Conference This Month

I attended the Wisdom and Eloquence conference in Fort Wayne earlier this month. The lectures and discussion provided lots of ideas to ponder.

Near the beginning of the keynote speaker's lecture, he quoted Luther where he was talking about the rain falling in one place and then going to another. The speaker said we need to take this to heart, that God is sending a blessing to us with classical education, and if we despise it, we will lose it. But Luther wasn't talking about temporal blessings; he was talking about the proclamation of the Gospel. If his countrymen rejected the Gospel, they would lose it. It made me uneasy to hear this quote being used out of context. What other quotes might the speaker be taking out of context? Can't we just say "Carpe diem" without hijacking a Luther quote that had nothing to do with education?

Also near the beginning of the lecture, the speaker posited the statement that classical education can be defined as the education that will make one "fully human." Maybe I have spent too much energy caring about the lives of little [pre-born] babies; this terminology gives me the creeps. Do we really want to say that those who have received mere technical training are less than fully human?