What kind of education is best for developing the human mind and soul, and what is an education for?  These two questions are arguably the most contested and challenged in the context of not only the liberal arts, but in the elective university system of education that is at the center of higher education in the world today.  The purpose of education has moved in a revolving door between the poles of intellectual and ethical development to professionalization, from serving the interests of political ideals of citizenship to serving the interests of economic success.

The question is where theological education fits within these very general trends in education.  Is it to develop church leaders primarily or is it to develop free thinkers who are able to critically evaluate the significance of the Gospel in the every fluid structures of the world.  I want to address this question in a couple of posts largely in response to Carl Raschke  recent article in The Other Journal entitled “From Church to “Rhizone”: Reconfiguring Theological Education for the Postmodern Era“.

The primary problem, Raschke argues, is that theological schools are suffering from “mission creep” which is a term referring to when an institution over-reaches its own prescribed boundaries by which it identifies its very mission and purpose.  Combined with this is a growing sense of irrelevancy in certain aspects of preparing church leaders and scholars in biblical studies, theology and the like.  As Raschke notes:

The relevance, or irrelevance, of theological education today has less to do with what is learned, including the methodological criteria for what might be considered appropriate knowledge. More than ever it has to do with how a limitless fund of knowledge and the skills for generating that knowledge are eventually applied in a practical or professional setting, especially when that setting seems limitless and undefined.

In addition to this move professionalization, Raschke argues that the reconfiguration of knowledge claims across distributed networks of ideas and information that usurp traditional boundaries in the institutions of Christianity only complicates the matter.

The possible resolution to this situation is that theological education “has to steep itself in its own irrelevant classical particularities in such a strategic manner that it is able to engage, critique, and transform the culture in a way that is genuinely relevant.”  In other words, rather than jump on the board of focusing on creating a class of church leaders who learn the ins and outs of every possible permutation of skills that are necessary to lead, dipping into the critical evaluation of what we might call the classical curriculum that you then learn to flexibly apply to your specific place of call it a more adaptable and rigorous way to educate theological students.

However, to what degree should we educate students to flexibly apply their education to the whims of the world?  Is this the best strategy, and is it even a new problem?  I will tackle these questions in the next post.

Read this.  Like it or not, you are not only going to be an enthusiastic and idealistic minister of the gospel, you are also assuming the role of a COO of a non-profit corporation.  Carol calls it “stuff they don’t teach you in seminary” and to that I say “Aye”.

When you sit in your first session meeting listen, but take the reigns and let people know that you are able to organize and steer the ship into safe harbor if it needs to go there.  Don’t be tentative.  The long time parishioners, deacons and elders can smell blood in the water and some of them want to eat you alive.

Be gentle and operate with love.  But be stern and clear enough about how you want to do business with people.  People will have expectations of you that you will never meet.  They need to figure you out as much as you need to figure them out.  Things “Storm” then “Form” then “Norm” then “Perform”.  So learn to live with a little tension as things equilibrate.  And that will likely take you three years so stick with it until then - at least.  Don’t be a first-year pastor statistic who ends up working a Starbucks with no clue what to do with life anymore.

Remember the Three C’s:

• Be Clear - Don’t be ambiguous with what you say to people.  Be pragmatic with your language.  Think about how things will look if people actually do them.  Most of all, have a clear understanding of why you are doing what you are doing and suggesting.
• Be Consistent - Try not to show favoritism or too much attention to any one person or clique of people and use the same language to express your ideas no matter who is in the room.  This prevents gossip.  If you approach everyone in the same way, the gossip stops about you as soon as two people start talking about you behind your back (which they will do - that’s part of being a leader).
• Be Creative - Don’t let the current conditions stop you from thinking outside of the box, and learn to take some risks with people.  Try not to be overly zealous with your creativity to change things right off.  But be creative within the structures you are inheriting to stretch the resources you have in the best way possible.  Sometimes you meet what you think people’s needs are by creating a few needs with your own vision!  Think what do we want to do, how will we do it, and how will we know we have done it.  Sometimes action will tell you what you identity is.  So don’t let an “unclear vision” bog your decision-making down.

In God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America Hanna Rosin, Washington Post correspondent, was embedded in the environment of the Patrick Henry College student for a year and reports what she witnessed and learned.

