Peanut Gallery: I’ve been thinking about my family growing in “wisdom, stature and favor with God”… and I’m not seeing how a college/university “liberal arts” education fits in with that. More… it seems to me that today’s college/university experience runs counter to – and is a detriment to – their Christian formation, i.e. becoming more like Christ.
The Bible doesn’t tell us much about Jesus’ early life. But I’m pretty certain that it didn’t include drugs, sex and rock & roll… living off-campus with co-eds at age 18… on Joseph’s dime. Jesus grew in “wisdom, stature and favor with God”… he sought out wise people… he learned a trade… and he got a life. And that’s what I want for my kids.
Ephesians 4:15-19 Phillips NT
True maturity means growing up “into” Christ
14-16 We are not meant to remain as children at the mercy of every chance wind of teaching and the jockeying of men who are expert in the craft presentation of lies. But we are meant to hold firmly to the truth in love, and to grow up in every way into Christ, the head. For it is from the head that the whole body, as a harmonious structure knit together by the joints with which it is provided, grows by the proper functioning of individual parts to its full maturity in love.
Have no more to do with the old life! Learn the new
17-19 This is my instruction, then, which I give you from God. Do not live any longer as the Gentiles live. For they live blindfold in a world of illusion, and cut off from the life of God through ignorance and insensitiveness. They have stifled their consciences and then surrendered themselves to sensuality, practising any form of impurity which lust can suggest.
With a few exceptions, there’s not much “growing up into Christ” on today’s college campuses. Instead, most of today’s college students leave with an “attitude”… $200,000 in debt… no job… and end up living in their parent’s basements.
College has changed dramatically since I graduated 50 years ago, and even since my kids graduated 15 years ago. I’m just not seeing how it fits into my grandkids’ spiritual formation.
The result is perhaps a fourth of the liberal arts courses — many would judge more like 50% — would never have been allowed in the curriculum just 40 years ago. They tend to foster the two most regrettable traits in a young mind — ignorance of the uninformed combined with the arrogance of the zealot.
Folks, it’s time to re-think this whole college thing… and Victor Davis Hanson‘s article re-posted below is a good place to start.
_____________________
An Anatomy of a Most Peculiar Institution
pjmedia.com
Victor Davis Hanson
December 28th, 2012
view original
A Campus-full of Contradictions
Almost everything about the modern university is a paradox. It has become a sort of industry gone rogue that embraces practices that a Wal-Mart or Halliburton would never get away with. It is exempt from scrutiny in the fashion that the Left ceased talking about renditions or Guantanamo Bay once Barack Obama was elected, or a Code Pink goes after a NRA official in the way it would never disrupt a hearing on Fast and Furious. In other words, the university is one of the great foundations of the Left, and so is immune from the sort of criticism that otherwise is daily leveled against other institutions.
So let’s take a 10-minute stroll through the campus and learn why costs soar even as students are ever more poorly educated.
The Curriculum
A student’s life on campus is a zero-sum game. For each elective like “The modern comic book,” or “Chicana feminisms” or “Queering the text,” students have no time (or desire to) take more difficult and instructive classes on the British Enlightenment or A History of World War I or Classical English Grammar. (Yes, despite the relativist, anti-hierarchical university, concepts really do exist like “more instructive.”) The former are mostly therapeutic classes, entirely deductive, in which the point is not to explore an intellectual
Continue reading “Is a college education worth it? Re-blog: “… A Most Peculiar Institution””
The Peanut Gallery 