Torah study must precede all other education

 Rabbeinu Bachya (Bamidbar 33:01) Although all wisdoms are comparable to silver, Torah wisdom is like silver which has been refined seven times over. All other wisdom contains elements comparable to dross, impurities, which have a tendency to invalidate that wisdom. Our Torah, by contrast, will not lead man to sustain losses either in money or through misleading him philosophically. When Solomon demands that Torah must be the first subject studied, he means that unless one learns about the meaning and purpose of miracles one may fall victim to the theory that nature preceded the Lawgiver chronologically, that the universe was not created by Hashem. The reason that in Hebrew nature is known as teva is that if one delves into the study of nature before having studied Torah such study is liable to swallow a person, he will “sink into a morass,” just as people who are drowned by the sea, were drowned, because they had not learned to swim first. A person who has studied Torah and early Jewish history summarized in the Torah knows that in addition to “nature” and natural laws, the Creator Who is totally free has demonstrated on many occasions that He is the master of what we call “laws of nature” by temporarily suspending these so-called eternal laws and thus demonstrating that it must have been He who had created and formulated them in the first place.  Scientists, when they read about the miracles which the Torah records they assume that the desert through which the Israelites marched must have been a very benign strip of land, capable of producing crops, etc., etc. They totally deny what the Torah describes as “this great and terrible wilderness inhabited by fierce serpents, etc., etc., through which the L-rd your G-d has led you”. The point made by the Torah is precisely that the deserts through which the Israelites marched was even more hostile to human habitat than regular deserts. This is why the Torah stresses beyond doubt “it was not a place where one could sow or expect to plant fruit-bearing trees such as figs, pomegranates, etc.” There were no wells. The experience of the Jewish people therefore was by itself so miraculous that unless we study it before we study general subjects we would not appreciate the greatness of G-d and His works.