Entries Tagged 'Education' ↓

You know all of that research into “learning styles,” whether a child is a visual learner or an auditory learner or whatever?  Well, we are finding that, while there is an element of truth to it, attending to such things does not seem to matter much in children actually learning more.  The key factor in learning is grasping meaning, a concept that evades any of these sensory approaches.  (While cultivation of meaning is what classical education is all about.)

More vindication of classical education, which cultivates knowledge (grammar) AND understanding (logic) AND application (rhetoric).  As opposed to various contemporary methods which, for reasons I cannot understand, fixate on only one of these dimensions of education and denigrate the others.   This article discusses the fad of   critical thinking, including the admission that educators cannot even define it!  The various approaches are incoherent,with  the most obnoxious version being “just question everything.”  More substantive scholars say that being able to think critically requires (again, see below) CONTENT.  You have to think ABOUT SOMETHING.  Whereas much of the critical thinking curriculum is all process, trying to provoke content-free thinking.   (The classical solution:  DIALECTIC, featuring questions AND answers, as in that great model of classical education, the catechism, which, properly used, helps the student answer the question, “what does this mean?”)

The notable scholar E. D. Hirsch is offering a radical new proposal:  That schools actually teach CONTENT.  Ever since Dewey, the assumption has been that schools don’t need to teach knowledge; rather, they should teach processes.   (Classical education, of course, teaches both.)   Here Hirsch shows how the efforts to teach reading, as in No Child Left Behind, are failing. Gaining comprehension in reading, according to the research he cites,  involves building upon other KNOWLEDGE of what the reading is about.  You can’t just teach comprehension as a process.

Here is someone who got through grade school, graduated from high school, graduated from college with an education degree, became a teacher, and taught in a high school for 17 years  all without knowing how to read! 

The president of the venerable William & Mary College, Gene Nichol, has been forced out of office. He represented, to me, everything that was bad about higher education today (to which my own institution, Patrick Henry College, is a laudable alternative). President Nichol was the one who yanked the cross out of the college chapel, an example of that politically-correct “tolerance” of other religions that is, in fact, intolerance of Christianity. He also allowed on campus the traveling “Sex Worker’s Art Show,” featuring prostitutes and porn stars touting their wares, an example of the academic culture’s current embrace of moral degradation.

The Board of the university is saying that those highly-public controversies were not the reasons they decided to get rid of the president, and that may be, since failure to notice what is wrong about such things is generally accompanied with other kinds of incompetence. Students are complaining about Nichol’s ouster, but alumni, to their great credit, felt ashamed of their school and doubtless exerted their influence.

Thanks to Frank Sonnek for alerting me to this piece by literary critic Stanley Fish, trying to figure out what the value is of literary study.  He begins with a fine reading of some lines from George Herbert, and he nails Herbert’s Reformation emphasis on how Christ does EVERYTHING for our salvation.

Fish became a big postmodernist theorist, but he was also a first-rate George Herbert critic.  In fact, he was, like me, an early promoter of a Reformation reading of Herbert’s spirituality, in contrast to the Roman Catholic interpretations that dominated the scholarship until then.

So Fish tosses off this brilliant little example explaining a line from Herbert.  And, in fact, his overall discussion shooting down the various claimed uses for this sort of thing (to change your life?  not really.  to make you a critical thinker?  other things can do that too.  to enrich your conversation in the culture?  or make the conversation duller.  to promote liberal thinking?  but conservatives read the same texts) is pretty much true.

But what he is no longer able to do, given his postmodernist worldview–which makes him have to explain everything in terms of a “community of discourse”–is to use classical, Aristotelian analysis, whereby some things, such as a poem and studying a poem, are good IN THEMSELVES.  Not everything HAS to be “useful” (good because it leads to other goods).   The pursuit of things good in themselves was also the hallmark of a classical, liberal arts education (as Cardinal Newman explains).

I picked up John Warwick Montgomery at the airport last night. He is now back in the states, where he will serve on the faculty of Patrick Henry College. He will keep his residence in France and continue his Apologetics Institute in Strasbourg, but he will be in residence here for one semester each year. Although he and his wife had been on an airplane for some 13 hours, they were crackling with energy, wit, and insight. It will be great to have him here, and I know our students will appreciate getting to study under someone of his magnitude.

Just idly surfing the other day, I came across this brilliant essay of his, showing how his evidentialist approach to apologetics fits in with Luther’s teachings about the incarnation, the sacraments, that salvation is “outside ourselves,” and that we must learn about God “from the bottom up,” not beginning with abstractions about God but beginning with the tangible God in the manager and on the Cross. Faith remains a gift of God, not something we figure out with reason as such, but it must begin with object truth. Read the essay yourself. It’s entitled
The Incarnate Christ: The Apologetic Thrust of Lutheran Theology.

Still more from Gallup: A recent poll on how many Americans believe in Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design.

A mere 18% believe that evolution is “definitely true,” while 39% believe that the Bible’s creation account is “definitely true.” (Other responses were about shades of “probably true” or “probably false.”)

From another angle, 14% believe that man developed with no guidance from God; 38% believe that man developed but with God’s guidance (apparently reflecting some version of theistic evolution); and 43% believing that God created man in his present form. (4% offered no opinion.)

