Reformed college presidents from around the world gathered at Oxford, UK, for a “Global Summit” at the end of June to discuss the international status and future of Reformed higher education. Institutional representatives from Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Nigeria, Hungary, The Netherlands, Canada, and the United States attended. Read more »

Online education is increasingly popular with Christians.  Christian parents aren’t stupid. They know that too many residential Christian colleges are not only failing to fulfill their biblical role, but are positively corrupting their young charges with the faddish -isms and ideologies of our secular age and charging an arm and a leg for the privilege. So Christian parents are taking their dollars and their children elsewhere. They’d rather have their kids undereducated online than maleducated and spiritually undone on campus. Thankfully, those aren’t their only two options. Read more »

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the leftist tilt of higher education over the past few decades, but secular academics are no longer bothering to hide their ideological hegemony. Propaganda is today’s scholarship.

This latest story from Inside Higher Education is just another documented example of Secular Academics Gone Wild. According to the report, “Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who ‘cry wolf’ about the impact of proposed reforms.” The “Cry Wolf” project is noteworthy for its bald attempt to cast conservatives as the evil empire and the left as the world’s savior. This overtly ideological-religious propaganda campaign Read more »

James K. A. Smith’s fine book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, is deceptive. It’s much more  thought provoking, more engaging than the platitudinous title suggests. It’s really about Christian education. A roll-up-your-sleeves, put-up your-dukes, and go-15-rounds kind of Christian education. Smith is going toe-to-toe with Christian education (and all education) as usual. But you wouldn’t necessarily get that from the title. It is much better than its title.

When using the term “formation,” Smith intends to challenge the long-entrenched notion, embraced even by Christians supposedly committed to baptized versions of  education, that education is about “information” or skills. By contrast, Smith argues that education  is about the formation of Christlike (turn the world upside down types of) Christians. Read more »

The shift from classical Christian liberal arts education to secular vocational training by the mid-20th century didn’t just undermine the church and Christian education, but it also undermined the very industries and businesses it was supposedly designed to help.

By abandoning the personal apprenticeship model of training and turning training itself into an industrial process, colleges began mass producing “specialists” in this and that with no guarantee of a job. Graduates with only decontextualized classroom training now enter the workforce with lesser skills and no loyalties to their employers and no covenantal bonds or accountability to encourage or protect them. These new mass produced workers thus become little more than impersonal replaceable cogs in the machinery of the industrial order.

Treated like widgets, workers will quickly lean in one of two directions. Read more »