Here a few thoughts for those of you who have been considering New St. Andrews College, but who have also been wondering about the uncertainties created by the economic moon crater we are now living in. Here are just a few additional considerations to put in the hopper.
1. This problem has revealed, as few other things could, that we have a dearth of people in cultural leadership who know how to think. What kind of education did the people who have made this mess receive? What was the principle value in that education, and why do we still think we need to keep training our young people that way? The principal value of modern education was and is “technical mastery,” with little or no attention paid to theology, meaning, history, virtue, or the simple ability to follow a thought out to the logical conclusion. We have just had a crisis caused by financial irresponsibility and we are going to fix it by multiplying that irresponsibility in order to get into the trillions column. We got hammered last night and are going to fix it with a whiskey and soda for breakfast. We just lost our shirt at the Vegas casino and we want to go double or nothing. We got laid off our job at the steel mill and bought a new car and plasma television on the way home to stimulate the household economy and cheer up the wife. Do you really want your children to be educated by people who can’t see the problems in this? And who laugh at the people who do see it?
2. In times like these, the thoughts of many turn naturally to vocational training. Community colleges and vocational institutes often do a brisk business in recessions because when people are laid off, or when they think the market is going to be tough, they often look for a way to obtain marketable skills, or retool the skills they already have. And, of course, in its place there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. But there is something wrong with continuing or perpetuating the central myth that surrounds liberal arts programs, like the program at NSA. The problem is not with what we believe vocational training to be — we have that right. We know what it is. The difficulty is that we don’t know what a liberal arts education is for. We tend to think of it as just another form of vocational training, vo-tech for English teachers, say. This blunder is the dominant paradigm in higher education today, and it is a crippling paradigm. Sadly, it is as pervasive in Christian circles as it is in secular circles, and it is one of the major reasons why we are in this current crisis.
A good liberal arts education is designed to equip leaders for life — we need men and women who understand where we came from, where we should be going, and how we ought to behave on the way. With that as a foundation, graduates of such programs generally excel in making their way through life practically, regardless of what vocation they wind up in. So, when times get really tough — that is not the time to quit training young people so that they will understand the times. Now that the Hive is starting to fall apart, now is not the time for Christian parents to redouble their efforts to make sure their kids are trained as worker bees and nothing else.
3. One last point, a practical one. The point of a good liberal arts education is not justified by pragmatics. As one wit observed, “Pragmatism is true in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” We are resolved to continue to offer an “irrelevant” degree in Liberal Arts and Culture. If you entrust your child to us, we want to try to provide them with one of the best educations that the sixteenth century has to offer.
But this by itself is the previous point — an education is not justified by the bottom line. So here is the third point — if it were to be justified that way, NSA is still an outstanding value. Our tuition is generally lower than the expenses at Behemoth State U, after financial aid. And it is drastically lower than that of other private institutions operating in the same quadrant of Christendom. You can check some comparisons here if you like. And exchange for this low tuition, what do you get? We have been operating for less than twenty years, and a number of our alums are already out there, making a dent.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programing.