Scot McKnight cites a study that shows many of the things we might think would make a difference in education don’t, and a number of others do.
I was actually unsurprised by this. The actual study is behind a pay wall, so I don’t know if they covered it, but another indicator of success in school is parental involvement.
School suspends cancer survivor over long hair he intends to donate, says the headline at The Detroit News.
I have a very strong opinion on this, and I have no sympathy whatsoever with the school’s position. They should work out a policy to allow this sort of good deed and especially to accommodate this young man who has survived cancer. Every bit of his plan resonates with me.
Our young people need teachers and school administrators with good sense and flexibility. Our country needs more young men like J. T. Gaskins.
My church has a good children’s ministry. I’m impressed every time I hear our children’s minister present a children’s moment during the church service, and every time I’ve encountered the children’s programs myself, including the couple of times I’ve been invited to speak.
The children are learning a great deal about Christianity, their church, the Bible, and how to live. The problems are challenging and sound. I’m likely to always push for more challenging material, but it’s possible that I would go overboard on that.
I was talking to a church leader a while back who told me that one of all the things going on in the church, the children’s ministry made him most hopeful. Despite the fact that my children are grown, and they’re taking my grandchildren to churches in other cities, I would agree.
So how can I have a problem with this exceptional ministry?
The problem I have isn’t with the program. In fact, I suspect that your church has the same problem as does mine. I’m wondering just where the needed backup is. No matter how good your church’s children’s program is, you can’t depend on other people (children’s ministers, teachers, pastors, and so forth) to nurture your child’s faith.
Just as the home situation is a better predictor of how a child will do at learning, so the home is where most spiritual formation takes place. The church can help, but it cannot replace the parents (or grandparents!) in preparing children for life.
My parents were quite willing to talk about their faith, though they were much more willing to live it. I know my parents prayed, not because they told me they did so, nor because they talked about praying, but because I saw and heard them doing it. I know they spent time studying the Bible, again not because they said so many pious things about the Bible, but because I saw them do it.
I have in my possession one Bible from each of my parents. One is a pocket sized King James Bible that belonged to my father. There isn’t a page in that Bible that isn’t packed with the notes my dad wrote as he read it year after year. It’s in doubtful shape now. But I don’t have to wonder just how much my father cared about his Bible.
I got the Hebrew Bible I carry from my mother. It’s the smaller edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. She wanted to stick with the larger edition because the print in this one is too small. But this Bible reminds me that not only did she study all her life, but that she eventually took the time to learn both Hebrew and Greek to use in her personal study.
It was not uncommon to hear the words of scripture from my parents’ lips. But even more importantly they tried to put those words into practice, from the various places the practiced medicine here in the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, and in South America. They gave of themselves.
And that is the true formula for seeing your children involved not just in church but in service throughout their lives. Let them see you do it. Let them know that your faith is important to you, not just because you send them to a Sunday School class, or because you attend a worship service, but because you have made it part of your life.
They’re going to remember a great deal more of what they see you model than they will of what you or someone else tells them. And if you make prayer and Bible study a part of your daily life you’ll also find that those wonderful folks who work in children’s ministry can accomplish much more than they can otherwise.
Don’t make your children’s faith an afterthought. Live your life of faith. Let them see something worth choosing and pursuing.
Scot McKnight wrote an interesting post today on the need for academic freedom in religious schools. First let me note that I agree with the need for academic freedom, and that I am sympathetic with all three cases McKnight mentions, and have had personal correspondence with one of them. In addition, I like to promote discussion that is as broad as possible.
I do want to put a note of my own, however. I think that religious schools should be able to set the boundaries on what they are going to permit. Will some of them set boundaries I would disapprove? Of course. Many already do set boundaries that would exclude me. In a free market of ideas, I would only object if an institution advertised itself falsely, i.e. claimed to have standards of academic freedom which were not true.
In addition, someone who intends to be a researcher at such a school should be aware of such limitations. If you are doing research at an institution that requires your results to fit in with a 6000 year old earth, for example, you must be prepared for a certain amount of disdain from mainstream science.
Academic freedom is important, and if certain results are excluded a priori, one needs to be aware of the fact.
… then perhaps nobody could say this:
But if four years of college undo 18 years of parenting and religious affiliation, perhaps the faith community’s tenuous hold is the problem, not the particular place outside its bubble where that hold evaporates. Consider the believers we’ve seen in history. With all the persecution that Judaism and Christianity have survived over the centuries, an argument that sites America’s Top 310 Colleges as a first order adversary is hard to credit…. (Source: The Atlantic: Why College Students and Losing Their Religion)
I agree. We tend to blame society for the fact that our young people tend to leave the church around college age. I suspect we’d like to believe that because it means we’re not to blame. We’ve done our best, but it’s just the society. What can we do?
Well, we could try living our faith and inviting our kids to live it with us, rather than trying to work in just the right amount of indoctrination. We could try examining the kinds of ideas they’ll hear about in college, rather than repeating cliches and working our way through bland, unchallenging curriculum. (Can anyone say, “Bring your Bibles?”)
