Category Archives: Education

Keeping the faith in college

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In the comments section to the previous post, a reader St. Andy asks this question:

To anyone who wants to answer.  This site has quite literally been a Godsend to me.  I’ve always loved science but until about 5 years ago, I assumed you had put your brain on a shelf to be a christian.  No big bang, no creation, etc.  Since then I’ve come to understand the bible in a much deeper way.  Believe it or not, it was Obi Wan Kenobi who made it click when he told Luke “you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend on your point of view”.  I thought, knowing what we know now, how could I explain to a civilization who thinks the earth is flat and a few hundred miles diameter, how everything came to be.  Would I talk about relativity, red shift, inflation theory, DNA, genes, etc, and spend hundreds of volumes explaining the science, or give something they can understand, like genesis.  It’s obvious really.  God wanted us to progress in science at our own pace, but wanted us to know that everything had a beginning and He made it all.  No, Noah didn’t have a penguin, a kangaroo, or a western diamond back rattlesnake on the ark.  But it’s still true that HIS whole world flooded and he had 2 of every animal in the world that he knew.  I now look at science as learning about God, and He becomes more incredible to me every day!

Anyway, my kids are in 6th and 7th grades in a gifted school and in Florida, we have a prepaid college program and they both have 4 years tuition paid for.  How do I avoid sending them to the Dawkins and Krauses in academia.  I’m not saying it needs to be a christian school, but I’d like to avoid the atheist agendas if possible.  I’m accused online of believing in an old man in the sky, flying spaghetti monsters, Santa Claus, etc, and I don’t know what I could expect a college student to withstand.  Any suggestions on how to identify these institutions, or suggestions on how to prepare my kids for the “smart people don’t believe in silly things like God” mentality?

St. Scott Church already provided an encouraging reply.  My response follows:

First of all, you’re already doing a good job being a parent who is interested in science and open to truth in every area!  That will serve your kids well.

Not to panic you, but it’s true that a LOT of kids who were raised in the Church fall away when they go off to secular colleges.  (Though many of these people come back to the Church later in life, when they settle down and have kids of their own.)  But I don’t think this is usually because they get argued (or more likely mocked) out of it by people like Krauss or Dawkins.  In person, most atheists aren’t all that evangelical about it, actually.  Atheists who argue about it on the internet aren’t a typical sample!

Anyway, I think freshman college students are more likely to stop going to Church, and slowly drift away.  Or they’ll get drunk and have sex with somebody at a party, and then feel like they can’t really call themselves a Christian anymore.  Which is sad, because it indicates that they never really understood that salvation is by God’s mercy, and not based on them being a good person who never makes serious mistakes!

A lot of Christian parents think they are raising their children with Christian values, but they’re only really teaching them to be a “good kid”, and then when they become an adult, it isn’t real to them anymore.  It’s biblical and proper for children to be obedient and responsible, but this is not the same thing as having a personal relationship with Christ.  Obviously you can’t do this for them.  You can only show by example what it looks like.

So a lot of parents get into a panic and think they have to send their kids to a Christian college or else they’ll stop being Christian.  But that might just be postponing the time when the person has to choose to follow God themselves, without people telling them what to do!  (For all I know, your kids are already like that, and you don’t need to worry about it.)

There’s nothing wrong with going to a Christian school, if that’s what your kids end up wanting to do, but what’s even better is if your children could be the kind of people who are secure in their faith and who have lots of nonreligious friends that they lead towards Christ.  Actually that goes for right now as well.

Anyway, I agree with St. Scott that the exposure method is best.  They’ll eventually hear it anyway, so talk to them about it now (in limited quantities and in an age appropriate way, of course).  Talk to them about why you believe what you believe, and why other people believe differently.  Show them one of these online comments, and see if you can get them to explain to you why it’s a misunderstanding of what we believe.  Teach them the skill of separating out the good from the bad (for example, it often happens that a writer says some nifty things about science but throws in a jibe at religion, so you can ask whether the one thing really follows from the other).

But of course, also give them a lot of good Christian books, for example by Sts. C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, N.T. Wright, Dorothy Sayers, A.W. Tozer, E. Stanley Jones, Augustine, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, or, if they like historical fiction, Elizabeth Goudge.  Of course there are many more authors to choose from; it depends on their particular interests.  (Encouraging them to study the Bible goes without saying, of course.  But you could see if your church denomination has a Bible quizzing program or something like that for teenagers.)

