Douglas Wilson | Higher Education

I'm going to start by describing the higher education bubble that we are currently in which is very much like the housing bubble the housing bubble which collapsed in last few years created the phenomenon you've probably heard of mortgages underwater a mortgage is underwater when someone was expecting real estate to rise and rise and rise and they invest borrowed money and when they borrowed money the housing market collapsed and they now owe more on their house than their house is worth so their mortgage is underwater the saying goes well at least people whose mortgages are underwater can declare bankruptcy or they can return the house to the bank and walk away you know they can there's a way of disengaging from a mortgage that's underwater but what happens when you run up $200,000 in student loans $100,000 in student loans or a big pile of money in student loans in order to get an education and you specialized in a particular major and you don't go on to work in that major at all and there's nothing that can be done to erase that obligation the student loan obligation you're more your education is underwater your degree is underwater and then some you know it's it's far worse than far worse than the housing bubble and of course the construction industry depends on continued home building and so forth but the higher education bubble is a little bit the higher education bubble is a little bit different from that because the University of Idaho here for example what I like to call the land land of knowledge you've got this knowledge factory that has a big apparatus and staff and infrastructure that's dependent upon warm bodies so you've got you've got a perfect storm coming I think and the perfect storm coming is that people are catching on that I'm if I'm a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars in debt for a degree that I if I'm in the majority I will not use and I could have gotten a General Studies degree and to the same to the same effect and they start and they start not going they start not borrowing money to get that effect they start enrollment starts to decline couple that with the failure of the government school system at the K through 12 level to equip people for even a specialized technical vocational education so the NOC colleges have to accept them because they need the warm warm bodies and then they have to set up remedial programs to teach them the basics of composition the basics of writing reading I have taught obviously I teach here at new st. Andrews but I've taught at I've taught at Lewis Clark State College and I've taught at University of Idaho note on an ethics course there and I have seen stuff at the college level that one ought not to see yeah this is not at one student we were discussing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and I had one student that confused Thomas Hobbes with Calvin and Hobbes [Laughter] all right so we have a we have a situation where any and here's the encouraging thing the two ways of expressing this encouragement my way of stating this as four years I've said in the long run stupidity doesn't work in the long run stupidity doesn't work another way of saying this is anything that cannot go on indefinitely won't at some point you run out of money Margaret Thatcher once said the problem with socialism is sooner or later you run about and run out of other people's money yeah and we are about at that place now so you've got this higher education bubble you've got the failure of the k-12 program to prepare people even for the old even for the old vocational system that functioned after a fashion in its heyday though you know there was a time when everybody was vigorous in full beans and this is gonna change the world and we're gonna put a man on the moon and we did you know I mean that's not a slouchy thing to do you know it's it's a pretty impressive feat of engineering there are a lot of amazing accomplishments and and so on but we are the the bad idea the the implicit idolatries the implicit bad assumptions in the higher education system are now coming to fruition there everything's coming to a head and of course the in studies institutions will cry for federal bailouts but sooner or later you run out of other people's money and at some point if it can't go on indefinitely it won't if you wanted to walk across water across your swimming pool it wouldn't help to get up a good head of speed first you know you it just makes the splash a little farther out so we are in we're in the middle of it I describe it as a higher education crisis crisis of confidence a lack of faith the old the old integrating principle that that we used to have right mentions the founding of the Christian University in the that grew up out of the Christian West the university is a very important preface the yoona well we don't have universities anymore we have Multiversity x' and this the university the the point of integration used to be Jesus Christ and Colossians it says in Christ all things hold together every Christ is the ark a the point of integration everything integrates in Christ everything holds together in Christ in a Christian framework it is possible to have such a thing as a universe you can't have a universe and you can see theoretical physics physicists today unbelieving physicists postulating many universes what are you talking about what do you mean many universes that's like having three unique phenomena well no there's if it's unique is there's there's one right a universe is one so the IP of a universe is a Christian as a Christian concept because Jesus Christ is Lord if Jesus is Lord then you have you can have a universe if Jesus is Lord you can have a University and what happened was you had this point of integration in Christ you had this old Christian understanding of equipping young people in the Paideia of the Lord where they were equipped to be people you weren't equipping them to be candlestick makers and bakers and you weren't equipping them for vocation except indirectly of course if you equip someone to be a person if you equip someone to be a free citizen who understands life and God and the world then