Educating the Workers

Editor’s note: Ian Hodge is a regular columnist for Business Reform Magazine, the leading Christian business magazine with over 100,000 readers. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

You don’t need to walk too far down the shopping mall to be amazed at the number of goods manufactured in China, Mexico, Honduras, Singapore, or Malaysia. With some exceptions, however, these countries are not noted for the wealth of their citizens.

But look a little closer at the things being manufactured and you see something else that ought to be printed on the labels: “Made in China. Designed in USA”. Whether this is clothing or computer chips, it is very much the case that while we’re buying goods manufactured abroad, we’re still buying things designed back home.

This phenomenon tells us an interesting story, for example, that we are more than competitive when it comes to some aspects of business. Other nations might be able to undercut our wages for a while, but they may have a long way to go to match our inventiveness, our creativity, our ability to take people from rags to riches.

This, after all is said and done, is one of the hallmarks of our culture. Poverty in the USA and nations like her is not like poverty in third world countries. Here our poor often still get to own a motor car, television, and can put their children in public schools at little cost. Elsewhere, poverty means lack of food, hunger, and no way out of the poverty trap because there are no schools to help.

In spite of all our concerns about our schools and their failures, we still rely on them to give children enough education to get a meaningful job. It is this commitment to education that in many ways sets us apart from other cultures.

Given that some nations such as Japan, Taiwan or Singapore have committed heavily to education, and China is following in hot pursuit, they still have a long way to go to match our abilities in education, at least in some areas. And there is a very good reason for this.

At the end of the day, education only takes place when a culture is willing to think and therefore educate in terms of right and wrong, truth and error. Philosophically, this means a commitment to the ideas of Christianity, which insists that truth is not relative but absolute. In this context, the idea that two apples plus two apples will always equal four apples is a truth some cultures find difficult to accept. In a world of chance, for example, two apples plus two apples may not make four apples tomorrow or next week or next year.

Centuries of education based on the idea of absolute truth, though under staunch attack in the world today, have not gone unnoticed. This is why the West has stood out from the rest of the world as a beacon of economic success. Whether it can continue to be the leading light is the question facing our culture and in need of urgent answer.

So, next time you see “Made in China” remember that “Designed in USA” is probably missing. And if the USA is leading the world in design, it is because, in spite of all its shortcomings, that American education is educating people from rags to riches better than most. And if our education is superior, it is because somewhere we’re hanging on to those uniquely Christian concepts that allow for true education and a high standard to flourish.

If those who want to abolish Christianity from our midst succeed, they will abandon true education as well. And then we will not only see “Made Elsewhere” labels proliferate, but we will know that the goods were designed elsewhere as well, since our capacity to think and create will have been reduced and hindered by our poor quality schools.