Just having encouragement from a parent who is interested in science and open to truth is already a lot!  Teach them to ask questions and don’t be afraid of saying “I don’t know” instead of giving pat answers.  It’s better to teach your kids that you can trust in Christ even when you have a lot of questions, then to give them a long list of answers and make it seem like faith depends on getting every one of them right.

The way a lot of Christians are raised, if they start doubting whether e.g. the Noah story was 100% literal in all of its details, they feel like they may as well be disbelieving in the Resurrection of Jesus!  But one of these two events is at the core of our faith, and the other is at the periphery.

Which college your kids go to should obviously depend on their own choices and interests, and it’s a long time before this decision has to be made.  If they are truly seeking God’s will, the Holy Spirit may guide them in a direction which neither they nor you expect.

In general, Ivy Leagues and other elite universities tend to have the academic environment which is most hostile to Christian faith.  I would not recommend places like Harvard, Yale, or U. Chicago as places to study theology, for instance.  But they might be fine for the sciences.  In my experience, secular science departments are more accepting of religious people than the humanities departments, actually.  Maybe not in Biology, because of all the conflicts involving Evolution.

A lot of secular schools have strong Christian social groups such as InterVarsity or Cru which can provide support for Christian students.  Really, it depends a lot on the school.  And there will always be some churches in the area where people are willing to pick students up from the college dorms, if one inquires sufficiently.

There are many fine Christian colleges out there, though some are Christian-in-name only, or so fundamentalist as to be embarrassing.  As good examples, I have family members who attended Seattle Pacific and Westmont, which are excellent liberal arts colleges, seriously Christian but not fundamentalist.  But they’re over on the West Coast.  I’m not familiar with the situation near Florida, but a good high school counselor would know.  Very few Christian schools are also highly ranked research universities (although there are a few, like Notre Dame or Baylor).  Although this matters more for graduate education than college.

I went to St. John’s College, which I would say is a rare example of a school where most students aren’t religious, yet theological books (including the Bible) are on the curriculum and taken seriously.  This is a really weird college, not for most people (and rather expensive without financial aid) but for a few people, it’s one of the best things that ever happened to them.

There are no wrong choices here.  What matters is where God is leading them as individuals.

It’s a little tricky to give advice here, because some parents are over-protective, and some are under-protective, and the advice that is right for one, is wrong for the other.  If you’re worrying about college when they’re in 7th grade, you probably belong more to the first category. :-)  I’d advise you to relax and trust God, who knows better than any of us do what each of us need.

The Achievement Gap

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Sometimes educators talk about “closing the achievement gap” which separates high and low performing students.  There are documented gaps in educational outcomes on the basis of e.g. economic classes, race, etc.  Some of these gaps lead to serious social problems down the road.  But even if we somehow produced a society which had equal outcomes for every factor in the current Politically Correct List of Superficial Ways to Classify People™, there would still be high-performing students and low-performing students.  Educators don’t like this sort of situation, because they don’t want to feel like they are failing some of their students.

Now, there are two ways to close a gap.  One is to take the students who are doing badly, and teach them better.  The other way is to take the students who are doing better, and teach them worse.  Or at least, don’t pay any special attention to them, since the goal is to produce equality.  This shows the danger of adopting equality as a goal.  Inequality is defined as a difference between two people.  Adopting equality as a goal means you are trying to benefit one person as compared to another.  If all better-off students were worse off, there would be less to feel bad about.

Instead, we ought to adopt the goal of benefiting all students.  But especially the ones who are most capable of benefiting from education.  This is, primarily, the more intelligent and motivated students.  People with (small “d”) democratic sensibilities don’t want to hear this.  But as St. Lewis writes in an essay on “Democratic Education”:

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal.  It has no place in the life of the mind.  Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless.  Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men.  Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors.  Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres.  Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.

A truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly `high-brow’.  In drawing up its curriculum it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the boy who wants to know and can know.  (With very few exceptions, they are the same boy.  The stupid boy, nearly always, is the boy who does not want to know.)  It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the needs of the many to the needs of the few, and it must subordinate the school to the university.  Only thus can it be a nursery of those first-class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive.

The goal of leaving No Child Left Behind sounds enlightened, but leaving some children behind is in fact a necessary logical corollary of teaching children difficult subjects.  If your only goal is not to abandon the children who are behind, then you will abandon those who are ahead: the ones who are actually interested in learning.  Most people, believe it or not, forget most of what they were made to learn in school.  The future philosophers, scientists, authors, judges, and so on will actually remember (part of) their education and apply it.