when you're making your way in the world and you say ok I have to feed my family I think I'll become a Miller I think I'll I will become a tailor I think I will become you know any one of these vocations that's a subset of being a person if you train someone how to be a person they will figure out how to be a tailor if you train someone to be a person they will figure out how to be a Miller or an engineer or a doctor if you train someone to be a doctor or an engineer they might not ever figure out how to be a person and that is the difficulty that we're up against so we have this what happens we had this University which is the Christian concept preparing young people to live in the world God made then is Roy described the elective system in the 19th century the elective system first began to appear and it took root and flourished throughout the course of the 18th century 19 19th century in the 19th century then in the 20th century it took root and flourished and and grew and became what we all are familiar with if you went to college that's what you thought was the deal that's this is what a college is right well the next point to make is if you take a sentence like this I love fill in the blank the point I want to make is that there is no virtue or vice to be found in a transitive verb is this person does the person who said the person who says this are they good or evil I don't know right I love ice cream I love the devil I love child pornography I love Jesus I love my country I love my mom I you know what do you mean I I don't know if it's virtue until I fill in the direct object okay love undirected he's not virtuous I love not the world the Bible says love not the world or the things in the world the lust of the flesh lust of the eyes the pride of life and the verb used is agapao the same kind of love that God extended to the world when He gave His only begotten Son so God loves the world in one sense we are commanded not to love the world in another the same thing with hate we're told to hate certain things in the Bible hate is not virtuous or vicious it I don't know what the direct object is right that makes sense now we want to abstract we want to have Verte you sort of floating above our heads if you're a loving person or a tolerant person or an accepting person that's that's virtuous it's what do you tolerate what do you love what do you hate what do you put up with what do you forgive not whether you forgive now the reason for saying this is most evangelical Christians are and I think this is generally good our Conservatives what does that mean what are we conserving what are we conserving there is no virtue in conserving it's there's no vert because there's no virtue in a transitive verb so if you are conserving if you are fighting for higher education you want to conserve higher education well do you want to conserve higher education Oxford in the 1300s are you trying to conserve higher education Oxford during the Reformation when it was a hotbed of Puritanism you know I said yeah that sounds good but you can back it up and run it down well sometimes I yes I would conserve that no I would I wouldn't conserve that the and most people are most Christians when they engage with education issues and higher education issues are conservatives of the way it was 20 years ago okay that's what they want to do things the monkeys are out of the cage everything's falling apart this is a disaster what we really need to do is we need to get from stage three cancer back to stage two cancer that's what we need to do all right well that's not concerned what do you conserve in there you're conserving the cancer okay another illustration I use is if that well this is back in the days when this illustration was born in the days of VHS when you had tapes that you would rewind and now I don't know what happens that just satellites and if you if someone at church recommends a movie to you which should have been the first warning sign that someone at church recommended a movie and all this is a great thing great for the family I don't think there's you know I don't think it's okay and you you watch 10 minutes of it enough of it to realize that this is one dog of a movie this is a bad deal you don't rewind and try again why rewind and try it again you are going to get the same result you're still watching the same movie if you want to do something different you have to take one tape out put the other tape in you have to go get a different movie you have to play something different what many Christian conservatives want to do is they want to conserve the way it was before our problems became apparent to me now they were they were a parent to prophetic insightful individuals who were saying where this was headed all along there were warning voices that we drama that we tended to drown out but you know we adopted the elective system in college we adopted this whole system of higher education and our country was young and the sky was still blue and the grass was still green and we weren't at war and you know things the birds were still tripping and and the apocalypse didn't come and so we said see ya know no problems well then that's this is how these things work when all those dire prophecies did start to unfold you get to the point where now you can't see them you can't see the prophecies fulfilled because you're so compromised by the fulfillment of them one person can't see it because the symptoms aren't apparent yet but you can rest assured that when the symptoms do become apparent one of the symptoms is judicial blindness and an inability to see how bad it's gotten so how is it how is it that you could have a lot in Sodom get to the point where he got to where he was so compromised and so has accommodated himself to something was so terrible as to do the sorts of things offering his daughters and barely escaping not being able to persuade his family to get out and it was now the Bible calls him right to the New Testament says that he was righteous righteous law I was vexed by what he saw but he was still entangled by what he was vexed by Christians today are vexed by what they're entangled by and one of the things we're trying to argue