Patrick Henry College is a very small institution, but also newly founded under the clear authority of its president Michael Farris, a Christian homeschool advocate and clear supporter of the link between political conservativism and orthodox evangelical Christianity. The story she tells shows us remarkable resilience and fortitude of the students of this institution Farris can coined “God’s Harvard”. Indeed it’s students will be among the elite of all secondary school graduates much less the creme of the crop among homeschooled teens. The student body which boasts a rather generous helping of homeschooled undergraduates alone supports any assertion that homseschooled teens can compete with the best and brightest of all high school graduates.

Rosin tells tales of highly competitive students who are in the throes of political training at Patrick Henry. these students have unprecedented access to Washington with a clear sense of mission and pride about their task to reform American government to be something in which God can exercise domain and rule. That God is not currently doing so is at the very heart of the curriculum. In any college, one would be thrilled to have such a critical mass of bright and passionate students and this is part of the picture that Rosin paints for us.

There is, of course, another side to the story. This side is the authoritarian nature of the administration with a special emphases on Michael Farris and Dean of Students Bob Wilson. There are very clear limitations on behavior and dress along with unwritten expectations of the role of women along the lines of clear complementarianism. Infallibilism of Scripture is not only preached from the pulpit at mandatory chapel services, but it is a clear expectation to be integrated into all facets of the curriculum. And more than just integrated, but this view of Scripture should hold all other forms of knowledge as a contingency upon its truth. To wit, the biology program focuses on a rather odd anomaly in biology called baraminology, which is a taxonomic system that re-casts speciation in terms of what was likely to have been the case in the literal six day creation of Genesis (see Ch. 8, 183 ff.). History and politics are taught with the indubitable assumption that the founders intended to favor evangelical Christianity as the structure in which government and civility would be administered. So this is not just about abortion and gay rights. These are only symptomatic issues of a wider evangelical worldview that hold the structure of quite literally everything in different terms and under different standards of truth compared to even other evangelical colleges (Rosin points out differences with Wheaton College in a few key places such as science).

Finally, the ethical administration of the behavioral code is brought out in Rosin’s stories of a few students that she followed intently. Chapter 7 “Den of Sin” (p. 167 ff.) recounts one such conflict in which one student informed the administration of behavior infractions of other students whom he had befriended.

Someone was getting expelled. No, five people were getting expelled, or maybe three. A couple of them were Farahn’s friends. Rumor was that the boys had been caught drinking, smoking, abusing prescription painkillers, and possibly cheating on exams. No wait, they had not been caught. They had been turned in by one of their roommates. He had written a long letter to the dean of students (p. 168).

The problem here is not so much that students get caught and punished for such behaviors. The problem is that the institution made as part of its rules that students should hold each other accountable if they catch another breaking any rule to any degree. Rosin’s tale shows that this has created among many of the students a culture of distrust and paranoia rather than one of moral fortitude.

Indeed, Rosin points out such details with the tone of a mother who feels bad for these children; that in spite of their brightness and passion in what they do, there is a stir of conflict that rages beneath the surface. The college’s position is to use biblical infallibilism to hammer any such conflict into submission with perhaps a follow-through of a hug and even an “I love you” from the Dean. But with he influence of Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right conservatives who support Farris unflinchingly there is a clear pejorative tone to Rosin’s narrative even in terms of the homseschooling environments from which many of these students came.

Experimental communities almost always implode. One faction wants to hold on to the purest version of the mission while another begs for a little fresh air. The men fight for power, while trying to protect an image of unified authority. But eventually, their adoring subjects catch on (p. 257).

For PHC, such an implosion was the resignation of four professors who did not support the same premises of Farris in their classrooms. Indeed, it is clear that for Farris, this version of “God’s Harvard” hearkens back to the ante-bellum Harvard itself, perhaps more so of Yale. But this is even more radical in its understanding of the evangelical nature of government and the role of the student. This is an interesting and thought-provoking engagement of a new kind of evangelical college that seeks to dissociate itself from the controversies of Falwell and Robertson, but maintains a clear kinship in its very mission.

Read an excerpt here.

One of the courses I teach is a senior capping course for several different majors as divergent as psychology to medical imaging. The course is to contain a major research thesis that encompasses depth in the discipline, critical thinking and engagement of liberal arts, and an engagement of values. The other part of the course is to bookend the undergraduate experience by reflecting on a course all students take during their first year which introduces them to the importance of values as a way to bridge their intellectual development with their service as contributing members of society. It really is kind of an early 20th century liberal arts curriculum in terms of the shape of society today.

