A friend once said of her son who was advancing through his teenage years, “It was a lot easier when all you had to worry about was whether or not Barney had an agenda.” Another friend of mine once said “Leave it to Beaver is perhaps the most Satanic show that ever aired.” Such may at first seem like funny comments, but they emphasize well the point of worldviews. Does Barney have an agenda? Maybe he doesn’t intend to be a radical purple crusader, but he does send messages about life and morality to kids. I'm not saying that parents need to ban Barney from the home. I'm simply saying, we need to be aware of worldview issues that are prevalent wherever we go or in whatever we watch. All of this, of course, gets much more involved as you get older. Consider the following review one mother gave of the movie Gladiator:
You are probably thinking, "It's just a movie!" But remember that the powerful images in which these messages are wrapped can meet with impressionable minds. Whether or not they are conscious of it, some may walk out of the theater having absorbed the sermon in picture.
All in all, worldviews are everywhere and they shape lives! For instance, the first 150 years of America’s history children were taught from the New England Primer, which started out “A -- In Adam’s fall, sinned we all.” It continued to go through each of the letters of the alphabet in a similar manner. B -- Heaven to find? The Bible mind! C -- Christ crucified, For sinners died. D -- The deluge drown'd the Earth around. The whole of the workbook contained prayers and other items of Christian significance, such as the Westminster Shorter Catechism. When it came to the education of children the early American people were consciously centered on Christian principles. In the 20th century the New England Primer was replaced with the McGuffey Readers. The content of which went like so: Lesson 1: The dog ran. Lesson 2. The cat is on the mat The consciously Christian perspective was replaced by a more humanistic worldview. God had been erased from the picture and life was now simply about cats and dogs. Today another seismic shift is taking place. Early elementary children are starting to read things like “Heather Has Two Mommies.” How did we come to this? It was the evolution of ideas. Once the Christian worldview was eradicated, education could go in a new direction. It was now free to cross boundaries of morality and develop its own pedagogy.
4 Comments
2/26/2013 12:07:15 am
“The whole of the workbook contained prayers and other items of Christian significance, such as the Westminster Shorter Catechism. When it came to the education of children the early American people were consciously centered on Christian principles.”
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2/26/2013 12:46:59 am
You are obviously a victim of a poor educational system. You not only terrorize proper English sentence structure, you don't get poetic linguistics.
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2/26/2013 03:40:08 am
Please be more specific and cite example(s) in my post of what you're referring to. ;<)
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2/27/2013 12:04:21 am
"Fools are like flies - they gather where the trash heaps."
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