for it new st. Andrew's is one of the ways to stop being vexed is to stop being entangled walk away just say no check out right do something different play a different movie maybe maybe there'll be a different result this time when you when you do this so what are we trying to conserve I am a conservative I am a conservative a political conservative economic conservative I'm a theological conservative you know but I know that that doesn't tell communicate anything because what are you what political frameworks are you trying to conserve what theological framework are you trying to conserve and I would say well politically I tell people I'm just slightly to the left of King Arthur theologically you know theologically I'm reformed and you know I've got all these this is what this is what I want to stand for this is what I want to get back to when there's something there to get back to that's the conserve part but there's also the the understanding that there is a conservatism that is stagnant that wants only to go back if we are here a conservatism that wants only to go back and park there you know is is going to is going to tend to be romantic sentimental and silly and and generally wildly inaccurate so but there's a deep impulse among reaction and Christians to do that let's go back let's let's get game dresses for the ladies and bonnets and in Conestoga wagons and reenactment parties and and let's live like the Waltons let's get back to the 19th century core American values the profit of the problem with that his nineteenth century America was a monkey house it was a monkey house of radicalism communism free loved communes anarchy and the in the West it was just a 19th century America was a madhouse and it was there were some good guys back there just like they're good guys alive to today but we oftentimes think that it's concern you know it's conservative if we just go back ok no no there I've seen arch traditionalists fighting against feminism go back and adopt an earlier form of feminism I've seen and so just returning to the past is generally speaking going to be indiscriminate you're just going to pick icons you know a good example of this if I if I might meddle a bit is the recent Glenn Beck rally where they had this huge poster of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and you know they had and and so this huge rally hundreds of thousands of people rallying for states you know individual rights states rights with a picture of a bridge I think somebody read a book would you yeah now I'm not a good I'm not against this um this the tax revolt the Tea Party I'm you know I'm all about look anything that can't go on for indefinitely won't and I understand the frustration the impetus of not chalk me up is entirely sympathetic but that doesn't give you the right to just embrace anything in the 19th century as those as though these battles weren't going on then right so if you go back and say I'm all about the founders and I'm all about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and James Madison and Patrick Henry you see did you guys know that these guys were fighting with each other you know it's not enough to say that they are all founders and they're all dead all right again read a book this week you can't just go back well of course did you try to do the progressive thing and just go into the future the problem with the future is that it's infinitely malleable you can it's a screen upon which you can project all kinds of things so if all you have is the future then you generally but you're dealing with this all you have is the visionaries personal desires because he can say you you've noticed this up you should notice this problem with them what do you go amatuer amature prophecy bumps where they say the book of Revelation is going to be fulfilled within the next 20 years in the Middle East and in Europe well this is what it's going to look like in the year 2020 well you can make 2020 do anything you want right because the future is infinitely malleable you can shape it form now if you wanted is if you wanted to say the entire book of Revelation was fulfilled in the 1950s well the 1950s aren't infinitely malleable you have to deal with what actually happened in the fifties if you want to say as I would say many of the New Testament prophecies were fulfilled in the first century well the first century happened the way it did and not some other way and so you have to take account of the actual facts on the ground well what we want to do is be married you know we live it this is a thinker named Rosenstock you will see possibly to the cross of reality internal/external past and future and we have as Christians we have for my purposes here I'm just talking about the past and future we have obligations to the past which is saying we have obligations to our parents and we have obligations to the future which is a way of saying we have obligations to our children grandchildren and great-grandchildren we have to extend both ways and when and the only way since we don't know the future and we don't know the past what we Rick what is required of us is we need to have a commit a dedicated commitment to Scripture because we need a light and a dark place okay how could how can we build what we're doing on Scripture trusting God - for the results so if we can plant and water as Paul says but God gives the increase if God gives the increase over time then new same years 150 years from now could be quite different strikingly different than any of us would have been visioned if you if you'd asked us to sketch it out we wouldn't have sketched that but it could be quite different from what we envision and yet good and be the sort of thing that and it could be almost exactly like we envisioned only the tone is wrong everything about it is off something's off what what counts there is obedience what are we are we okay with the Bible says for us to do now if we refuse to if we say well we want to figure it out based on our graduate degrees in our study in our discipline and so forth that's not that's not light RL Dabney said and I think this is very important in the realm of Education Christ is not the light at which we