Even if both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney can tap dance on water and heal the stupid with spit and dirt, nothing can stop the bad economic news to come….
Just in time, college students across America have launched a strategy to deal with this crisis: Study less.
Less studying, as you might recall, is a time-honored approach to getting a good job and staying ahead in a global economy that’s competitive and tanking.
Read the full column HERE.
A Canadian pastor (who has ministered in England for decades) once told me that the early monastic movement involved an older monk mentoring a younger monk or two. The older helped the youngers in spiritual formation.
A friend with state board certification in counseling and a doctoral degree in psychology once took on post-doctoral work in psychoanalysis. Each student in the post-doctoral program not only had to read stacks of books and articles and attend hours upon hours of lectures, but each student also had to be psychoanalyzed by an elder analyst. Not just one session. My impression was that the post-doctoral students were attending analysis sessions for most of the three-year program. Mandatory analysis!
These demanding situaitons — however gracious — surely at times were uncomfortably personal.
That kind of close examination of the individual — the kind offered in early monasticism and psychoanalysis — is not everyone’s idea of a good time.
Still, conversations in those kinds of contexts illuminate hidden dynamics, agendas, weaknesses and flaws that could damage ministry. These can be hidden behind doctrinal and theological rightness.
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See “Too PC? New Australian Curriculum Bans References to Birth of Jesus in Textbooks” at The Blaze.
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Tagged Australia, Christianity, education, international, Jesus, news
While I don’t agree with all the assumptions made by Penn State professor John Marsh, or all those made by his reviewer in The New Inquiry, I think this excerpt of the review offers a valid critique of American attitudes toward education and our economy:
But if education really were the silver bullet, we would have hit something by now. Instead, as Penn State professor John Marsh argues in his forthcoming book Class Dismissed, we have an increasingly unequal country hiding behind the flimsy twin excuses of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. Marsh makes a convincing case that no amount of reformist tinkering can make higher education an engine of egalitarianism, because schools were never meant to reduce inequality in the first place. As long as we credit the education system with the ability to fix labor problems, Marsh argues, it is doomed to failure.
Marsh, who comes from a union household, sees the decline of labor organizing as the central source of high and rising inequality. As workers have lost bargaining power, he insists, the gap between classes has increased.
Read the entire review here.
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From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
In the Pew survey, all respondents were asked about the “main purpose” of college. Forty-seven percent said “to teach knowledge and skills that can be used in the workplace,” 39 percent said “to help an individual grow personally and intellectually,” and 12 percent said “both equally.”
Read the entire article here.
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Education is premised upon the belief that the old have something to tell the young. Where would our advertising and popular entertainment be without youthful rebellion and narcissistic self-affirmation? Knowledge and wisdom feel like enslavement. Knowledge and wisdom can slow you down.
When you go through difficult circumstances, what do you think is happening? Is God teaching you a lesson? Are in inside some kind of spiritual education plan?
Or, are you just experiencing the fallout of fallen humanity? In an imperfect world, you are just dealing with several imperfections at once?
Or, maybe, sometimes you go through spiritual education, and sometimes you just have a run-in with the fallen world? What say ye? Comment!
Elif Batuman argues that the university creative writing program “stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch. Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent. It’s exciting and important to reject the great books, but it’s equally exciting and important to be in a conversation with them. One isn’t stating conclusively that Father Knows Best, but who knows whether Father might not have learned a few useful things on the road of life, if only by accident? When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education.”
Earlier today, Carol Costello did a great piece on homeschooling on CNN’s American Morning.
Two statistics stuck out during her report:
“In a 2008 study, 36% of families listed religious and moral values as the main reason for homeschooling. But, another 38% said the primary reason they homeschool is because they don’t like the school environment or the way teachers teach—those numbers are also way up from a few years ago.”
Read the written version of the report here.
Another compelling reason to educate at home came from one of the homeschooling parents interviewed on the broadcast version of the report. She said there’s nothing natural about putting 20 kids in one classroom and expecting them to all learn the same way.
Read this exciting letter from Stan Mattson, founder and president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation:
At long last! It’s difficult to believe, after so extended a journey, but the truth is, we are about to take a major step forward towards the long-awaited goal of establishing C.S. Lewis College.
It pleases me greatly to inform you that a news conference was held today in Northfield, Massachusetts announcing the purchase of the campus for the use of C.S. Lewis College by Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
Located in the greater Amherst area of northern Massachusetts, just east of the Connecticut River, the campus is the beautiful and historic former site of Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield Seminary for Young Women (later, the Northfield Mount Hermon School). NMH recently consolidated their operations onto their Mount Hermon campus, located five miles away.
For details on this rather extraordinary development, including the press release, announcement videos, and photos of the campus, visit http://www.cslewiscollege.org.
We invite you to rejoice with us on this joyous occasion, taking place most appropriately in this Advent season.
“Further up and further in!”,
J. Stanley Mattson
Founder and President
C.S. Lewis Foundation
~ ~ ~
"I make your speeches stronger. I make your letters more persuasive."
Lecturer in English at Coastal Carolina University
Columnist for the Weekly Surge: Beerman and Strange Days
Recipient of a scholarship to the 2006 C.S. Lewis Foundation Summer Institute
Winner of awards from the N.C. Press Association and the S.C. Press Association
Graduate of the Knight Ridder Assigning Editors Seminar
Graduate of the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School
Completed the Committee of Concerned Journalists Newsroom Workshop
Semi-Finalist, the 1996 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship
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