Knowledge Is Power?

Empowering people has become one of the chief espoused goals of our age. As conscientious folks look around them at the ills of the world, as they look back in history at the deeds and mis-deeds that haunt the human race, many have concluded that it is lack of power that causes the victimization of so many unfortunate people--les miserables of Hugo’s book, so entitled.

Very often those same conscientious souls will attest that a chief--if not the chief--pathway to the empowerment of the victimized masses is education. People become victimized by those in power over them, primarily because the victims are ignorant; they lack the knowledge that the powerful possess. In point of fact, the primary knowledge lacking for these victims is the knowledge that they are victims...that they are ignorant, and the ones with power over them are in the position of taking advantage of them.

In truth, it is very natural to be impressed by those with superior knowledge. Especially when they use that knowledge in ways designed to impress the ignorant. Think of a skillful magician or illusionist as an example. I can be astounded and entertained and delighted by a magic act precisely because I am ignorant of the bits of knowledge the performer keeps hidden from my notice. I can be amazed at a science fiction movie because I have no idea how the special effects are produced.

And when a teacher speaks with great eloquence and authority on a topic with which I am only marginally acquainted, it can be equally disarming. That teacher could very well use his or her power to free students from the victimhood caused by their ignorance...or use that power in the exact opposite manner.

When it comes to empowering people with knowledge, to educating the ignorant, it must be clearly understood that education itself is a two-edged sword. A magician can use his bag of tricks to entertain a voluntary audience who paid a price for admission...or he might use his power to hoodwink and defraud unsuspecting folk out of their money.

There is a naturalistic school of thought that prevails today in educational circles. This approach to empowering the ignorant has to do with devaluing, denying and dismantling any and all belief in the supernatural and any absolute truths such as transcendent moral laws that are connected with the supernatural. If this approach to educating people doesn’t make you edgy, it should.

Naturalism is the assumption that nothing exists beyond the boundaries of the natural universe; everything is ultimately explainable in humanistic, scientific terms, and no reference to realities such as God or the spiritual realm is necessary or desirable for true knowledge of what is.

Why this should make you nervous is that, apart from a transcendent, eternal Creator, Lawgiver and Judge, there is and cannot be any adequate, ultimate standard for what is good and what is true. And power in the hands of people not guided by such standards is a highly volatile power, one that can ruin and destroy just as easily as it can give pleasure and freedom. Many civilizations have attempted to sustain themselves apart from an ultimate transcendent standard (the God of the Bible)...all of them have crumbled into dust.

Education that claims to be values-neutral, non-judgmental, making no reference to good and evil as absolutes--such “empowerment” is similar to giving a child a stick of TNT in one hand and a lighted match in the other. And this would be the most hopeful metaphor, hopeful that the child would throw the match away or let it burn out before the flame found the fuse.

Right and wrong, good and evil, godly and ungodly, true and false--these concepts are absolutely crucial for the constructive, beneficial application of knowledge. Even with those concepts firmly established, the wayward hearts of fallen people will all too rarely apply their knowledge to such virtuous uses. Without them, the emergence of virtue from such hearts becomes no more than a biochemical crap-shoot!

Leave it up to the learner himself to choose his own right and wrong? Without any reference to what a Creator might be telling him? Hmm. This sounds very familiar to me, and would to anybody who’s read the opening chapters of a book called Genesis. This approach to values choosing might sound very democratic in theory, but history (all-too-recent history, in fact) tells us that naturalistic educators are rarely free of their own preconceived preferences and agendas that are so easily intimated into the hungry minds of their pupils. Sexual values and mores is only the most obvious arena of revolutionary values that leaps to my mind.

Yes, people require power to become victors rather than victims. And knowledge is indeed power. But the same power that can light homes, streets and sports stadiums...can also be used to vaporize all of them in a big mushroom cloud.

Think of knowledge, not as power itself, but as a powerful tool. Wisdom, on the other hand, is the ability and the willingness to use that tool to achieve an ultimate goal that is good, true and beautiful. It is in the revelation of our all-wise Creator that we find the absolute standards for those three criteria.

As we receive that revelation in the pages of His Book, as we apply those standards to what and how we transmit to our students, we can prayerfully equip the ignorant (including ourselves) to avoid becoming the victims of those who wrongfully wield the tool of knowledge, as the serpent did in the Garden of Eden.