stare Christ is the light in which we see Christ is the light in which we see not the light at which we stare now you can in worship and there are times when prayer when we're directing ourselves to the Lord directly but the rest of our time to to speak as Abraham Kuyper would have spoken there's not one square inch in all of the in all of creation over which Jesus Christ does not declare mine so the son who is Christ shines and shines on everything everyone enlightens everything I was recently talking about what is it that you guys are how would you put in a nutshell how would you describe in a nutshell what you guys are trying to accomplish in Moscow with NSA and the churches and all the other things well how would you encapsulate it in that shell and I would say I would put it this way all of Christ for all of life all of Christ for all of life and all of Christ as he is revealed in Old Testament and the New Testament all of Christ as he reigns over the created order the natural order all of Christ for all of life all our experiences our academic our student life the downtime the students are experiencing their off time we want them to live in community we don't want them to live in this dorm setup where it's an artificial sort of you know let's let's build a small middling skyscraper put a bunch of unmarried boys and girls into it for four years give them access to alcohol what could go wrong I don't know you tell me so but basically what we've done is we have we have revolted against that what we're trying to do is say look young people need to live among a people they need they need to live among people who are older than their people are younger than their they need to they need to be around people who have jobs and Families they need to live in the midst of people living ordinary lives because that's going to equip them for ordinary lives now in this I let me say that how how I got here and and then connect K through 12 to higher education when my oldest daughter Becca was a toddler two or three years old one day Nancy said to me Doug I can't just see her I can just can't see handing her over to someone we don't know and saying here she is educator teacher about everything teacher about a common and at the time Nancy and I didn't have any acquaintances at all really with Christian education anything like that I knew that virtually nothing about it i but i knew i agreed with that and said okay you're right don't worry we'll have a Christian school started by the time Becca hits kindergarten which we which we did so Becca hit kindergarten and there was a school waiting for nineteen students four staff members no salaries for anybody for the first two years just a wing and a prayer sort of operation the teachers lived off of gifts and donations and it was just patched together but God blessed and and when we were formed when we were deciding to form this we said okay what are we gonna do we're doing this Christian school what kind of Christian school what did you know there's lots of Christian schools around the country what kinda we're gonna do and we knew the two kinds that we didn't want to do but we didn't know anything about Christian education so we didn't know we did want to do we didn't want to have a fund what I called a fundamentalist reactionary Academy where you know with the kids with red white and blue uniforms and propellers on their hats I didn't want to do anything like that where Pentecost was assumed to have happened in 1776 when the Holy Spirit came down and Thomas Paine was Judas and you've retold the whole story it it was too Americanized didn't I didn't want a fundamentalist reactionary Academy that way the Saint by the same token one of the fundamentalists had to have a point because almost everyone who doesn't like a fundamentalist is usually a liberal and so we didn't want to have a Tony prep school with teaching all the stuff the government schools teach only with extra to extra tuition you know let's make them pay double for that so we we wanted to be a decidedly Christian we really believed the Bible people and fundamentalists in that sense we affirm the fundamentals we believe in the fundamentals we were not relativist sweet but we're not what I meant was cultural fundamentalists so we we came up with a motto classical and classical and Christ centered education the classical meant that it's not fun and the christ-centered meant that it's not liberal or or watered-down you know it's but we didn't okay that's not that identifies what we're not but what are we I remember I remembered having read an essay by Dorothy Sayers in that they would call the lost tools of learning that they would parry a review would periodically reprint as an article and when I was in the Navy I'd read that and I thought huh and but I remembered later having read that so we went back and looked it up and Dorothy Sayers argued for applying the Trivium grammar dialectic and rhetoric to the stages of child development roughly in the K through 12 area so we thought well we don't guys we don't know what we're doing let's do this let's listen let's try this she says in the article that no I'm sure that no one will ever be foolish enough to attempt what I am suggesting here but she did not count on Idaho so we just did it and then we were astonished at some of the stuff that started to happen like whoa you know this is really amazing and gratified and learn more as we grew and develop so then we so we had this K through 12 program about ten years into it I wrote the book recovering the lost tools of learning which caused other schools to start coming here with a CCS started it so now there's 250 schools roughly around the around the country following this this model so God's been very very kind to us we had this K through 12 thing now if we are educators we are farming you will Eddie you want a wheat farmer to know when the grain is ready you don't want it to be just you don't want it to be green just turning gold and then mow it yeah that's not what you want to do you want to know the whole what the whole process is what's the gestation period what's what are the int is what are the bookends of this process is it K through 