Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Education

  • Is Intelligent Design Religious?

    David Opderbeck has an excellent post on the question of whether intelligent design (ID) is religious and how this relates to our view of natural theology. (HT: Through a Glass Darkly)

    In the post, he gets into an issue that I have raised before, which is the question of whether we really want to advocate teaching of a sort of “creation lite” (my term) in public school classrooms. I personally say this not form the perspective of keeping religion out of the public school classroom, but rather to keep the state out of the business of teaching religion. I believe that two things generally result from the state trying to teach religion: 1) They do it badly, and 2) They tend eventually to want to enforce whatever it is they have decided to teach.

    Opderbeck says:

    But even if a plausible argument could be made for the constitutionality of teaching some version of ID in a public school, I personally find this “wedge” strategy pragmatically and theologically suspect….[I’ll leave you to go discover the analogy he uses where I have the ellipsis!]

    The imagined Christian majority in this country often seems to believe that whatever is taught in the classroom will be acceptable to them. But a review of the differences in viewpoint among Christians on many issues should suggest that it is difficult to create a single course that is acceptable to all. I would not object to a course in the Bible as literature, for example, provided it was clear that this was not a class in the Bible as a source or object of faith.

    I think Christians ought to seriously consider whether or not strategies used to get some form of religion taught in the public school classroom might do more damage to faith than their potential benefit (or damage) to the state. Perhaps we should recapture the notion that it is the task of parents to pass on their faith to their children.

  • Can Education Keep Up

    One of the things I think has not been discussed enough in the current job situation, though I think President Obama has done extremely well on this one point compared to his predecessors, is the simple fact that jobs for minimally educated people are disappearing, and thus many of the new jobs that are being created are for people with strong skills.

    I always felt that high school as currently constituted was somewhat of a joke, a place to manage teenagers until they were ready for the workplace or for college. I got two and a half high school credits, and then took my GED when I turned 18. Somehow after that dismal High School experience, accomplished via correspondence while I was overseas with my parents, I managed to complete both my BA and MA degrees. (Of course, speaking of unemployability, consider the options for an MA in Religions with a concentration in Biblical and Cognate Languages. Really. That’s the full title of my degree. That’s why I own a business–it’s hard to get employment otherwise!)

    I don’t mean to run down high school teachers, though I think they are often given an impossible task, but I do think that a combination of factors from excessive central control to poor pay and lousy opportunities for professional advancement tend to make high school a much less productive experience than it could be.

    I have in my library a book titled The Saber-Tooth Curriculum, originally dating back to 1939 with the proper spelling – The Sabre Tooth Curriculum, but still available in a classic edition released in 2004.

    The basic idea is that we tend to educate for past needs even as things change, such as training your hunters to deal with saber toothed tigers when such were disappearing from the landscape. It’s a great book. If you’re involved in education, you ought to get a copy and read it.

    I recall the very negative reaction all around when I brought my programmable calculator to an elementary school classroom. I was an assistant teacher, also a college student, but in the tiny church-related school where I taught that meant taking actual classes. The gist of the complaints was that I was going to deprive the students of needed basic knowledge–their ability to add columns of figures–by providing with this device, useful largely to the lazy. As I saw it, I provided them with a very early opportunity to learn the basic concepts of computing and programming. I don’t know if my very small effort really helped any of them, but I’m certain that a broader effort would have.

    These days we’re graduating students whose computer skills are somewhere between limited and non-existent. No, I don’t mean they’re all that way, I mean that we let kids out of the whole program in that condition. They’re not going to be very effective in the modern world with certain skills.

    As an aside, let me note that one classic subject could do well with some reintroduction–basic logic. My wife and I watched with great amusement, and no little impatience a couple weeks ago as three or four customers ahead of us tried to work with the self-checkout lanes at the local Walmart. Now I’m aware that these things can be frustrating. Often they don’t work correctly. But these were working just fine.

