Thoughts on Consumerism and Modern Education
By Teri Ong
About the time our 3rd grandchild was born (May 2010), I was listening to two men on the radio arguing about whether or not it was right for colleges to have attendance policies which include penalties for cutting classes. One man didn’t think it should matter to the administration if a student was present or not. If one could pass the course without the benefit of the lectures, why should anyone care? And if one could not pass the course, it was his own money he was wasting.
The other man, however, argued that a student was not paying for credit for a particular course, but was actually paying for a diploma from an institution with a certain reputation. If the student’s non-attendance would hurt the institution’s reputation, then the school had a vested interest in requiring the student to attend. After all, what counts most from the school’s perspective is the marketability of the school’s reputation.
The discussion continued as others weighed in with consumer-oriented ideas about our system of higher education. Is the student buying a credential? Is the student buying transferability? Is the student buying his own marketability in the job market? Is the college selling its reputation? Is it selling a “good-old-boys” agreement with other institutions?
I was stunned! I have been a teacher for over 30 years, and for all that time I thought that what a student was getting from me was an increase in specialized knowledge and skills which would make him a better informed, more mature, more well-rounded human being. Now I find out that, like the Wizard of Oz, all I was really expected to do was hand out attractive diplomas in exchange for a fee! By the way, have you noticed that even education for “working adults” has changed in focus and nomenclature from “continuing education” to “degree completion”?
The discussion on the radio that night all hinged on the idea of monetary “return on investment” for one or both of the parties involved in the educational process.
I don’t know when commercialism became so rampant in education. Perhaps it was a result of the Industrial Revolution when all of life took a turn toward consumerism. I tend to blame my own generation. There has never been a more self-obsessed generation of consumers than the “Baby Boomers.” But then again, one of the wise old Greeks warned about what would happen if teachers were ever allowed to teach in exchange for money. The first fully accredited university was probably established somewhere just outside of Eden.
Dr. Elaine Storkey, a Cambridge University professor, gave a lecture to some of my students last year which traced the social history of Cambridge through the naming of its colleges. The colleges that came into existence during the Roman Catholic era bear the names of saints; the Renaissance colleges bear the names of secular monarchs, and those that came into existence during the Reformation are more foundational– Christ College, Jesus College, Trinity College. Later colleges bear the names of their financial benefactors. In America, our colleges and universities and their buildings are likewise named after the big donors rather than after the big brains or, better yet, the big ideas. Many of ours bear the name “State.”
A modern day recruitment tool used by colleges of all sorts is a ranking of how much their graduates make one year after graduation, five years after graduation, ten years after graduation, etc. We would all at least give lip-service to the idea that how much a person makes has little bearing on what kind of person he or she is, unless, of course, all we are interested in is whether said person is rich or not rich. Nonetheless, money is the primary measure of successful “educated” personhood in today’s America.
When people talk to me about the college where I teach, they invariably ask, “Are you accredited?” They never mean, “Am I going to learn things there?” They almost always mean, “Will your credits get me into a more prestigious school where I can buy a more prestigious degree and ultimately get the greatest monetary return on my investment?” No one ever really questions that they will learn many wonderful and valuable things in our non-accredited college, but the nagging question remains, “What good are all of those wonderful and valuable things if they can’t get me money and/or recognition?” It is very hard to persuade people that being a better human, especially being a better Christian human, is its own reward, and that God will use the tools we get, no matter where we get them from. We even had one Christian college registrar tell us that she thought it was immoral and should be illegal to take students’ money in exchange for education that wasn’t readily transferable into other institutions. She could not see that having the right kind of stuff in your head and heart was better and ultimately more valuable than merely having stuff on the right kind of paper.
Whether one looks at the ancient Greek model or the ancient Hebrew model, the old idea of education was to grow better people, not necessarily richer or more prestigious people. What is a better person? They meant people with better character, better ability to think and analyze, better ability to solve problems and be persuasive, with more wisdom in relationships with man and God.
Cicero, a Hellenized Roman, wrote in his educational treatise “On duties,”
“Honour springs from one of four sources. It consists in sagacity and the perception of truth, or in the maintenance of human society, respect for the rights of others, and the faithful observance of contracts, or in the greatness and strength of a lofty and invincible spirit, or finally in that order and measure in word and deed which constitute temperance and self-command.” (The Great Tradition, p. 85)
King Solomon said,
“For the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, Guarding the paths of justice, and He preserves the way of His godly ones. Then you will discern righteousness and justice And equity and every good course. For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.” (Proverbs 2:6-10)
Contemporary educators are not very interested in that type of education. They are more interested in shaping the character of students to be compliant contributors to the tax base. Modern students think they are getting an education; they are really just learning a trade. It might be a prestigious trade like lawyering, engineering or doctoring, or it may be something like “golf turf management.” (Yes, a state university in Minnesota offers that “major.”) Schools offer hundreds of such “programs.” That is why so many people these days have to go back to school for “retraining”; their program became obsolete, and they didn’t have the intellectual or character skills to be able to cross over into some new field.