3 no is it K through 6 no well just because of the default assumptions our culture we built we built a K through 12 program and we had our hands full keeping it on track and learning things and it was a lot of work and effort and stuff my daughter Becca the the cheerful young guinea pig who submitted to kindergarten of this new fangled you know this thing got into high school started taking took her pSATS I think God grew a good test scores and she started to get mailings I don't know how this system works but when you when you take tests you start to get mail from all over the country she had really good test scores and she was being recruited by Christian colleges and so we start to get this mail I think Becca was a junior in junior or senior we started to get this mail and I looked at these flyers that Christian colleges would send out and my conclusion was that the purpose of higher education the purpose of Christian higher education in North America is to make lifelong friends eat pizza and ride horses come to our school come to our school and you will make lifelong friends there so it's like a advertisement for a youth group why one of the things that Roy said before is that what's your line about cruises yeah academic cruise ships where you come to come to our institution for a four year cruise full service provided we have gym we have exercise rooms we have horses we have you know all it's a cruise ship and and I add it yes enough for them it's a Love Boat cruise ship and I do that also the cost is the same add up what what a cruise ship trip for a week to Mexico Riviera is multiply it times the number of weeks in any academic year and that's the average tuition of private institutions the same is the same and for similar reasons because you're paying for all this you're paying for all this infrastructure and it would it irritated like Anna struck me that Becca in her time at logos was all as a result of her time low gas was all dressed up and no place to go would it go what are we gonna do and she she went up at her senior year she went up and took a ethics class at the University of Idaho and was just appalled it was a good class of the Christian instructor a friend of ours was the instructor but she was appalled it was an ethics class other students were just sitting there like thumbs nobody cared sluggish disengaged this is frightful and so Nancy you might dear wife who said that we need to school for Becca to go to said once again we need to school for if I gotta go to and and and and so NSA started at Royce kitchen table or dining room table we in the first year for students and again God is blessed the reefs but the reason for the blessing is that education is teleological education is T Leon theological it is directed toward an end and you want that end to be something other than to have the time of your life right if you if the goal is to have the time of your life then you might have a better time on a cruise ship you might have a better time at Disneyland you might have a better time at Branson Missouri why why go to a college to have this done to you well it's because you've been told certain things will happen you'll be trained for a vocation you'll be trained for this you'll be equipped some of the disciplines are real disciplines some of the disciplines are joke disciplines I have a friend of a friend who's now a distinguished microbiologist a real hard scientist he before he was a Christian he was a sociology major and he went to take his final went to take a test or his final in sociology and got stoned you know just was stoned out of his head took his final aced it and thought I have got to change majors something's wrong here so I'm so I'm not saying that there aren't distinguished scholars there aren't hard disciplines there aren't good people in little enclaves in different places trying to be faithful and and there are Christians trying to be faithful in the system but the system as a whole is rigged against faithful obedience the system as a whole is rigged against faithful obedience earlier I said that the university is a Christian concept and I mentioned that that what we have now is a Multiversity well because the boys in the physics department do not talk to the English English Lit people what the English that people is irrelevant to what the physics people are doing what what the people in English that are doing is irrelevant to AG econ is there the whole the whole system is this you've got this group this group this group this group all doing their own thing and the only yoona the only unifying principle is the budget okay that's the things they're scrapping for for a piece of but there's no theological doctrinal worldview integration and nothing nothing to tie it together so what we're trying to do at new st. Andrews is return to an education that equips students to be Christian men and throughout the course of their lives that's a equipping them to think equipping them to read equipping them to believe equipping them to worship properly that's what we're after now here's the optical illusion and thing to be careful careful with because of the circumstances I have fond of saying that if if they're a bunch of clowns in a circus ring you know cavorting doing somersaults riding unicycles there's 12 clowns they're climbing in and out of little cars if you run down there and start reading the st. Crispin's speech from Henry the fifth and let's say you do a good job it's a bang-up job but to the audience you're just the 13th clown all right you don't have the gravitas to step into that and change the whole change the whole context to a certain extent up to this point we're doing battles to end this but to a certain extent we're the 13th clown because you've got this higher education system that's just going doing its thing and it sort of sets the sets the assumption sets the tone of discourse and we come along and we offer one major major in quotes we offer one degree in liberal arts and culture all right that's our degree now people think that we are that's majoring in how to be a classical Christian schoolteacher they think that we're offering one major we think that we're were indicating