Thinking Christian

My college friend Rob Koons was putting together a concentration on “Western Civilization and American Institutions” at the University of Texas, but he got the plugged pulled on him in a manner that was not only unceremonious but also confused, contradictory, and educationally unwise.

He learned some lessons from the experience, including:

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a “distribution” standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.

The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda.

This is further evidence that something is wrong with the American university. I’ll have more to post on this early next week.

Hat Tip: Divine Conspiracy Blog

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The LA Times is reporting on a “Spirituality for Kids” curriculum being presented in some Los Angeles public schools.  

‘Spirituality for Kids’ is not religious,” said Karen Timko, who is in charge of elementary counselors for the Los Angeles Unified School District and has included the group in a resource fair for counselors. “It’s tools for navigating your life.”

This is another good argument for appropriate separation of church and state, religion and public education. (Yes, I’m in favor of that.) It’s also a good opportunity to show some of the confusion that exists on religion. The curriculum developers’ website says,

Founded in 2001, SFK was established to create global change by empowering children with the understanding that all possibilities lie within – their choices can influence the world around us.

This is close to truth, and close to a secular truth, except for that important word “all.” Yes, possibilities lie within us, and yes, as the same web page shows, education can yield positive character outcomes for children. I’m all in favor of teaching character in schools, a curriculum that has been sorely neglected or distorted over the years. As an education major at Michigan State University in the mid-1970s, when MSU was regarded as one of the top education (teacher-training) schools in the country, I was taught “values clarification,” the doctrine that every child’s values are to be brought out, respected, clarified, and celebrated. Our professors had apparently not anticipated Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s values.

No, it’s not character education that’s the problem. It is the teaching that “all possibilities lie within.” This is in fact a direct contradiction of historic Christian doctrine, which says we must rely on God. It is through Christ who strengthens that we can “do all things.” (The context counts on that, by the way; it’s not about being able to do everything we wish, but about living a life of spiritual power in any kind of circumstance.) Note that the point I’m making does not depend on your agreeing with Christian doctrine; the fact is that the SFK curriculum conflicts with a major point of Christian doctrine, and thus has definite religious implications.

But beyond that there is the title wrapped around the whole program: “Spirituality for Kids.” If they had called it Maturity for Kids, or Character Development for Kids, or Life Skills for Kids, that would have been one thing. But they called it “Spirituality for Kids.” They can say all they want that it isn’t religious, but are students that dumb? Do they even want students to think spirituality is divorced from religion? And if they do, are they not in this also teaching something definite about religion, i.e., that religion is optional for spiritual development?

The excellent National Study of Youth and Religion spoke of large numbers of teens who are “spiritual but not religious.” Obviously there are implications for religious belief in this. I would hope that school administrators in Los Angeles and everywhere would not be blind to this.

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NY TImes: Is It Time to Retrain Business Schools?

Still, there have been signs that all is not well in business education. A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline. The authors attributed that to “perceived peer behavior” — in other words, students believed everyone else was doing it.

As the country reels in the wake of Bernie Madoff and the effects of other questionable characters, this news of M.B.A. cheaters can hardly be comforting. The rest of the Times article asks what business schools can do about this (and also how they can train students better in handling real-life economic crises, whether based in ethical lapses or other conditions).

Now compare Colossians 3:1-5:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

This is speaking to followers of Christ. Some of it is in what is called “positional” language: that Christians through a radical identification with Jesus Christ, and his substitionary death for us, have joined with him positionally already in his death and resurrection. Though it is not an experienced fact in our lives yet in ordinary-language terms, it is as good as if it was, for the promise is that secure.

I say that for the sake of clearing away any minor confusion that might arise for some readers. That’s not the main point I wanted to make, however.

God’s word sees ethical lapses as much more, and going much deeper, than an educational matter. It’s a matter of idolatry: worshiping a false god, the god of greed, or of getting ahead, or of “what everyone else is doing.” Followers of Christ understand how ephemeral and deceptive these gods and goals are, that there is a much longer view to take. Gathering the most impressive titles or toys is nothing compared to the real value of appearing with Christ in glory.

Changing B-schools’ curriculum to focus more on ethics isn’t a bad idea; that’s not what I’m saying. It might help with some behaviors. Still the only ultimate answer is at the level of the heart, where Christ alone can make the deep changes that sweep away “what is earthly” in us.

Jesus Christ is about changing hearts, with lives changing from the inside out as a result. Now, does this fit the real world? Probably (see here and here, for example), though not with total consistency, which may have something to do with spiritual maturity and depth of commitment. I’ve had opportunity to observe this very close up. For several years I was a Human Resource director with Campus Crusade for Christ, a nearly half-billion dollar mission organization. I could count on one hand—without using the thumb, pinkie, ring finger or middle finger—the number of employee theft or fraud situations I had to deal with in that role. Now I’m a member of a Campus Crusade team that includes our internal auditors. If there’s any “funny business” going on in any employee’s or department’s books, we’re likely to find out about it first. What I discovered in my HR job still holds true: we’re not perfect, but still there’s a whole lot of integrity in this mission.

I was studying for my Master’s degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology while I was working in Human Resources. (Chances are you’ve never heard of I/O Psych; suffice it for now to say that it’s an HR-related field.) I told a professor that I would have to miss an upcoming class because I was part of a group traveling to Atlanta to shut down one of our departments.

He said, “you’re going to gather all their keys, ID’s, and passwords there, right?” I told him, no, actually, we hadn’t discussed doing that; we were planning to make it less abrupt for them than that.

“But what about sabotage and theft?” he asked.

“You know,” I answered, “in all our planning for this, which we’ve been working on for six weeks, we’ve worked on every angle we could think of: how to lessen the impact on the staff, how to transition them to other roles or ease their out-placement, how we could use some of them to help build other departments. But not once have we even thought about them pulling anything like that on us. That’s not the kind of people we have.”

Several weeks later I was able to give my prof the full follow-up: our staff members’ integrity held up to the challenge. They handled it well and honestly. (That kind of thing happened more than once with similar outcomes; this was not the only time I was involved with a major reorganization of this nature.)

Though I know of exceptions to this rule, yet I have real-life experience with the rule itself, and I have found it to be true: Where people are fully committed to following Christ, it really does make a difference in their ethical behavior. Our country and our world could use a large dose of that.

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It’s amazing to see this [Link: World On the Web » World New Media Archive » Ideas have nothing to do with reality] …

Teachers cannot – except serendipitously – fashion moral character or produce citizens of a certain temper.

… showing up on the web so soon after the article I discussed in my last post, “Ideas Have Consequences;” in which researchers were quite able (at least in the short term) to fashion moral character, with hardly any effort at all.

The quote here is from Professor Stanley Fish, who on this topic is all wet.

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This reminds me of so many other untested beliefs. Parents and teachers have been of the opinion lately that students will understand math better using real-world objects to illustrate abstract concepts. Research now suggests this is wrong.

“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

[From Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices - New York Times]

I don’t have an axe to grind regarding how math gets taught. I’m just intrigued that they actually tested the theory. It reminds me of other theories that have clear and testable sociological implications. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody actually did research to these to see if these are true:

• Intelligent Design is a science-stopper: if you can say “God did it,” you’ll give up doing research in the natural world.
• Raising children as Christians is child abuse.

But wait a moment: there already is research on that second one.

Do you have any other similar examples of ideas that need sociological research?

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