    All the customers needed to do was scan the item and place it in the bagging area. Several customers couldn’t get the idea. They’d try putting it directly in the shopping cart, back on the belt before the scanner, rescanning it (hopefully the watchful lady at the other end helped them with double charges!) and so forth. My ever helpful wife tried to explain, but the person ahead looked at her like she was green and had just hopped from a spaceship with a handy ray-gun.

    The point I’m making here is simply that these several people didn’t have enough logic, or enough understanding of the straight line “machine thinking” that was going on to learn the process. I’m sure that unwillingness was honed by previous experiences with machines that were not working, but even there a simple skill in recognizing when a process is not happening the way it’s supposed to would be helpful.

    But a New York Times Op-Ed today by J. B. Schramm [registration may be required] brings up another point I’ve been making to any young person whose attention I could hold long enough–High School is no longer enough. So I’m glad to see that some education money is being tied to the idea of preparing kids for college and that somebody is trying to measure that success. I think Schramm is quite right.

    I do hope that the bureaucrats involved will find a way to measure this without making educators spend most of their time measuring, but that is another matter. Results must be measured. Then, of course, there is the question of whether we can abandon failing programs and advance successful ones based on the results.

  • Blocking a Federal Education Grant

    While I know that some forms of determining merit pay for teachers can be unfair, in general I think tying pay to performance is an excellent, indeed necessary idea.

    Now the Florida Education Association is trying to block $700 million in grants from the federal government because it’s tied to incentive pay.

    Bad idea, I’d say!

  • Why both Bock and Borg are on my Ready-Reading Shelf

    I have been wanting to respond further to the excellent discussion over at Reclaiming the Mind, to which I linked a couple of days ago, but I’m not really an academic, and Karl Barth notwithstanding, I’m not really a theologian either. (I now am close to 100 comments behind on keeping up with the thread a Reclaiming the Mind. It’s a great discussion.)

    Nonetheless, I’ve been involved in Christian education at the congregational level for many years, most of my life, in fact, and I’m an avid consumer of Biblical scholarship. I think that the attitudes that folks are discussing there are evident in places other than academia. They show up in the books I read and often in Sunday School classes that I teach. So here goes with some comments from outside the academic environment.

    Some points:

    1. Much of the discussion has centered on Dr. Wallace’s definition of a Christian. We have gotten so sensitive to definitions, that it seems that to define is to discriminate. If you think about it, defining is discriminating. Any definition includes some and excludes others.

      If Dr. Wallace had defined “scholar” so that it only included Christians who hold something like his own views, then I think that would have significant. He would be trying to exclude on a basis similar to the one about which he was complaining. But he didn’t do that.

      I might have a slightly broader definition of Christian, but any definition includes some and excludes others. If we didn’t do that, we couldn’t communicate. By letting us know his definition, Dr. Wallace let’s us understand what he has to say, which hardly seems inappropriate.

    2. In just about any group of people based on ideas there will be some who narrowly define an “in” and an “out” group. I experienced this in my own graduate education when a professor refused even to talk to me after he read a paper I had written (not for one of his classes, fortunately!) because I was using comparative material and critical methodologies to excess. As the story was related to me, he managed to prevent publication of the paper as well. But the key point is this: I learned a great deal from that professor as well.
    3. Presuppositions abound on all sides, and sometimes we just suppose things that others have studied because we have to start from somewhere. But there is great value in examining such presuppositions and making sure we are supposing things that really need to be supposed rather than examined and established. Interaction between people with different presuppositions sometimes forces such examination.

    I think there is a distressing lack of building basic foundations in much of the literature, particularly literature written for a popular audience. Thus folks in Sunday Schools in both liberal and conservative churches believe that they are simply following the best scholarship, but they are often reading material that comes from a completely different set of scholars in each case, and those sets don’t agree.

    In one Sunday School class in which I discussed historical Jesus research, the members generally had read something by one of the Jesus Seminar scholars, or someone with a similar approach, and they were very surprised to learn about scholars who disagreed not only with the details of any particular reconstruction, but also with the method by which the reconstruction was done.

