The Emerging Scholars Blog

On InterVarsity’s main website, one can find two articles

1. Honoring God at Work
2. Human Flourishing

AND two audio files

1. Why Aren’t We Flourishing? — Opening Plenary by MaryKate Morse, Professor of Leadership and Spiritual Formation at George Fox University. Time: 35:00
2. Powerful Faith — Seminar presentation by Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University and the author of Faith in the Halls of Power. The seminar in which Michael Lindsay spoke was entitled Exploring Privilege and Redeeming Power. Time: 1:15:09

After you’ve reflected upon the presentations, take a moment to share some thoughts on fear, power, and faith in higher education.

While posting Colleges ignore life’s biggest questions, I was reminded of Neil Postman’s The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School – a book which I believe after a dozen years still remains a must read for those involved in education.  In my review of The End of Education, I conclude:

The End of Education Book Cover

Postman’s The End of Education provides an excellent critique of the current approach to schooling and education, but fails to assert a compelling alternative for the follower of Christ. In the end, a sense of the divine underlies our theories of education and makes religiously neutral education impossible. Contrary to Postman, we should not seek to create our own broad narrative or return to the American Experiment, but instead boldly explore our place in the narrative of the God who is there and is not silent.

If you’re interested in reading my full review, click here. Anyone have thoughts on Postman’s book or the general topic of The End of Education which they’d like to get out onto the table?

Note:  If you’re unfamiliar with Neil Postman (1931-2003), University Professor, Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology, and Chair of the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University, visit the Random House author spotlight which includes links to a number of his titles.  Personally, I found Technopoly:  The Surrender of Culture to Technology hard to put down.

Last fall Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, kicked off the academic year with a Boston Globe op-ed entitled Why are we here? Colleges ignore life’s biggest questions, and we all pay the price.  In response, Comment hosted an excellent on-line mini-symposium with several scholars including Steven Garber (Director, Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation and Culture), Dr. James K. A. Smith (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College), and Greg Veltman (Ph.D. Student, University of Pittsburgh).  As you enter the new term and consider the role of higher education, take some time to read and briefly respond to these short pieces and Kronman’s response. …

To whet your appetite, below’s part of Dr. James K. A. Smith’s response to Why are we here? Colleges ignore life’s biggest questions, and we all pay the price:

While I think his diagnosis of the commodification of knowledge in University, Inc. is right on the money; and while I’m all for a more robust role for the humanities in a university education; and while I’m downright enthusiastic about a university education that actually grapples with “the big questions” about what it means to be human and what it looks like to live “the good life” — the fact is Kronman’s lament points out the need for so much more than he proposes. What’s needed is for the university to recover an understanding of education as formation.

But Kronman’s liberalism won’t let him imagine that. In order for education to be formative — in order for education to actually mold and shape students into certain kinds of people who are primed to live out a vision of the good life — such education needs to be shaped by a story, grounded by a tradition, and oriented toward a particular vision of the Good. But that would entail a violation of cherished liberal principles of the modern university — the stories it tells itself about its alleged neutrality, its supposed tolerant largesse, and its respect for human autonomy and self-determination. This is why he demonizes a “religious” education as the worst possible threat. So Kronman really just imagines a liberal, modern bastardization of a formative education: a syllabus that “raises the big questions,” but then leaves the sophomore in the place of lord and master, free to make her own decisions about the good life. (In this respect, his pedagogical memory is selective: the rich tradition of education that he points toward was not just unabashedly formative. It was, at times, positively dogmatic!) — Dr. James K.A. Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College.

Note: Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life was released last September by Yale University Press.