Tech chieftains and cultural Marxists controlling the levers of influence and power in the culture impudently display their totalitarian tendencies by suppression of dissent and turning a blind eye to virulent deep state distortion and misrepresentation. In the inverted world of Marxist critical race theory dogma, “2+2 = 4 is just a white supremacist decree.”

Education bureaucrats insist that diversity and tolerance are the twin pillars of Western civilization and liberty, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In Proverbs 22:1 Solomon recommended that “A good name is rather to be chosen rather than riches, and loving favor rather than silver and or gold.” With that, he implied that an individual’s glory lies in instilling righteousness as the mainstay of life, rather than in the accumulation of wealth and power.

“Wisdom is principal; therefore get wisdom. And with all your getting, get understanding,” Proverbs 4:7 says. Colossians 2:8 warns: “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and vain deceit, in the tradition of men and the elementary principles of the world, and not after Christ.” And 1 Timothy 6:20 urges to avoid the “profane babblings and opposing views from so-called knowledge.”