    In another class, members expected that I would dismiss Jesus Seminar material out of hand. They just wanted to hear that they didn’t have to concern themselves with any of that stuff. When I tried to explain the idea of criteria for historicity to them, I might as well have begun speaking Greek. They didn’t want to ask why one would take such an approach.

    Both of these classes were in United Methodist churches within the same general area. There was an obvious difference in what these various people were reading. But they had something in common. Neither group could explain how the other one had come to their conclusions. Both groups thought that they had the backing of good scholars.

    You may be wondering about my title at this point. I keep about six shelves of books within arm’s reach of the desk where I do my personal devotions and book study. There I keep those books that I look at regularly when I’m studying. Amongst the lexicons and grammars, I include some other works, one of which is Darrell Bock’s Jesus According to Scripture.

    Now Dr. Bock is somewhat more conservative than I am. I’m much more willing to question the historicity of portions of the stories told in the gospels. But one thing I want to do is understand how these passages have been harmonized by others. In other words, I don’t want to say that two stories are irreconcilable in their current form without both trying myself and seeing how others may have done it.

    That’s where Jesus According to Scripture comes in. Dr. Bock outlines the relationships between the various gospels for each pericope in the gospels. Once I have read that material I may not agree with any of the reconstructions, but at least I have considered the possibility.

    Now I doubt that there are many historical Jesus scholars who have never given consideration to any of these options. But I’m certain that there are other areas where scholars have not fully considered alternative ways of looking at a text. I find this in some conservative commentaries in which historical-critical research is dismissed out of hand. Fortunately, there is a substantial crop of excellent recent commentaries where this is not the case. Those commentaries are matched by critical commentaries that do not take the time to cover the possibility of some conservative options, for example for dating or authorship.

    But amongst the readers of this material, there are indeed many people who simply read one commentary or one book on a topic and believe they have a good view of what Biblical scholars believe on the topic.

    I had this emphasized to me in a study group I once led. They had asked me to lead a study on the book of Revelation, so I proceeded to used multiple commentaries in my own preparation, and also to look at some of the background texts, such as portions of Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, and so forth. After a couple of weeks I was told I was making it much too complex. The majority of the group asked me to teach from David Jeremiah’s book Escape the Coming Night, if I remember correctly. They pointed out to me how simple he made it, and wanted me to follow that so that they could understand clearly.

    I had to tell them that I really couldn’t teach that book because I very simply didn’t agree with it. It was a great shock to them. To them, this was what Revelation meant. It was the only way. There might be minor variations, but not a completely different approach. (I take a completely different approach in my study guide, Revelation: a Participatory Study Guide, for what it’s worth.) They pointed out where Dr. Jeremiah said that Revelation was really quite easy to understand once you knew how to interpret it.

    In turn, I pointed out that I have a complete shelf of books on Revelation (and I still feel I need many more), and that many of them claimed it was quite simple, and no two of those agreed. Of course, quite a number quite correctly say it’s not simple at all.

    This is why I think that there is a great need in our Christian education departments for teaching about the nuts and bolts of Biblical studies. It seems to me that much of what goes on in Sunday School classes is a sort of “vain repetition” reinforcing the stuff that we already know and have studied year after year.

    So whatever needs to happen in academia–and I’d generally favor a great deal of openness–we need more dialog between various viewpoints in our churches.

    Now here’s the hard question: Will we allow discussion of serious issues, complete with the possibility that people might come to “unapproved” conclusions in our churches? That’s perhaps a little tougher of a question than one about an academic environment. I have found that many quite liberal individuals in churches can get very wary of materials from any other denomination used in their churches. I even heard one liberal education director complain that a book had “too much Jesus” in it. (I must point out that I vigorously disagreed.)

    On the other hand, I know of many conservative churches where similar materials would be rejected. I have worked with folks who would accept invitations to speak at my church in my education program but would never consider inviting me or anyone from my church to speak at theirs.