… but his solution is very different from mine. I think the idea that the current concept of a university will survive is a pipe dream. The cost is going to force education to change. Face to face education will be needed, but the form is going to change. (HT: John Meunier.)
Jason Byassee explains why he voted to allow up to 2/3 of seminary credits to be taken online in his United Methodist conference (HT: Joel Watts).
Readers of this blog will already be aware that I believe it’s inevitable that the majority of education is delivered by virtual means. Not only that, I think this is a good thing. I think it will make it possible to deliver a higher quality education. There is always resistance to new technology, because it takes away from our old standard ways of doing things. But instead of fighting such technology, which is still just a tool, we need to find ways to use it to make things work better.
I think our current concept of a university, a college, and a seminary are doomed. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing good in those concepts. There are experiences that do need to be carried out together. But those classroom lectures with hundreds of students ignoring the professor can be replaced by more efficient means, and we can spend our money, and the precious time of quality teachers on the most important things.
For example, I recall preparing lessons for my later classes while occupying a seat in a class on Daniel and Revelation, and then getting a comfortable ‘A’ in the course. I could have learned more by spending those hours online. Could the professor have done better? Absolutely. But he also had to deal with about 50 students, so detailed discussion of all points involving all of us would have been impossible.
On the other hand I would not want to exchange my time studying Greek exegesis with Dr. Sakae Kubo for anything else. There we had half a dozen serious students, and we made that time with an expert count.
Dr. Byassee comments on hands-on education, such as learning how to take the hand of a dying person. There’s where I think even seminary fails. I have talked to many seminary graduates who are uncomfortable praying with a member of their congregation when they graduate. They have to become comfortable as they pastor. Here the local church needs to be involved. I wonder why a young person, especially one contemplating full-time ministry, would be allowed to get through their youth in church without learning how to pray with one another.
I’d think strong local church involvement plus a good online program with additional time spent in person at a seminary (weekends, weeks, months, sabbatical years) would be a good formula. All of those elements should be lifelong, and not just during a time of preparation.
In my view, social media and virtual education will only hurt us if we don’t learn how to make the best of the resources available.
The joint blog through the book Almost Christian by John Meunier and his daughter continues with Parents Matter Most. I must recommend this series again, because both participants are making excellent points and being quite open about spirituality. You can follow the links in the various posts.
A key takeaway line this time:
Neither grows a scriptural teen faith. Because the solution isn’t to barricade kids or to throw them to the sharks. It’s for the adults to grow a scriptural faith, too [emphasis mine].
Who knew? 🙂
I don’t think the problems with Christianity are hard to find. We have students who want to learn to understand their Bibles but don’t want to be bothered reading them during the week, people who want active prayer lives, provided they don’t have to pray, and parents who want their children to be in church, but who don’t want to model spirituality for them. I must confess to weakness in the latter two items as well, and on occasion in the first! This isn’t a rant in which I can point fingers.
I point again to Psalm 78, especially verses 5-8. The scriptural pattern is there. Why not follow it?
… and he was teaching continuing education. Doesn’t it point to a problem if a roomful of doctors can’t tell that the person teaching them never completed medical school?
When I first looked over the list of David Alan Black’s books I kind of skimmed past The Myth of Adolescence. I have no adolescent children and didn’t really care to read about the matter one way or another. Over time I took a further look at his article, Want to Reform Your Youth Ministry? Reject Adolescence, and also heard him speak on the topic here in Pensacola. I still haven’t read the book, but based on those two items and my own experience, I want to make some comments and invite you to explore the subject.
Those who know that I am a strong advocate of public education might be surprised to know that I was homeschooled for all but four years of my first twelve. Those four years were spent in a small private school where my experience was substantially different from what it would have been in either public school or a larger, more “mainstream” private school.
The difference is not just in where I went to school, but in the way I was raised. These differences have been emphasized to me repeatedly over the years. I remember encountering a mother at a church I attended a few years back. She was sitting at a table in the church library surrounded by paperwork. I asked her what she was doing.
“Filling out application and financial aid forms for my daughter to go to college,” she said. The girl in question was nowhere in sight.
I was amazed. Here was a girl who was 18 years old and presumably ready to go to school away from home, and yet her mother was filling in all the paperwork for her. Not only did my parents not fill in any of my college applications, they required me to prepare any financial aid paperwork all except for their signatures where required. I’m not trying to paint a picture of the good old days. I’m not anxious to turn back the clock. And no, I didn’t walk three miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways.
I was reminded of this again when I saw an ad for the new show “Glory Daze” about going off to college. The assumption in the show is all too frequent. Young people will leave home irresponsible and ready to go crazy, and this is the natural thing. There’s an expected wild time when young people get to high school as well. In fact, it seems that we expect quite a lot of our children and young people–in terms of trouble, irresponsibility, and downright stupidity. Responsible behavior? Not so much!