What is linked above is raw data, going into much more detail and with a range of related questions and comparisons, so feel free to offer your own analysis.

Another interesting tidbit from is a poll on
what Americans believe about the Bible. It found that nearly a third, 31%, believe the Bible is the “actual word of God, to be taken literally.” Nearly half, 47%, believe the Bible is “inspired by the word of God.” Nearly a fifth, 19%, believe that the Bible is just “ancient fables, history, legends recorded by man.” (Read the linked report for various demographic breakdowns as to age, education, church attendance, etc.)

It would seem that over three-fourths, 78%, see the Bible as some kind of spiritual authority. But I wonder what nearly half of our fellow citizens mean by the second category and how they know what parts of the Bible to believe and what they don’t have to believe.

Findings from a Southern Baptist-sponsored study of young adults leaving the church:

70 percent of 18-year-olds who attended church regularly in high school quit by age 23: they don’t like it. And by age 30, 34 percent still have not rebounded. That means one in four young Protestants has left the church.

On their laundry list of reasons: they wanted a break (27%), church is too judgmental (26%), they moved away to college (25%), busy with work (23%).

On the positive side, the 30 percent who kept attending church cited solid spiritual reasons, including: “it’s vital to my relationship with God” (65%) and church “helps guide my everyday decisions” (58%).

So churches lose three-fourths of their young people. About half of those eventually come back. But one-fourth never do.

Some of this can be explained in terms of the natural separation that happens when young adults break with their families on the road to starting families of their own. Church is something they did with their parents, so, in their separation from their parents, church gets dropped. Once they become parents themselves, church becomes a part of their lives again.

And yet, separating from the church is dangerous, since in this interim young people often fall into serious sin, which, as the Bible teaches, if not dealt with and forgiven, can harden the heart and become a pretext for unbelief.

There are other factors: The more legalistic the church–that is, the more the church seems all about strict external rules and harsh monitoring of behavior, rather than internalizing the law through the Gospel– the more eager the young person is to get out of there. Also thoughtful young people often find their churches so unthoughtful that they readily consider all of Christianity to be childish. Then there are the widely ineffective Youth Groups that, in trying to address the lack of interest, often make it worse.

This is an enormously important issue for churches to address, so let’s use this blog to get at some answers: Did YOU break away from church? Why? What brought you back? What could the church have done to keep you and to minister to you through that crucial period of your life? Or, why did you stay? What was your church doing right?

When veterans of the Clinton administration went into academia, a number of them were shocked to find that despite their impeccable liberal politics, their new university colleagues considered them unacceptably right wing! On many campuses the faculty has more Marxists than Republicans. This has long been known, but some recent studies are documenting the extent to which our nation’s campuses have a hard-left bias and discriminate against conservatives. Read this from Robert Maranto, who is publishing a book on the subject. Excerpts from his findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
. . . . . . . . .
Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

I am provost at Patrick Henry Collegewhere we are countering that anti-intellectual silliness and keeping our civilization’s educational heritage alive. We are giving the best and the brightest of conservative, Christian young people an Ivy-League caliber of education (referring back when the Ivy League was at its height). Our students have some of the highest SAT scores anywhere and we are equipping them with a rigorous classical Christian liberal arts education, full of the great books and the great ideas, coupled with specialties in culture-shaping fields, featuring an apprenticeship methodology with some of the best internships in the nation.

And though we might be accused of bias in the other direction, I would put the quality of our class discussions, including the consideration of alternative viewpoints, to be far above what goes on in the typical leftwing classroom.

We are a young school, having been founded in 2000, and we are small, with just over 300 hand-selected students. We should be at least ten times bigger than we are. But we are pretty much at capacity in our existing facilities. Since we don’t take government funds and refuse to go into debt, we have to raise the money before we can build the classrooms and dormitories that we need.

We have some amazingly generous donors, but we should have 100 times the number of financial supporters than we do now. Many people of means are pouring money into institutions whose faculty members would, if they had their dream, line them up against the wall as bourgeois capitalists and consign them to a revolutionary firing squad. They would do far better to pour money into Patrick Henry College!

If any of you are thinking of making an end-of-the-year charitable contribution or would like to support us in an on-going way, go here and here.

OK, end of fund-raising appeal. I’ll try not to do that very often. But reading about the state of higher education in this country made me convinced all the more of the importance of what we are doing at Patrick Henry College.

I got to attend vespers at my wife’s school yesterday, a service held at the end of every school day. There is something powerfully moving about hearing little kid voices singing serious hymns (which they learn by heart) and chanting the liturgy. And the children did so with such gusto and loudness!

My theory is that the cutesy-wootsey approach to children’s songs and worship appeals mainly to parents and grandparents (OK! I admit it! I am both of those things and a sucker for cutesy-wootsey!). But that children appreciate being able, through good teaching, to take part in what adults do. I also worry that in our attempts to make their experience with worship and Bible study completely “kid friendly” and in our trying usually in vain to attract adolescents with what I have elsewhere termed stupid youth group tricks, that we are reinforcing the deadly tendency of young adults rejecting their church background as “childish” once they leave home. Better, in my opinion–and less condescending–to introduce them to a spiritual life bigger than themselves that they can grow into.