    Which brings me to what I think is the most important point: This isn’t about quid pro quo or tit for tat. It’s not about whether liberals or conservatives are more closed minded. I kept right on inviting those folks who weren’t inviting me back. In fact, I had never imagined that they would invite me back. I and my students benefited from their expertise and from being exposed to their point of view. Not having a speaker come to their church that might reflect my perspective was entirely their loss.

    High quality diversity is an advantage, and it needs to be pursued irrespective of how others behave. Those who pursue it will reap the benefits.

  • Incentive Bonuses Equally Divided?

    The idea of equally dividing incentive bonuses between all teachers, good, average, or bad apparently makes sense to the Boston Teachers’ Union. They want to block incentive bonuses given to teachers based on performance and instead divide the money between all teachers equally.

    Note also that the money is coming from private foundations. That’s at least one teacher’s union that is not helping to improve education.

    (HT: The Agitator.)

  • Blogs in Tenure Applications Etc

    There has been a good deal of discussion of this around the blogosphere, related to graduate school and job applications as well. Nels P. Highberg provides an interesting example at ProfHacker. (HT: Exploring Our Matrix)

  • Singing Praise to President Obama?

    CBS is reporting on a school that has children singing songs about President Obama’s accomplishments. I note that the story compares the reaction to this to the reaction to Obama giving a speech. I thought the speech reaction was way overblown. The president of the United States should be able to address the nation, and to address schoolchildren as well.

    But even in the context of Black history month as the school superintendent said this was, I think this is deplorable. Use historical figures, celebrate current African-American citizens, celebrate President Obama as our first African-American president, but leave out the songs of praise for his specific policies.

    In both religion and politics, it seems some teachers fail to comprehend the idea of neutrality.

    HT: Dispatches

  • Seventh-day Adventist Education and Evolution

    I recently wrote with appreciation about my Seventh-day Adventist education in Biblical studies over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. Today a friend sent me an e-mail directing me to a post on Inside Higher Ed, discussing a problem with the teaching of evolution at La Sierra University, a Seventh-day Adventist school. I didn’t attend La Sierra myself, but do have some family connections there.

    In the story we see a fairly common complaint, a biology (or other science) professor teaching evolution in a Christian classroom where the school constituency does not support it. In some cases, we find a very divided constituency. In a Seventh-day Adventist school, such teaching is directly contrary to the church’s statement of belief.

    From Adventist.org:

    In its statement of fundamental beliefs the Seventh-day Adventist Church affirms a divine creation as described in the biblical narrative of Genesis 1.

    – God is Creator of all things, and has revealed in Scripture the authentic account of His creative activity. In six days the Lord made “the heaven and the earth” and all living things upon the earth, and rested on the seventh day of that first week. Thus He established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of His completed creative work. The first man and woman were made in the image of God as the crowning work of Creation, given dominion over the world, and charged with responsibility to care for it. When the world was finished it was “very good,” declaring the glory of God.–Gen 1; 2; Ex 20:8-11; Ps 19:1-6; 33:6, 9; 104; Heb 11:3

    In this case, a student asked to present a paper that included his creationist beliefs, and was permitted to do so provided he first showed a full understanding of the mainstream science involved. In the end, the professor decided that the paper did not fulfill that requirement. From an e-mail quoted in the Inside Higher Ed story:

    “The paper you sent me is unacceptable in its present form,” Gary Bradley, a professor of biology, wrote to Cerna May 12. “You said you would address the geological issues presented in class, demonstrating that you understand the data and the mainstream interpretations. Only then would you attach a paragraph taking issue with that interpretation. You have not done this. You have demonstrated only superficial knowledge with what was presented in class and even that was done with clear apologetic skepticism.”

    This is the sort of story that provokes mixed emotions for me. First and foremost, I am an advocate of free speech. It is a topic on which I come very close to extremes, especially for someone who calls himself a moderate, even a “passionate moderate.” But freedom of speech doesn’t require other private persons to provide one with a platform for that speech. As a publisher, I am very well aware of this. There are many things I think should be legal that I will not publish myself.