This is not to say that education is unimportant for the masses.  A certain quantum of literacy and comprehension is necessary to survive in the world.   By definition, a democracy has votes, and a certain degree of education is necessary to vote wisely.  When broad sections of society are deprived of a good education, and become a permanent underclass, society suffers.  The heroic teachers who try to remedy this, by volunteering to teach failing students, are worthy of our respect.  It is a valuable project, but it ought not to have such an exclusive monopoly on our thinking that we forget the need to teach those most capable of learning.

But aren’t those students going to be learning anyway, in pretty much whatever environment you put them in?  To some extent, yes.  But it makes a difference what you think is the point of education.  The current goal is to produce a system in which any student can succeed if they really try.  This means lots of busywork, and a hefty amount of grade inflation (rewarding the consistently effortful, and punishing those who take chances on difficult subjects).  It does not necessarily mean teaching critical thinking.  Teaching people to be “good at school” can mean be a sort of slave-mentality, while the goal of a liberal arts education is to produce people who can think for themselves.  This involves a sort of paradox: you have to teach people to teach themselves.  Ignoring a student’s needs is one way to try to encourage this, but it is not the best way.

Let me be autobiographical for a moment, just to give a concrete example. I hope that I am now old enough and fulfilled enough to be beyond any resentment, but I feel that a specific example will be helpful, and I am the example I know best.

In the area of mathematics, I was “left ahead” as a child for pretty much my entire school career before I started taking college classes.  The teachers recognized my knowledge, but none of them did what was required to give me sufficiently advanced material.  I suppose they probably had their hands full with the students who needed more help with the assigned curriculum.

Eventually, in the 7th grade, someone put me into the 8th grade Algebra class.  It was too late—I was already starting to do Calculus by then.  I was too bored by the subject to do any homework, so the teacher failed me, even though she knew I knew all the material.  She thought I was lazy and needed study skills, which was true, although this was hardly the correct motivator to produce them.  I had to repeat the class again in 8th grade.   I was mortified, but fortunately none of my classmates knew about the situation.  I still didn’t do any homework (through guilt-ridden procrastination and deception, not through a firmly decided upon rebellion), but this time she recommended me into the Honors Geometry class in the 9th grade.

This time homework was only 10% of the grade, but the extremely formulaic and tedious standards for proofs docked me another 10% or so on the exams.  (See A Mathematicians Lament for an important critique of the way we teach Geometry and other mathematical subjects.)  That got me to a C+.  As a result I was looking at having to take the non-honors version of the next course in the sequence Algebra II.  (Los Altos High School had a policy against skipping classes).  Bear in mind that, on my own, I was learning Maxwell’s equations,  General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics at this point.

There was a standardized test to overcome the C, but in a school full of overachievers it was deliberately designed to be impossible.  Too many questions in too short of a time.  I knew immediately, before getting the results, that it wasn’t going to fly.  I was going to be steamrollered under the wheels of an formalistic bureaucracy which was unable to make a plain human diagnosis of the sort of student I was: lazy but brilliant.  I was terrified that I would never receive the help I needed to succeed at what I already knew I wanted to do in life: theoretical physics.

 Some wandered in desert wastelands,
finding no way to a city where they could settle.
They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He led them by a straight way
to a city where they could settle.
Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for mankind,
for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things. 
(Psalm 107:4-9.  Read the whole thing!)

So I cried out to the Lord to save me, and he rescued me from my afflictions.  The instruments of his salvation were as follows: Although I complained of the inhuman bureaucracy, in fact there was an excellent academic counselor at the school who knew my situation and advised me to apply to the Foothill Middle College Program, basically a way to flunk out of high school into the local community college. They only take Juniors and Seniors, so I had to skip my Sophomore year.  No regrets!

When I went there, Foothill finally gave me an actual placement test, and I got the highest result and so placed into Calculus 1A (I made an arrangement with the prof to skip the classes and take the final: with Calculus 1B I finally got to new material).

My weird education story doesn’t end there, but this was a critical turning point.  It happened because at some point certain educators cared enough design and implement a program for people like me.  For this and many other gifts I give thanks to the Head Teacher:

I love the Lord, for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy.
Because he turned his ear to me,
I will call on him as long as I live.
(Psalm 116:1-2)