by Matthew Pinson | Feb 9, 2016
Trends Toward Renewal of the Core Curriculum
Recently there have been trends in the other direction, back toward a very specific and prescribed core curriculum. These moves have come from opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum.
On the Left
Remember earlier I said that the educational modernists wanted to move away from an emphasis on teaching a body of knowledge designed to transmit truth to students. Well, ironically, some of the call for a more prescribed core curriculum has come from the left. After succeeding in destroying the last vestiges of the old Western canon and traditional core curriculum, many on the extreme left have called for a return to a more prescribed core curriculum. Now of course, their desire is not to transmit a body of knowledge to students in order to inculcate ancient wisdom and virtue and truth in them. Quite the contrary—they want to be intentional about displacing the vestiges of the older thinking in their students and replacing them with the ideology of modernity and postmodernity.
This makes sense. If you are deeply committed to radical leftist ideology, if you have dedicated your life to Marxist or feminist ideals, and the reason you went into education to begin with was to fight for a woman’s right to choose, same-sex marriage, radical environmental ideology, and the redistribution of wealth, then it makes sense that you would want to transmit to and inculcate in your students these ideas and ideals.
Conservative Movement toward the Core Curriculum
However, the main impetus for renewing the general education core curriculum has been from conservative thinkers on higher education, both within and outside the evangelical community. It’s helpful to use a term often employed by Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School:
Renewal through Retrieval
Leading conservatives argue that we must renew general, liberal arts education in the American college by retrieving time-tested educational models of the past. And this is in both the form and the content of those historical models. The form involves how the curriculum is put together, that is, being largely prescribed rather than a series of electives. The content involves the transmission of ancient wisdom, virtue, and truth.
This renewal of the core curriculum started back in the 1980s and 1990s. Educational leaders in the political sphere wrote reports criticizing leading universities for their lack of the form or content of a traditional core curriculum. Examples of this include William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy and Lynne Cheney’s 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students. These voices were joined by scholars and authors such as Allan Bloom, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, heavily influencing the conservative conversation on higher education, and other thinkers such as New Criterion editor Roger Kimball. The mantle was taken up by conservative think tanks and professional societies like the National Association of Scholars and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and by higher education public interest groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
During this time, scores of colleges have undergone curricular revision, and other colleges have been started to reflect these conservative ideals for higher education. The majority of these institutions have been conservative evangelical and Roman Catholic institutions, but have also included Eastern Orthodox and Jewish colleges. Some of these schools have stripped the entire curriculum down to a reading list of great books, while most have simply prescribed a curriculum that their faculty believe will produce an educated person to whom has been transmitted a body of knowledge that reflects time-tested eternal verities, produces breadth of knowledge and introduction to diverse ideas and modes of inquiry, and produces competent citizen-leaders who are good critical thinkers.
Almost all of these schools have seen themselves as being motivated by their conservative Christian worldview, which reasserts the unity of knowledge under God and the duty of teachers as wise men and women who bequeath their students with a body of knowledge that they, in their professional judgment, believe will produce in them an educated mind rooted in the Christian view of the world and life.
The Vision for Welch College
This approach to the general education curriculum is what I long for at Welch College. We have always argued strongly for the unity of knowledge rooted and grounded in the Christian world-and-life-view. We have held to theology as the queen of the sciences. We have continued to believe that we’re engaged in something more life-transforming than mere technical or career training, and this involves a broad generalist approach rather than an emphasis on specialization.
We have valued faculty-directed learning that is mentorship-driven and student-sensitive. This is seen in the new conceptual model for Teacher Education that Dr. Thurman Pate and Dr. Etta Patterson have produced, which counters Deweyan and constructivist models of education, advocating more traditional approaches to teaching and learning.
We are a community of faith and learning that holds conservative, classical, and broadly traditional learning in high esteem, while most of us would not define this as narrowly as some, as limited to the great books and classical languages and literature. This approach arises from our time-honored commitment to traditional values in private and public life that we believe receive their motivation from Holy Scripture and from the consensual wisdom of the Christian tradition.
What we have put forward is a truly core curriculum, a prescribed course of study for every student that enters Welch College as a freshman and graduates from a baccalaureate degree program.* I see this as more consistently, creatively, and carefully putting into curricular form the academic values we already espouse.
By embodying our academic values in a core curriculum for all our students, we will be enabled more effectively and fruitfully to fulfill the mission to which God has called us: to educate leaders to serve Christ, His Church, and His world through biblical thought and life, as we move forward for the future of Welch College, the glory of God, and the extension of Christ’s kingdom.
*This will not be the case with students who transfer in from other institutions.
