Education is wonderful. It comes to us like a lamb, inoffensive, desirable, and so it is in many respects. But watch out? Because from its mouth may also come a lot of blasphemy and slander and misleading and appalling things, and anti-God matter. Certainly false religion masquerades as beneficial and benevolent. It dresses up. We think of Rome again. It lays claim to all manner of good works.
There now is a tendency among a very small minority of people among Christians to want to promote what is called classical education. We have the verdict of the apostle Paul on classical education. You find it in 1 Corinthians 1 – the most devastating statement against the learning of the ancient Greeks, and the same goes for Rome too. It is said, ‘Oh the apostle Paul received a classical education.’ That is impossible to say. The apostle Paul would have received, as an unconverted Jew in a Pharisaical family, a Jewish education. He would have received an education which even in his unenlightened days was just about as different from the education of the Greeks and the classics as you could imagine, in its structure, its way of thinking, its way of conducting arguments, in every conceivable way. He quotes Greek authors twice in his epistles, and perhaps a third time, which is very controversial, so we say, twice. In each case when he quotes an author he is in complete disagreement with them, except on a particular point where he seeks to get across to people steeped in Greek culture, a point which even their own authors approve of. But he has nothing in common with their authors. Why Christians should want to go to one of the great heads of world government and culture of ancient times and bring that into modern life today, and educate their children with it, is hard to imagine.