kids in a major when we're not now a number of our kids have taught gone on to teaching Christian classical Christian schools but a number of the graduates have gone on to do other things have wildly diverse things and that's that is the design feature all right the fact that we have a we have a college a Christian college that's that's got firm biblical convictions and you've got all these schools out there that need desperately need Latin teachers you know it's logical for them to come fish in our pond but it's not like I would want to caution everybody against the assumption of thinking that NSA provides vocational at all I work we're trying to lean against that now every institution can reproduce itself right so if you've if you've taken a bunch of if you've taken a bunch of courses in Lit in history and theology then you're going to be equipped to teach with history and theology you can reproduce that but that's not that's not the intention the intention the fundamental intention is to prepare kids equip them to live all right how to be a person and and then there's a shorter distance from how to be a person in the NSA context to teaching Latin in the classical Christian school in Kentucky then there is between graduating from our institution and becoming a medical doctor you know it will you could be hired right after your first summer after graduation for the one and you couldn't be practicing medicine the first summer after the other so that's a longer route and so it's a logical mistake but it's a mistake nonetheless where we're not providing vocational training for English teachers we're not that's that's not what we're doing all right what I want to do is just end my comments there and open it up for questions if anybody has yeah you mentioned cultural fundamentalist naturally cultural fundamentalist opposition to alcohol opposition to mixed rollerskating skinny neckties opposition to skinny neckties you see I'm talking about the cultural fundamentalism that says that was descriptive of the conservative revolt against liberalism the mainline denominations that retreat it into 4th bible-believing enclaves but then develop their own social mores and customs some of which are unbiblical prohibition of alcohol being one of them now we would be fundamentalists the same wage a aggressive machen was a fundamentalist we wouldn't be fundamentalists in the same way that say Bob Jones University would become the balance although we shared the faith you know their fellow Christians coming back through the job training problem and the cost if you think about the costs of higher education today yeah average private institutions are average state universities you're paying is an enormous amount of money for this job training goal but if you go back to what would be the costs of actually doing it in the context where it's done I give the example from journalism if you want to think about being a journalist and go across the street here The Daily News and take half it a half a semesters tuition and drop it on the desk and say if you let me work for you I'll pay you for me to work here if I can if I can you know follow your own yeah follow you around and get to write and do it all but all the top jobs there you'll learn more in a half a semester in that context than four years of journalism school I mean that was might feel a little top journals needle and war in that short period of time for a fraction of the cost if you really wanted to be journalist but the problem is what we've done culturally is to say well but you need to get the college experience which means the pizza parties the horse-riding the the dorm life you have those sorts of things and that does not building towards maturity and so it really kind of schizophrenic on this cuz we don't really want the job training we're not really willing to pay for it we're willing to let the sort of other institutional development take over for us and we just kind of wash our hands the other thing that no does that hasn't been mentioned yet in vocational training is because of globalization and many of aspects of which are negative many are positive I don't you know but it's just a fact if you've got a degree in computer computer programming in 1990 how up to date is your undergraduate training well it's a bit it's obsolete and you might as well have gotten a liberal arts degree for all the you know your your liberal arts degree is equally obsolete be equally irrelevant to the current state of computer programming as a 1990 degree which would be and what happens is there's a conservativism in the negative negative sense in institutions where people get hired they get tenure they want the curriculum to stay put they've already done all their lesson perhaps they've done it you know done everything and if they're in a field where everything is just dramatically changing outside that field there's no instant there's no economic incentive for that major that major field to to stay current and and there are some practical incentives this is not in one of those fields but I had a professor for maybe three class periods I dropped their class but he had clearly been teaching the same history class for 30 years he walked in who we could have been a collection of fire hydrants for all he cares he he walked in picked a pile on the back ceiling stared at it and began to recite just second second class came in state of the ceiling began to recite he had been teaching this course for decades clearly and memorized I think every word in this course well what is it that encourages people to do that we'll follow the money well what are you paying people to do out in the market companies that get fall behind in the technology go out of business all right on the market but in tenured University programs yes there is a unifying there is a unifying face that they insist on but they but they try to pretend that they're not insisting on absolutely no option and you only find out what the what the unifying principle is if you contradict it and then then they frog marches at the door I had my son when he was up when he was my son graduated from Lagos he went to he enrolled in NSA and U of I at the same