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 4, 2016
The Erosion of the Core Curriculum
American higher education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a growing lack of commitment to the unity of knowledge and a resultant emphasis on academic specialization. These trends, together with modern student-centered theories of learning and knowledge, eroded the classic core curriculum. The more modernity took hold, the more knowledge became fragmented, and the more knowledge became fragmented, the more the curriculum that transmitted that knowledge became fragmented. And the pace of this erosion was only quickened as students were more and more given the reins over the best way to be educated. Furthermore, the sheer number of courses required in general education gradually dwindled, with specialization and career training now the order of the day.
So the twentieth-century general education curriculum is the story of gradual erosion in colleges and universities. The more secularized schools were the first to innovate, especially schools more dominated by technical and technological training. Colleges that retained their Christian moorings gradually followed.
Distribution Requirements
The first step in this erosion was a move toward what was called distribution requirements, with careful qualifications. Under this system, students were required, for example, to take two three-hour courses of history. But both courses had to be in the same course sequence. For example, if you took Western Civilization I, you had to take Western Civilization II. You could choose to take say, American History or Ancient History, but you had to take both the first and second semesters of whichever sequence you chose. Or, in the case of literature, you were required to take two courses in literature, and you could choose between Western Literary Masterpieces, American Literature, or British Literature. But you had to take both your literature courses in either Western, American, or British Literature. This was the more conservative distribution requirement system.
This eventually gave way to a freer distribution requirement system. So, to use history and literature as examples again, you had to take six hours in history, but you could choose any two history courses you wanted to take. You might choose to take a course in Readings in the Diplomatic History of Nineteenth-Century Russia or a course in the History of Rock Music since 1975. But you simply had to register for two courses in history. Or, in the case of literature, you could take one course in Greek Drama and another in Race, Sex, and Gender in the Works of Mark Twain. Student choice became more and more commonplace, especially after the student revolution movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Move Away from the Western Canon
The move away from a more traditional curriculum was also helped along by the move away from a traditional literary canon. This new mentality held, for example, that Guatemalan peasant history and literature was on par with the history of the Renaissance and the writings of Shakespeare.
This “politically correct” trend was simply a delayed result in the 1980s and 1990s of the change that really took place in the students that led the student revolution movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While the student protesters in the 60s and 70s were preoccupied with anti-war and economic justice, the student protesters of the 80s and 90s were preoccupied with race, sex, and gender, shouting “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!”
The freer distribution requirement system over time began to be traded in for more of a general education elective system that would maximize student choice. So, rather than being able to choose two courses among a panoply of history courses, and another two courses among myriad literature courses, students in many colleges and universities were now required simply to choose, say, fifteen semester hours in the humanities, twelve semester hours in the social sciences, and so on.
Christian Higher Education’s Response
So how did Christian colleges react during this gradual evolution of the general education curriculum in American higher education during the twentieth century? Most—while emphasizing the Christian worldview throughout the curriculum and while often requiring specific courses in Christian worldview thinking and religion—became simply a warmed-over Christianized version of the general education trends of the twentieth century, but usually about twenty years behind the secular trends.
I’m not suggesting that Christian colleges didn’t know what they were doing or were not concerned about Christian higher education and the Christian worldview. They did and were. What I’m saying is that they weren’t as concerned as they should have been about the traditional aims of the college general education curriculum. And because of this concern, they unwittingly let something slip away that was an important expression of their uniquely Judeo-Christian view of higher education.
by Matthew Pinson | Feb 2, 2016
The New Welch College Core
Last year Welch College unveiled its new “Welch College Core.” The Welch College Core is a completely revised general education curriculum that every student who comes to Welch as a freshman and graduates with a bachelor’s degree will take.* Over the next few posts, I will be discussing the new Welch College Core. I’ll start with a discussion of the rationale for a core curriculum and then talk about what the core actually looks like.
“The Discipline and Furniture of the Mind”
Traditionally, colleges and universities had core curricula for general education. These curricula carefully outlined a series of prescribed courses that would carry out the institution’s goals for a breadth of knowledge to provide what the Yale Report of 1828 called “the discipline and furniture of the mind” and thus produce a truly educated person.
By “discipline of the mind,” the report meant what we today would call logical thinking or critical thinking. The “furniture of the mind” referred to passing on content—knowledge and wisdom and virtue—to students. The traditional core curriculum was embodied in what historians of American higher education call “the old-time college.”
The Unity of Knowledge
This notion of a core curriculum was based on the unity of knowledge. Most of the old time-colleges were founded by Protestant denominations. But even most of the state universities in nineteenth-century America had required chapel and required religion courses, and the way they approached education was from the vantage point of the traditional Protestant worldview. Even the Unitarian schools, for most of the nineteenth-century, believed in a basic theistic and Judeo-Christian view of knowledge.
