Every faithful Christian educator should want to know the truth, and not just the truth about ultimate things. A man can know the truth about Heaven and Hell, about the triune God, and about the vicarious death of Christ on the cross, and still not have the faintest idea about what he ought to be …
How Not to Lower the Net
There is not really a delicate way to get at one of the root problems with modern higher ed without confronting the emotional engine which drives those problems. And when we confront that engine we discover that the problem is caused by the atomosphere we all live in, and not by this or that nefarious …
Holy Ghost Industrial Grade Sandpaper
I have been writing on distance learning, and how, while it provides some important things, like information, it is utterly incapable of providing other things, like how to deal with people. In a learning community, in a school or college, your fellow students are people, your teachers are people, the administration is made up of …
The Case Against Distance Learning
But before anyone gets riled at the title, allow me a few caveats first. The first is that a strong element of distance learning is essential to every form of real education. Every university library is full of distance learning packets called books. When I read Augustine or Calvin, this is because back in the …
The Disease of Pragmatism
On this subject of higher education in the liberal arts, there is much to develop in every direction. And by “develop,” I mean “shoot at.” It is what our military calls a target rich environment. What is a liberal arts education for? Why go to college? Why pay big bucks to go to college? What …
Behemoth State U and Leviathan State
The perennial temptation of ersatz conservatives is to tell the progressives that what they are proposing cannot possibly work, and that if implemented it will ruin us all. And then, when the progressives (so called because they are progressing toward the Abyss) succeed in driving their proposals through, conservatives line up for the next election …
Four Years to Go
I have recently posted on the revolutionary nature of industrialized education. The modern university system was born in the revolutionary era, and was a function of people abandoning the historic Christian forms of higher education, and trading them in for a style more in keeping with what they thought was promised by the Industrial Revolution. …
College as a Counter-Revolution
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 …
Two Sizes Too Large
Carl Henry once said, “If evangelicals lose the battle for the mind of contemporary man it will be in their own colleges.” That’s the kind of prophetic and semi-inscrutable statement that we could use a lot more of, and which unfortunately, we don’t hear a very much any more. Since Henry wrote those words, the …
Great is Diana of Grand Rapids!
The board of Calvin College has instructed the faculty there that they are required to refrain from promoting sodomy. The first thing to note is that I was astonished that somebody associated with Calvin actually took a stand on something like this. But there you go. Let’s pray the board holds out. The second thing …