Responsible decision making is not learned by being told what the right decisions are. We seem to think that if we teach enough Sunday School classes that tell our young people they shouldn’t use drugs, they’ll be properly inoculated. We think that if we repeatedly indoctrinate them with the right beliefs and doctrines, they will keep on believing those things as they go on through life. No matter what the evidence, we cling to such ideas.
But life itself is going to involved repeatedly making decisions and dealing with the consequences of those decisions. Life is going to force responsibility on people in some way. Often, because their first experience with real responsibility comes very late in life, young men and women make wrong choices that harm them for a lifetime.
My parents were missionaries. That is a very important point in my background. Now not everyone will be a missionary overseas, but the most important witness parents can have on their children is by living their faith. I know that my parents’ faith was a faith that would hold in the face of major hardships and even the threat of death because I saw them live it in that way.
They had high expectations of their children. We were expected to take responsibility. I went on mission trips when I was eight years old. It was my responsibility to carry out the garbage for the portable clinic. This was not a mission trip by car or by air. We were already at a clinic that was about as far as you could get by car. The clinic equipment was carried by two mules. I recall being rather disturbed that there was no room for me to take a pillow. Actually I think the problem was more that there was no way it could be kept dry, but that’s retrospect! The people walked.
When I was 12 years old I became a teacher for the kindergarten section of my church’s Vacation Bible School program for the first time. It was a bit hard to endure the teasing of other kids my own age who laughed because I was “going back to kindygarten!” I taught that class both for VBS and often during the rest of the year for many years after that.
When I was a teenager in South America, I would go out to churches by myself. I know my mother’s prayer life must have really grown during that time. Most of the time the host pastor or evangelist would stop at our house on a motorcycle, and I would grab my trumpet (my reason to exist at the time!), hold it in one hand, jump on the back, and head out to some church where I would support pastor’s ministry with music.
I’m also a high school dropout. Yes, really. I have 2 1/2 high school credits earned by correspondence. My parents decided that it was no point pushing me to go through the regular high school curriculum when I was so busy doing so many useful things, including reading a small set of encyclopedias through. The high school curriculum really couldn’t keep my attention. Just to finish this story, at one point I thought I was going to have to go back to high school to get the credits. It was going to require some determination on my part just to tolerate it. Fortunately, I met with a friend of my parents who was also a college president. He told me that once I graduated college nobody would care where I went to high school. “Take a GED and get on with your education,” he told me. Best advice I ever got!
I’m not telling these stories to illustrate how wonderful I was. In fact, I don’t think these are examples of how I was exceptional at all. They are just minor examples of what young people can do when parents, teachers, and church leaders have high expectations of them. We consistently set our sights too low.
When I was in college I worked in a small private school teaching whatever they needed taught. At one point I was teaching American history. I picked up a wonderful book of readings, but it was aimed at the college level. As I read it myself, I could see nothing that my kids couldn’t handle, so I added it to my list for the class. I got a number of complaints. Was I sure the kids could read the book? Maybe I was overestimating their comprehension. But I got no complaints from the young people, who were in seventh and eighth grades. They just read the essays, discussed them, and had a great time.
I believe that our educational system is becoming less and less capable of handling the world in which we live. We are still spending years and years getting the basic preparation to start working, when the world is changing so rapidly that the career for which one begins to train may be totally transformed by graduation. This suggests the value of a lifelong attitude of learning, working, and adapting. Our educational system is not providing that.
I would suggest three words to guide child raising and education: Expectations, responsibility, and risk.
We need to expect more and expect better. If we expect adolescents to be rebellious, they will likely live up to those expectations. If we expect college students to be wild, they certainly will be. I often mention the effect my mother can have on a room full of four-year-olds. She can begin with chaos, and in moments transform the room into order. This is not accomplished through mass violence or yelling. I’ve often said I don’t understand it, but I think now I do. She expects good things of the children and she gets them.
Second, we need to permit responsibility. Responsibility is not something drilled into people. I receive ads in e-mail all the time for boot camps. I have no idea why. My children are grown and have their own children. But these messages claim that their boot camps will transform a child. Now there is a value in this military style training, especially for the military. But responsibility comes from making decisions and dealing with the consequences. It is practiced and not drilled. I don’t mean there is no teaching involved; rather, I mean that teaching responsibility is insufficient. Young people need to practice responsibility. In the essay I cited Dave Black uses the phrase “novice adults.” A novice learns by doing.
Finally, we need to accept risk. Allowing young people to practice responsibility involves risk. Some aren’t going to get it right. When my parents dropped me off at the top of a mountain about 20 miles from home with just a bicycle I had repaired and refurbished myself, and then headed off for the weekend, there was risk. (No, I wasn’t going to be “home alone.” My older sister was there.) It turned out that I hadn’t been quite perfect in restoring that bicycle. I had to stop at a town half way home, buy a part, and install it in order to finish my ride, but I made it just fine. Parents may face more daunting risks, but I suggest that no risk is greater than the risk of not allowing your child and then young adult to learn responsibility through facing risks.
I’ll get around to reading the whole book here sometime soon, but at the moment I’m convinced I’m likely to agree with most of it, and enjoy quibbling about details. I hope you’ll give this some thought.