This year I had no time to develop the course and built it as I drove it. I killed them with Simone Weil who was unintelligible to them. I also killed them with postmodern discourse on apocalyptic literature. They liked Brave New World in this vein. So I am rethinking it again.

I always approach a course like this from a philosophical premise. When I taught an introductory course in religion, it was through Habermas’ use of Husserl’s concept of lebenswelt. I want to do a similar thing, but through Simone Weil’s notion of “reading” the world.

What I want to do is approach value by way of West meets East. The Western side will engage media and consumerism as a critique of what shapes values on a more or less global scale. For the East part, I want to focus on the plight of people who struggle in the midst of real oppression and for that I want to focus on Sudanese refugees who have not gotten much press at all in the West (unless you watch BBC World which my students on balance have not even heard of).

I am wondering how to tie these two aspects together seamlessly so that it is relevant to what they will be doing with their research - and this will be a stretch since they research topics as divergent as the ethics of proper shielding in medical imaging to the social effects of windmills in Somerset County, PA. SO here is my short list of readings in order of the curriculum starting with the West. I would love to know if anyone has a thought or two to add to this!

1.  West - One of the following:

• Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It
  (Thomas de Zengotita)
• Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say (Douglas Rushkoff)
  
• The High Price of Materialism (Tim Kasser)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Barry Schwartz)
• The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Juliet B. Schor)
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman)

I am definitely going for a Neo-McLuhan theme here.

2.  East - One of the following, but probably the first title:

• Slave: My True Story (Mende Nazer with Damien Lewis)
• They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan (Benjamin Ajak, Benson Deng, Alephonsian Deng, Judy Bernstein)
  

3. Then read either Brave New World again or Fahrenheit 451.

4.  Then I want to close with something that illustrates the reconstruction of society according to what is good, just, and beautiful but I am not sure where to go with this.  Weil’s The Need for Roots was way over their heads.

Inside Higher Ed reports a revealing study on the gap that occurs between admissions policies and student success.  The focus of the report is on differentials between black and white students, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Or as the report puts it in another way, black students are two-and-a-half times more likely to enroll at a college where they have a 70 percent chance of not graduating than at a college where they have a 70 percent chance of graduating.

“College opportunity for minority students doesn’t end with the admissions process,” said Kevin Carey, author of the report and the research and policy manager at Education Sector. Colleges, he said, “have an obligation to give support” to the students they admit. If they admit black (or other) students with poor academic preparation, “and if you do nothing,” the graduation rates will differ by race. But he said that if you do offer additional help, students can succeed.

Working at an institution that admits a high proportion of at-risk students we are constantly working the precarious balance between who we admit, how we support them, and teaching them how to be responsible for their own learning all while making sure that our curriculum is academically robust and rigorous.  What this means is that we have a lot of variables at play that seem contradictory on the surface (i.e. enrolling a student with a 2.7 GPA in high school and rather low SAT scores, for one).  Now we, because of the demographics of our population pools, do not enroll a lot of students of color.  Yet the problem still exists and it causes institutions to be creative with programming on strapped budgets and FTE allowances in order to raise the probability that the student will graduate.

We still have this ideal in our massified system of higher education to make it universal.  However gaps between cost, access, opportunity, graduation, etc. are consistently holding that back.  This is why the study of higher education is looking more at the system from a K-20 perspective because it is clear that these gaps in higher education begin there.

Of other note, I find it fascinating how many of the colleges that the Inside Higher Ed report highlights as having large gaps between black and white student graduation rates are religiously-affiliated.  What this could indicate is that the intention is well-placed in to whom the colleges are giving opportunity to pursue a higher education.  However, the ongoing support in the midst of that opportunity is clearly not adequate.

This is something that should be highlighted in state funding programs for less advantaged students.  But I fear that the trend is the reverse.  In Pennsylvania, the Act 101 program to support less economically advantaged students has increased pressure to make the program competitive and has actually increased the rigor in the eligibility requirements.  Colleges that qualify for the program are now going to find it more difficult to support less advantaged students as state funding will no doubt wane putting the burden more on the shoulders of the institution.  It is really hard to see how this will help mitigate the enrollment to graduation gap at all.  It seems more likely to maintain it unless money starts growing on campus trees.

I always have far too many blogs on my radar than I can truly absorb, digest, and comment. No doubt that is true of many folks out there who have glutted themselves with news, information, and conversation. Which leads me to a lead-off question.

