People want to live a life that matters. Nobody wants to waste their life right?
And many today think that a college education is necessary for living a good life. And if you can somehow get into the Ivy League, well, then that’s the golden ticket to the inside track.
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But let the buyer beware. You should know that the Ivy league cannot deliver meaning and purpose. And to be fair…most colleges can’t either. Why?
They are simply not equipped to. And their inability is creating disillusionment and drift among this generation.
To see this, listen to the candid admission made by Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker:
“Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.”
The fundamental question here is this: what is a human life for? How do you become fully human? And this is a worldview question.
The Problem with Colleges and Universities Today
The problem can be summarized in a word–reductionism.
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Not to worry, I will unpack this. But this concept is essential to grasp because it’s everywhere. It is the assumption that drives the whole show in modern education.
Here is what reductionism looks like: You take a human being and reduce him or her to merely an information and data container. As I have written elsewhere, this reductionism is why we are failing our students.
Is information important? Yes. But is it the whole enchilada? Not even close.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The Christian worldview provides the resources and holistic vision necessary for how you give a student–or any human being for that matter–a meaningful life. I have shared my thoughts on how to teach from a Christian worldview in another post.
However, just so I am not misunderstood, I think education is a great thing–especially for Christians. College is and can be a very important path to living well. But true education is not about testing well or finding a job that pays the bills–it’s about living well.
A diploma doesn’t guarantee human flourishing (i.e., what is classically understood as “happiness” before we completely emotionalized the term in the modern era). And the sooner we figure that out the better off we will all be.
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One perennial offender is the notion that all religions basically teach the same thing.
I also will miss his razor sharp whit and creative ability to turn a phrase along with the way he would go after whoever was arguing before the court to defend a point rationally. Every time an opinion was delivered from the Supreme Court, I always wanted to see what Scalia had written because I knew his opinions would be rooted in the text of the constitution (i.e., textualism or originalism) instead of the prevailing cultural winds of our day (sometimes refereed to the “living and breathing document approach”).
The book is