time and was taking classes here and was going up there and even he went up there because he wanted to play Division one ball he wanted to he wanted to walk onto the basketball team and so he took these I know a bunch of kids in our church go to the UI and they they generally they have very reasonably decent experience experiences with the classes they they've took but Nate's classes there were all of them stinkers just amazing his philosophy professor loved him until they got too caught the but he had an English teacher who was foul just a foul lady she would embarrass the football players in the class she was just and so she was she assigned then she had them watching movie you may have heard of it was a movie from back in the day called Harold and Maude eighty year old lady old lady who has an affair like a 19 year old boy and then she winds up committing suicide and the message of the movie is do your own thing don't let anybody tell you what to do that was the takeaway think so she had the students watch this movie and and then write a three I want you to write me a three-page paper responding to the movie so uh Nate wrote his intro paragraph was you know I used to be pretty conservative been pretty uptight and I thought that you know I thought you oughta obey your parents and all that sort of stuff but I realized from this movie that the takeaway message is you shouldn't let anybody tell you what to do and I don't feel like writing a three-page paper and so it's one perk one paragraph on the top of the stapled it to two blank sheets of paper and handed within and then it like a couple weeks went by he finally got called out into the hall which is pretty bad in college with you things have gone awry when you get called out to the hall and Billy the teacher said I'm gonna flunk you for this paper I'm gonna flunk you for the course if you don't redo it but you gonna have an opportunity to redo it and you got an apple in the paper and they said now I was making a point did you understand the point I was making and she said you can't take these things to the logical conclusion know when it's my authority she said when it's my authority you must do exactly what I say right but if you're tearing down your parents Authority your church's authority the authority of Western civilization you've got to tear the whole thing down and and make him so Nate came back to me we were talking about this he was doing the NSA and you by the same time and he said dad I I feel like Mike Logan experience has equipped me to to fight with the bad guys and just you know fight the dragon and everything but he said I don't feel like I'm fighting any but I feel like I'm carrying a part of stress doll it's just there's just nothing in there it's like so you know it was exasperating him nice and he said I'm thinking of just dropping the whole thing and coming up going over to NSA full time and I said well this is house you want to read the narrative read the story I said you know I'm telling you right now you know that when you leave you buy and come over to NSA you do know that the basketball caught the coach is going to call and call you on the team you know that he said yeah I know that yeah doesn't matter I know that so he transferred over to NSA and sure enough the basketball coach called him and said you can come on the team he explained he left the school and you come over to NSA and the reason for that is he would had been trained to see through to the fundamental principle that they're gonna defend it all costs right and identify it and tag it and then he's the kind of person who would get a reaction other students can see it and keep their heads down and just get through but so yes there's there is an integrated person I would want to add to this discussion an understanding that many parents went through college you know 15 20 30 years ago and the experience for you who graduated or went to school is not the experience of students today and I think that's that's one of the messages that has to be clear wait so much has changed in higher education and when I mentioned in my discussion about multiculturalism that literally was the edict from the university presidents saying every core course must teach multiculturalism it wasn't an option you must do it and ideological shift has so radicalized that you go up to the University today it is nothing like it was 10 or 15 20 years ago and parents blissfully wished that weren't the case but they just are not doing the homework together they just send their kid up there and think that's not a problem because it is a different ballgame antithesis is much more stark today than it ever was used to have faculty members who would just try to help you learn and be the best person you can be and they will ideologically edgy about it even though it might have been very anti personal and personal life now it's can I have a student in front of me if they're conservative Christian ties evangelicals my goal was to turn it is to make them not I don't do that I'm not my job I can't tell you how many times students in our community go to U of I and this is U of I we r red state this is Idaho remember it was not Berkeley and we have had students who go up there in first day of class how many of you are Christians you know the professors who is a Christian they want to single them out they want to take them out they want to do something about that one funny one was a young girl was up there and the teacher the first day of class went on this rant rant against low gosh school just no reason just took out after low gaan school and the class is very interesting and then then okay calm down and then how many of you getting a lay of the land with the students uh how many of you kids have read Beowulf one hand went up hers how many of you kids have read you know whole series of books just find out work and one student you know name is Jesse and kept going on this is great where did you go to school yes wait we have one daughter the one who's not here engineering okay and we think that UW's the best place okay for somebody with that interest and do you think the same danger the same things that have over there she's gonna