    Education is similar, in my view. A teacher must obviously set some bounds on what is allowed in the classroom, and a student must work within those bounds to fulfill an assignment. While I would certainly commend any teacher for making those bounds as broad as possible, consistent with accomplishing the educational goals, I don’t think a teacher is obligated to allow free speech full reign in a classroom—certainly not by law, and I don’t think even ethically.

    But here we take a step further. A church establishes a school, such as La Sierra University, and presumably expects it to serve the educational needs of its constituency. What happens if it does not do so? I remember in my days as a student at Andrews University, seeing an ad offering research grants for people who would do research to demonstrate that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Could those be considered scientific grants? Would the money be paid if the research proved that the earth was, in fact, 4.5 billion years old? These grants were not offered by the university, but they do demonstrate the feelings of the constituency.

    Is it acceptable for a church-related educational institution to control what is taught in its classrooms? I believe this should be the case for the most part, with exceptions for accountability which I discuss below. I may disagree. I may choose not to go to that school or send my children there, but a church institution has additional accountability to the folks who created and maintain it.

    I want to make clear here that I believe that the best protection for freedom of speech in education is through competition from multiple educational institutions pursuing their own policies and goals. Accreditation provides some accountability, but I would personally prefer that accreditation dealt with the minimum requirements, and not with the details of what else might be taught. (Note that La Sierra is a fully accredited school, and I would be very surprised if they did not meet, and continue to meet and exceed standards.)

    At the same time I am in sympathy with the professor in this case. Your freedom of belief and freedom of speech does not give you the right to a particular grade from a particular professor. If the assignment involves understanding the way mainstream science understands the fossil record, for example, you should demonstrate such understanding. Briefly, my ideal is that a professor requires understanding but not belief, and does not penalize one for belief. (That ideal should require a great deal of definition and support, don’t you think? Well, it must wait for another post.)

    Also, just to cover the bases, I am an advocate of mainstream science, and that alone, being taught in public school classrooms, both because I think we have little enough time to cover the basics in a high school education these days, and because I am tremendously unhappy with government employees, teachers in this case, getting into material that is largely religiously driven, much less actually teaching religion. (I apply the same standard to public school Bible classes. I don’t like them.)

    But in this case, I’m more interested in the best way for a church group to educate its own young people. Growing up SDA I was thoroughly indoctrinated with young earth creationism. If you look back at the SDA statement of belief, I was required to memorize every single one of the scriptures–yes, whole chapters–as part of the process of making sure I understood just how God created the world. Most of this education was in what were called “self-supporting institutions” in those days, the “self-supporting” denoting that they were not financially supported by the denomination.

    I learned only science that was consistent with this view. Since I dodged biology and took chemistry once I was in the regular Adventist educational system, I continued to avoid biology, geology, and related topics. To the extent that I challenged this view, it was from a biblical perspective, as I looked at the text of the early genealogies and became convinced that the earth was much more than 6,000 years old, and that this view was scripturally sound. But I was thinking maybe 100,000 or so years. Thus I left school with an MA degree without any understanding of evolution.

    Again, I do not say this as an assault on Adventist education. There are plenty of other groups who struggle with the same material, and they often have similar problems. Had I attended a mainstream SDA secondary school, I would likely have encountered a bit more of evolutionary theory. As it turned out, I simply started reading material on evolution, especially in astronomy and geology, on my own. Now people will often think I was somehow brainwashed, but what struck me most in my reading was the number of cases in which my indoctrination had misstated what science intended to teach. (Hold that thought a minute.)

    I recall teaching a class in Genesis, covering the prehistory (1-11) shortly after joining my first United Methodist congregation. I had no idea what the range of beliefs in the pews actually were. As it turned out, there were two ladies, one who sat at my right as we gathered around the table, and the other at my left. The lady at my right was a theistic evolutionist, thoroughly convinced that anything else was nonsense. The lady at my left was a young earth creationist, thoroughly convinced that evolution was at least the first step on the road to hell. Both were Methodists in good standing and leaders in the church. So I learned that changing denominations hadn’t changed some of the basic issues. Yes, there was no similar Methodist statement to the SDA statement, but all the viewpoints were there, and they were contentious.