I posted a piece that at least I thought was interesting on theodicy yesterday. Kind of an old question from a slightly different angle. If I post something like that I notice that no one comments. Yet if I post something pithy about movies I hate or enjoy, it’s like flies to sugar [not that my readers are flies, it's a relational metaphor ]. This further raises a question that Chris Brady has been exploring here and here about the nature of blogging. I wonder if I am too much a generalist for much of the blog world that would be interested in the topics on which I post? I would ask the additional question of readers why do you read blogs and what are you looking for? What grabs your attention and holds it?

Jan Edmiston reflects on the plight of the dying church. Regardless of how you understand the statistical significance of old mainline churches fading away as the “greatest generation” sadly leaves us, it is an immensely painful situation for a lot of good pastors.

As many of you know Chris Tilling has had a few posts on his own grappling with science and theology here, here, and here. Worth a read for anyone, and especially anyone who is absolutely sure about their current understanding of the compatibility between evolution and creation.

There was an interesting study at the University of Houston which gives a far more scientific result as to the effectiveness of a hybrid course model versus a traditional course model. Rather than come to the standard conclusion of “no significant difference” the result was a better performance in the hybrid course. This is a risky kind of study that faculty with whom I have worked have always balked because of the nature of the control versus the experimental group in the model. I would like to see more faculty take this risk with the same kind of study to get some external validity data. That would do more in the filed of educational technology than the vast majority of other “studies” that have been done in the past. In other Higher education news, encouraging interfaith experiences is discussed at Inside Higher Education.

The Evangelical Philosophical Society posts an interview with Paul Copan, chair of philosophy and ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University, entitled, “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?“. The subject matter engages one of the arguments among new atheists along the lines of God is Not Great (HT to FQI for this one). While this piece is more or less descriptive of the foundations and character of the arguments, Copan’s piece here is a little more nuanced.

Ryan at Rumblings discusses faith and doubt in the midst of religious tradition.

Identitymixed has the post title of the week: All Things Urine. If you don’t have kids yet, this is the kind of stuff the books don’t tell you!

Julie gives all husbands some rather sound advice on what the best things in life are for a wife, especially after being together for a while.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State includes news about a resolution that passed recently declaring Easter Week to be “Christian Heritage Week” in Alabama. Looks like they did not get the memo in civics class that Sally Kern missed as well.

John Mark Reynolds asks if paying teachers more will provide more incentive for better students in teacher education programs.

The best way to improve the quality of schools is to improve the quality of teachers. Vital reforms are needed in teacher education programs. This is a subject about which Paul Spears will have more to say in the next few months, but even the best teacher education programs cannot work without good students.

Too often teacher education programs do not attract the students who were, in college, actually the best students. While there are many brilliant education majors, the best and the brightest do not often pick teaching as a career.

While I am not sure that teacher education programs do not attract excellent students (some of my close friends in college who are now teachers graduated either summa or magna cum laude, my sister and another friend have master’s degrees in teaching from rather prestigious institutions as well so I am not sure if this bears out), the issue of pay inequality is surely in the ballpark.  Poorer school districts need to continually find incentive just for good teachers to get in the door.  But will a flat pay hike increase teacher quality?  I am not sure that is it either.

Here is an analogy for you.  What are the most successful sports teams, especially over the long haul?  Is it those organizations that draft like mad during free agency to pick up accomplished “star” veterans?  Or is it those teams who are creative with the salary cap, recruit well, and develop[ talent to work with excellence within a system?  Look at the last six or so Superbowl champions, how the San Antonio Spurs keep winning, or really any of the teams before free agency.  They all find people who will work well within a system, develop them to work there, and reward them for when the perform well.  Businesses do the same thing when they hire.  They all develop talent and find ways to keep that talent in the company.

Public schools do not reward excellence or really offer sufficient programs to establish excellence in teaching.  They also do not do anything to negatively reinforce mediocrity.  Unions do not allow for it.  The public system also does not allow open competition with other alternatives.  It is a mutually reinforcing monopoly between the whims of the state and the teacher unions.  A teacher can be hired, tenured, and vested with a track record of performing at a rather mediocre level over a ten year period.

Charter schools are successful because they link wage increases to performance and take teacher development very seriously.  They also tend to take student-teacher bonding seriously.  Better teaching is rewarded and better relationships with students are part of that structure.  That is a win-win situation for the student.