# PonderIt

## Saturday, December 25, 2004

### Education and new ideas

James Robbins at National review made this point:

James S. Robbins on War on National Review Online: "During the Korean war when the Chinese and North Koreans engaged in the brainwashing experiments on United Nations POWs, one going-in hypothesis was that it would be harder to indoctrinate the better educated Anglo-American soldiers than it would the less-learned soldiers from other countries. But the Communist indoctrinators made a significant discovery. The soldiers who were raised in a Western liberal culture, where education meant being open to new ideas, were much easier to break down. They were more willing to question premises, accept new facts (even invented ones), and draw conclusions based on the alternate frameworks their captors presented them. Yet the Communists found the Turks, for example, impossible to break. They simply refused to engage. The Turkish troops, mostly young men with rural backgrounds and limited formal education, had a very simple and unshakeable worldview: They were Turks, the enemy were [expletives], and that was the end of it. There was more than a little virtue in that degree of certainty."

This is an interesting thought as you think about the "intellectuals" that end up leaving the church. It is hard to image that we could be too smart for our own good.
But that isn't really the problem, is it? No. The problem is that get just enough "smart" to start to question but not enough "smart" to understand things as they really are, i.e. the way God sees them.

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