walk into the engineering department different disciplines know different disciplines are saner than other disciplines it's not it's not a uniform problem but what happens is the the university wants to brand every student that comes through and that's why court you know you've got a court report curriculum requirements you've got so we want to get our hook in even even if it's a forestry student I mean what could go wrong with the trees right well you've got core requirements where we're gonna we're going to insist on certain things you've got the moral mayhem of the student life and that sort of thing so basically I don't there's no sin in the Bible called sending your kid to a state-supported University that's not that that's not the sin the problem is sending the sin is sending your kids into places where they're not equipped previously to do more damage to the institution than the institution will do to them but that's the issue so if if if a godly Christian kid goes to a State University and turns the place on its ear I'm not gonna complain because but he already had he wouldn't have been able to do that unless he already had the education right now I would encourage people to you Roy mentioned earlier you've got that you don't just have what's a good idea how could you learn engineering you also have onerous regulations from the government of licensure and certain you've got to check the boxes in a certain way and I would encourage parents if the kids really called to engineering and you're convinced of that I would encourage them to try to get their humanities core requirements from a believin place transfer pick up pick at engineering in engineering school where that sort of thing is allowed credits from here for the order yeah or basically be creepy creative in how you put it don't just accept what they're offering create something different so there's some I've looked a lot at the history of engineering and well I guess one of the things that believes me within the Christian community is that engineering is one of those things that almost everybody seems that they'll fall to is a good way to make a living and do practical things but the history of engineering is directly and immediately tied to the Marxist capitalist term in the late 19th century in the United States there was not more than two engineers in any one state prior to the Morrill Act that the whole notion of an engineer was very very different and I say what we've what we've done is sort of come in many cases to a kind of pragmatism that just really looks for these things and it's not to you know anything on your daughter your family thing I think it's just the atmosphere we're breathing now is like oh what you go in engineering without your well yeah well I'm thinking about what what is it that engineering does and I just had this conversation with one of our graduates who's perhaps one of our most brilliant graduates ever just amazing and he was the top University of Idaho Groucho as well simultaneous and he's now four years into doing engineering and he calls me and he says I'm thinking of getting out engineering and being a teacher and and I said you know you are so gifted you could do anything anything you wanted but ask the question what is needful the kingdom of God do we really need one more engineer designing a widget that works at this much milliseconds faster than the last widget did I need a faster phone I mean is that is that is there that the important thing in the kingdom of God all your great gifts and abilities that you just feel called you know to treat that to milliseconds more and and if it is then god bless you go do that you know but but I don't think I don't think sometimes we ask those questions early enough often enough and weigh these things and I just didn't first people to think about that instead of just saying well there's there's all these wonderful clients out here man just go do that there are people I really do believe our call to be engineers I said if you're one of them you're gonna be great that's what you have to do but I just I just encourage people to think more more broadly about some of those I'm like five girls and I don't have to work the three of my sisters work full-time and so the one of them she says well I wouldn't be working I must be getting paid for it so she masters so it's like is you know using your gifts and getting something that's gonna pay you your time but they also you have to keep in mind that the people running our society rigged the system to make certain choices easy for you and certain choices hard for you so you you that's what I meant by be creative don't don't just take the smorgasbord approach and say whatever they're offering must be okay we all we all have to do something and when you decide what to do do something you're good at but don't necessarily assume that the only options that they offer you are the only way to get there well let me just answer it this way and then let's wrap up so we can disperse but the the thing I would say is looking at from our end when we have you're looking at if my kid goes to NSA where will they go after that what will they be doing after that but for mark our Vantage is different when kids leave here we don't see people floundering figuring out what to do that the kids who leave here are plugging into all kinds of things in all kinds of ways so we're not seeing a lot of fruit fall to the ground and and we're taking all kinds it's not just humanities walks that we're getting we're getting people who are gifted in arts and science and and that math and that sort of thing um well let's uh thank you all for coming let's conclude with that father thank you for our time together we commit it all back to you thank you Jesus name

Channel: Canon Press

Views: 6,748

Keywords: Classical Charter Schools, Classical Education, Classicists, New Saint Andrews College, Saint Andrews College, Oxford, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Classical Conversations, ACCS, Association of Classical Christian Schools, Higher Education, Against Education, Classical Christian Schools

Id: XSdnzpx_01E

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019