    So where is this leading me? I think we have a serious educational weakness in the church in general. I heard it in SDA circles–let’s just teach “the truth,” let’s use only SDA literature. Now I hear it in Methodist churches–we have the cross and flame on the sign, we need to use Methodist literature in all our classes. But it wasn’t possible to do a solid indoctrination when I was growing up and it has only become more difficult as information science progresses. Isolation from all other ideas isn’t possible.

    It’s not that all Methodist literature is bad. Neither is all SDA literature. In fact, I like a great deal of both. Considering I grew up and was educated SDA and then became Methodist, I have quite a bit of both on my shelves. But we have a wonderful opportunity through Sunday School (or Sabbath School for any SDA readers!) and small groups, and I don’t believe we use it very well. We have an opportunity to really study subjects in depth, to discuss them with people holding various viewpoints and learn to truly understand opposing viewpoints. But so frequently we just rehash the list of major doctrines or major social issues without getting serious.

    When should children and young people learn to understand a topic like evolution? I’d suggest it happen at the earliest opportunity. If you don’t accept the theory of evolution, you also have the time to give your reasons. Shielding them from the information, or from having to express an understanding of it, will not help you.

    This little ramble was triggered over the subject of evolution, but I would add to this hermeneutics in the broadest sense. While I was required to memorize hundreds of verses of scripture, very little time was spent on how one would understand those scriptures. I had no idea how someone could come up with a different view of the scriptures than I had, because I had no idea how we had come up with our view, which in turn became my view. That is an approach that is bound to fail in the long run.

    A choice made in ignorance cannot be very good, even if the choice is technically correct.

  • The Homeschool Advantage

    Because of many of my political positions, not to mention my theological ones, many people suppose that I would think public education was the be-all and end-all of education. And I do believe that making education available to everyone is an essential of civilized society.

    The problem is that writing a health care bill titled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 will not assure that all Americans have affordable health care choices, and creating a “public education” system does not necessarily mean that the public will be educated.

    Both fall into the category of difficult goals; the methods used to accomplish those goals deserve to be carefully studied.

    Today I found a report of a study on home schooled children on the Christian Post. This study does not appear to be done by a completely independent agency, and even in the course of the short news story, there are potential factors other than homeschooling that might influence the children’s academic performance, such as two parent families and the obvious advantage of parental involvement and so forth.

    But my own experience makes me tend to believe the study has some validity. I was homeschooled, and no matter how many times I have compared by experience with public school students I have never discovered a case where someone had a more academically challenging experience in public school.

    I have significant problems with much home school curriculum, such as material from ABeka, which uses the King James Version of the Bible to teach children, and a huge amount of material that uncritically teaches varieties of young age creationism. These are serious problems, in my view, but they don’t detract from the fact that home schooled children are learning more.

    With so much failure in public schools we need to be taking a radical look at just how much success we are having. We’re not doing that well, and a democracy needs educated citizens. I would be the first to say that home schooling is not a solution to our educational problems, though I believe strongly that parents should be protected in the right to provide home schooling to their children. Home schoolers have a huge advantage in being able to select their students–absolutely!

    At the same time, perhaps we need to learn something from this success and apply it. We are not looking for tweaks to a working system. We need revolutionary change in a failing system.

    PS: I’m aware that I have vented without suggesting solutions myself. This is a blog, after all, and I get to vent!

  • Congratulations to Houston Baptist University

    … on their new Master of Arts in Biblical Languages.

    In growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church I got used to the idea that in order to teach Bible or become a pastor one started studying theology/religion at the undergraduate level and then continued at the graduate level with the fundamentals out of the way. While I am no longer SDA, I do appreciate my SDA education. I took my BA with a major in Biblical Languages and then was able to take greater advantage of my graduate professors.

    My MA was in religion with a concentration in Biblical and Cognate languages, so didn’t look much like the one that HBU is offering, but it looks like a good program.

    So all in all, this is the kind of thing I like to see happening at Christian schools.