My colleague Roy Atwood is fond of reminding people of the revolutionary origins of our modern system of higher education. We don’t think much about it anymore, and simply describe it as “going off to college.” But going off to college now is quite a different thing than what it once was, and the difference is the direct result of revolutionaries overthrowing the Christian form of higher education, one that had been established for a millennium or so, and replacing it with the modern knowledge factories of the state university system.
This did not happen by accident; the whole thing was by revolutionary design. And, true to form, many Christians apply their conservative instincts simply by trying to conserve and maintain earlier iterations of the revolution. But what is necessary is a counter-revolution in higher ed, and to get there we have to know where we came from, and how we got here.
Popular views tend to lump the American Revolution and the French Revolution together, as though our Revolution was the source of everything that followed. This is a serious misreading of the history, but not because we have not had our form of the French Revolution — we certainly did, but the standard name for that revolution is the Civil War. The nineteenth century was the century of foment, with radical and progressive ideas spreading through Western culture like a gangrenous rot. The first great manifestation was the French Revolution. There was also the crisis of 1848 in Europe. Then we had our national convulsion between 1861-1865. One enthusiastic observer of our disaster was a young man named Karl Marx. And the century of revolution was bookended on the other end by the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century.
During the War Between the States, the U.S. Congress — a pestilence foretold by some ancient prophet, I am sure — established our modern system of state universities. This was a radical act by a radical Congress, interested in undermining the distinctively Christian forms of education that had existed for centuries. They did this through the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, seeking to establish “seminaries for industry.” And so they did.
But this did not come as a bolt from the blue. Remember Marx? In 1848, he and Engel produced the Communist Manifesto, and the tenth point of their radical proposals called for “free education for all children in public schools.” On top of that — and this is the kicker — they wanted a “combination of education with industrial production.”
This unholy alliance between higher education and industry was successfully accomplished, and the system has become unquestioned, and almost unquestionable. Moreover, it has become a system that many Christian parents insist on maintaining. Even while opposing Obama’s proposals for socialistic health care (because they don’t want “socialism”), they insist on perpetuating the central engine of socialism (as well as the central example of it) by having their kids go to the very schools that Marx demanded of us, and got. And on top of that, when someone proposes that their older student attend a liberal arts school that is seeking self-consciously to reestablish the old tradition, the parental (and Marxist) objection is often that “want their kid to be able to get a job.” But before we think about getting a job, we need to train the next generation how to get a life.
Now before going any further, it is important to note that this is not written against the idea of gainful employment, or against the central Protestant concept of God-given vocation, which I also intend to address. The point is that you must not start there. The issue is one of prioritization. You need to understand the world before finding your place in it. If you just start by finding your place in it, then, unreflectingly, you are aspiring to become a cog in the socialist industrial machine. You are aspiring to be a worker bee in the great Hive of modern society. And if you get bored standing there on the assembly line of the new civilization, they will give you an MP3 player, so that you can have something to think about.