C. S. Lewis, in his famous critique of education, The Abolition of Man, warned of this sort of “education.”
“Where the old initiated, the new merely “conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as a grown bird deals with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry keeper deals with young birds – making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.”
The current generation may believe it is getting a “liberal” education, but modern education is “anti-liberal”; it is not freeing. The American education system manufactures intellectual clones to serve the mechanism of state, people who are “free” to pay income taxes on production and sales/use taxes on consumption. It extrudes white collar tradesmen and calls them “professionals.” It presses out moral relativists who have compromised all virtue in the process of earning a “degree,” who will mount no resistance to whatever moral burdens the state lays upon their shoulders.
A growing number of people, primarily Christians, have seen the danger of the moral decay in American higher education and have sought ways to protect their young from losing their virtue in the classrooms of the fools who have said in their hearts, “There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) They understand that the “companions of fools will come to destruction.” (Proverbs 13:20) They understand that students “become like their teachers” when they are fully trained. (Luke 6:40)
So how have such parents and students solved this valid contemporary dilemma? They have devised ways for students to get credentials and degrees without going off to colleges. Principally, they seek college credits for content the student already knows. They have found ways to have a diploma in hand, but have not necessarily solved the problem of having thinking skills in their heads or virtue in their hearts. They are not necessarily better off than Frank Baum’s scarecrow after his encounter with the wonderful wizard. This type of credential fails as miserably as the average state-sponsored college in recognizing that there are many important things to learn in life that cannot be reduced to a standardized, computer-scored test. And for as morally sensitive as such students think they are, they are still primarily focused on being able to practice a trade and make as much money as possible.
It is time to scrap “credentialing” in favor of true Biblical discipleship. Students and parents in the Body of Christ must recognize that there are teachers worthy of being followed as examples, as was the Apostle Paul. (Phil. 3:17) Educational visionary and reformer John Adams recognized the power in the underlying concept of discipleship. He wrote,
“Our students must be led. They must be taught. Who should lead and teach them? Certainly, persons whose lives in some useful sense they share and influence, persons drawn to such work because they love teaching the young and delight in watching their progress and in contributing to it. In a small college, one in which virtually all know or are known to each other, pupils and teachers alike… here, the real stick-to-the-ribs work of an education to our purpose may thrive.” (An Education for Our Time, pp. 23-4)
Parents and students must recognize that loving God with all one’s heart and soul and mind requires special skills, discipline, and accountability which may be best learned in a godly classroom with a godly teacher. They must recognize that students who are studying in order to be “Approved unto God” will never be wasting time and money, even if their course is not humanly “accredited.” (II Tim. 2:15)
Dr. Kevin Bauder, president of Central Theological Seminary, has rightly discerned that
“Christians do not need their own institutions to train doctors, lawyers, financiers, botanists, microbiologists, engineers, agribusiness persons, optometrists, disc jockeys, musicians or educationists. What they need are institutions that will produce graduates who are competent in their faith and who can bring their Christian perspectives and values to bear upon whatever discipline or vocation they enter. If a Bible college can accomplish this task, then it will be well on the road to success.” (inthenickoftime@centralseminary.edu)
Bringing a Christian perspective to bear on all aspects of life and service requires training and discipline of mind that few students can achieve through “independent study.” Sheep do need shepherds. But a good education which protects and nurtures purity of soul as well as rigor of mind may have far-reaching cultural effect as students mature into those capable of “that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every great civilization,” as Owen Barfield observed. (History in English Words, p. 62)
One of the early church fathers, John Chrysostom, in his treatise entitled “The Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children,” astutely recognized the value of shunning the worldly way of thinking as regards education:
“Let us then implant in him this wisdom [godly wisdom] and let us exercise him therein, that he may know the meaning of human desires, wealth, reputation, power, and may disdain these and strive after the highest. And let us bring words of exhortation to his mind: “My child, fear God alone and fear none other but Him.”
…The summit of wisdom is refusal to be excited by childish things. So let him be taught to think nothing of wealth or worldly reputation or power or death or the present life on earth. (The Great Tradition, p. 205)
This purity of character and focus will never be achieved if parents or students are focused on worldly credentialing and earning potential.
When it comes to an economic perspective on the education of young people, King Solomon did express some educational ideas in consumer terms. He said, “Buy– and do not sell– truth, wisdom, instruction and understanding.” (Prov. 23:23) But he also acknowledged that many are not interested in this type of transaction, “Why is there in the hand of a fool the purchase price of wisdom, since he has no heart for it?” (Prov. 17:16) Jesus gave the key to a true “liberal” education– a freeing education. He said the truth would make us free, but we must want the truth in order to be able to recognize the truth.
Where does all this leave me as a teacher in a tiny, itty-bitty non-accredited Bible college? My hope is that God would bless me with instrumentality in the lives of my students and that maybe one of them might say someday, “I have taken her class and I have come away a better person– I bought wisdom from her that was more precious to me than gold.”
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References:
Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Barington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2007.
Bunting III, Josiah. An Education for Our Time. Washington D.C.:Regnery Books, 1998.
Gamble, Richard M. (ed.). The Great Tradition. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1996.
