The intellectual Emmanuel Todd told about the fact the United States has lost the sense of lutherian education in the recent years. If I don’t personally support his ideas about Putin, I think this idea is right. As the Western world entered into modernity partly thanks to lutherian ideas, it is threatened today by the fact these standards of education are threatened. To this extend it can be useful to engage for this classical and humanistic way of educating.
A reason why I became protestant, despite a catholic education, is that pastors are theologians, experts and teachers. Martin Luther did a lot of work to alphabetize and educate massively the population, among them women (which was a revolution at his time). Other great theologians like Philip Melanchton were supporting him in this process. But the massive alphabetization of the population was a real starting point to modern capitalism. As the economy was immobiliar with feudalism, it became mobiliary with the rise of cities, businesses and merchants. The first elements of modern finance appeared, and it will lead later to the first financial bubble in the XVIIth century in Netherland, which is name the tulip bubble (the price of tulips became too high before exploding). But this rise of modern capitalism, the concurrence between states replacing the superior authority of the Vatican, and the curse in innovation in science, techniques, the revival of philosophy, literature, arts and music, were the consequence of this implied context.
The fact massive education led by Luther led to a more important competition between states is also linked to the fact individualism was more important than before. Even Marx, who fought capitalism all his life, thought that capitalism was a real positive evolution compared to feudalism, as it fosters hard work and fights mediocrity. But this change of context, which led to the supremacy of the Western world, and made small countries like England or France able to defeat huge empires like the Arabo-Muslim one (the symbol was the battle of Aboukir won by Napoleon, which was traumatic in the Muslim world because they faced for the first time in their history an “army of the future”, fighting with guns against swords) or the Chinese one (marked by the cruel Opium Wars and the destruction of the Summer Palace in 1862). These examples show the important consequences an ambitious educational policy can have: economic development, a more efficient impact against poverty, more innovation and scientific progress. The political or geopolitical consequences can be huge to this extend.
Today the Western world looks to forget the basis of its former success ; only Asia is sustaining the old school educational system, especially China and India. Concerning China the massive investment led by Deng Xiaoping in education in the 1980’s had great effects : in 40 years, 800 million people went out of poverty, which is unique in the history of the world in such a short time. I am not a fan of the Chinese regime but this result illustrates the sentence of Nelson Mandala saying that “education is the best way to change the world”. It is the reason why revitalizing the Lutherian approach of education, which is not formalist, open minded but is demanding can bring a lot to our time when the internet and social networks are taking too much place. Its approach of simplicity and long run thinking can give responses to the superficial and stereotyped way of life we often tend to have today. To this extend engaging the best possible to promote this idea can contribute to its small scale to fight this trend. It can also be supportive to fight the rise of extreme right and fascism everywhere, as the lack of education has always favored fascistic ideas.
The observer 