Cedarville Magazine, Spring 2014

No part of this task is without its challenges. For thousands of years, education has been one of humanity’s most controversial topics. Even today, in a society where Americans largely operate under a shared understanding of what education is, constant comparisons to foreign education systems and foreign students reveal that we still wonder if we are going about it the right way. This deep- seated uneasiness should not come as a surprise. Education contains the power to establish the future of society, and that provides fertile soil for controversy. Further, the enterprise of higher education faces new difficulties. The modern American university system has produced the most massive and sophisticated graduate program of education the world has ever seen. Yet this does not make it immune to the forces that will completely reshape its nature in the near future. On the administrative side, there are economic realities to consider. The financial paradigm of higher education is not an indefinitely workable model. How much longer can we expect colleges and universities to continue in an unconstrained cost spiral, with budgets and tuition costs growing at a rate that far outstrips the cost of living in the rest of the economy? The university model simply cannot survive by perpetuating this pattern. Then there are changing realities in the classroom. The technological revolution continues to alter the very nature of how we process information. In 2010, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that most American adolescents are spending between seven and 10 hours a day with digital devices. When they sit in college classrooms, they are no longer looking at the professor; they are looking at a screen. For better or worse, incoming college students are digital natives, and we must adapt our methods to this reality. Challenges to Christian Higher Education While these are serious challenges that demand consideration, they are in no way the most serious difficulties confronting us. No, the most serious challenges facing Christian higher education are the ones that accompany the word Christian . We are not just about the business of higher education, but a higher education that is specifically and intentionally Christian in content and conviction. However, this goal is increasingly out of step with the values of the broader world of higher education. The secular academy operates on premises that now stand diametrically opposed to the foundational beliefs of Christianity. Over the last half-century, those institutions that have tried to carve out a Christian model that also fits in terms of the educational, intellectual, and cultural aspirations of the larger world of higher education have found it increasingly difficult to maintain this position. Sadly, when push comes to shove, many of these institutions have chosen academic approval over theological accountability. Why is holding this position so difficult?There are twomain reasons. First, it is difficult because all the norms of what establishes academic credibility are set by secular institutions. In an article published in The New York Review of Books , Richard Lewontin, a research professor at Harvard University and one of the leading figures in genetics and evolution, reflected on the concept of intelligent design and argued that within the context of the secular academy, “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” In other words, the larger world of higher education has concluded that theistic truth claims must be excluded up front. Any appeal to objective, revealed truth is seen as illegitimate. Under this premise, the larger academy is increasingly convinced that Christian higher education can be neither genuinely educational nor intellectually plausible. Simply put, the secular academy sees Christian higher education as an oxymoron. Second, we have reached the point where we must understand that all education is moral. All education is steeped in a worldview. All education is an attempt to train people to think and believe certain THE LARGER ACADEMY IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION CAN BE NEITHER GENUINELY EDUCATIONAL NOR INTELLECTUALLY PLAUSIBLE. Cedarville Magazine | 15