The basic implication of this Judeo-Christian approach to knowledge in American higher education for the core curriculum is that this worldview presupposed the unity of knowledge. It made sense to have a unified core curriculum that embodied the best of classical and Judeo-Christian liberal arts and sciences. That is because these Christian scholars believed that the Judeo-Christian worldview, and the classical wisdom that overlapped with it, embodied the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The Fragmentation of Knowledge
Beginning in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the unity of knowledge broke down, giving way to the fragmentation of knowledge. And this breakdown of the unity of knowledge was the direct accompaniment to the secularization of the academy in America, a story so well, and sadly, told by James Burtchaell in his classic book, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of College and Universities from their Christian Denominations. As leading American intellectuals began to doubt the truth claims of Holy Scripture, they had to latch onto something in the place of biblical Christianity. This tended to be empirical knowledge, knowledge that could be substantiated by evidence from the five senses.
This development displaced theology as the queen of the sciences, replacing it with empirical science. One result of this process was that the emphasis in education gradually moved from the educated person—the broad, generalistic schooling of the classically trained mind—to the scientist. The shift was from generalist to specialist.
Traditional education in the Western world valued broad interdisciplinary learning that made connections between the different disciplines. And it valued this sort of learning because of its convictions about the unity of knowledge. On the contrary, modern education, because it devalued the unity of knowledge, moved away from an emphasis on broad, interdisciplinary learning and increasingly emphasized specialization and specialized fields of study.
Education as Career Training
A factor that accompanied the move toward specialization was that college education became more and more identified with career training. Before the twentieth century, the public mission of the baccalaureate degree was to provide broad general education that would produce truly educated leaders who had classically trained minds and knew how to be exemplary citizens and leaders in society. If at all, preparation for specific careers was seen as only a secondary or tertiary mission of undergraduate degree programs. Colleges and universities were not technical training centers. They were educational institutions. Their aim was to produce, not technicians, but well-educated leaders. This all changed in the twentieth century.
Student-Centered Theories
Another way that modernity was affecting education at this time was the student-centered learning approaches that educational theorists such as John Dewey were promoting. Traditionally, the faculty saw curriculum as its prerogative, indeed as its territory. Students did not have the knowledge to decide which courses to piece together for a good general education. The faculty did. The faculty had not only the knowledge but also the wisdom and experience and understanding of the world, past and present, that gave them the ability to decide for young adults how best the latter could become educated persons.
However, in the twentieth century, educational theorists began to question this received wisdom of the Western intellectual tradition. The new student-centered theories demanded that colleges give students more choice in putting together their own personalized general education curriculum. Indeed, such modern theories held (and hold) that knowledge is about the individual creating meaning and knowledge subjectively, rather than about the transmission of objective knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next. If this is true, they concluded, of course students should be in the driver’s seat in deciding how they are to be appropriately educated.
The Shrinking of Content
Another effect of the new educational philosophy was that content became less important in general education. Technical skill and critical thinking are really the goals of education in a modern democratic society, it was thought. So the earlier idea of a faculty committed to transmitting ancient wisdom to its students, inculcating truth in them, with that faculty prescribing a curriculum that would best accomplish that goal, was dispensed with.
Remember the Yale Report of 1828 that I mentioned earlier? That document had said that higher education was about the discipline and furniture of the mind. One could say that modernity placed almost all the emphasis on the discipline of the mind—intellectual skills and breadth—but almost none on the furniture of the mind—teaching a body of knowledge designed to transfer truth to students. Obviously, this approach would demand a move away from the core curriculum of the past.
Thus the lack of commitment to the unity of knowledge and the resultant specialization, together with modern student-centered theories of learning and knowledge, eroded the classic core curriculum. The more modernity took hold, the more knowledge became fragmented, and the more knowledge became fragmented, the more the curriculum that transmitted that knowledge became fragmented. And the pace of this erosion was only quickened as students were more and more given the reins over the best way to be educated. Furthermore, the sheer number of courses required in general education gradually dwindled, with specialization and career training now the order of the day.
*This will not be the case with students who transfer in from other institutions.
by Matthew Pinson | Dec 3, 2015
Reposted from an article at erlc.com/article/questions-about-christians-and-involvement-in-cultural-transformation
I recently listened to a podcast of the White Horse Inn in which Michael Horton featured the ongoing transformation of Mackenzie University, a prestigious private university in Brazil with more than 40,000 students, into a Christian university.
Let me say at the outset that, even though I have serious questions, which I’m going to express in this piece, about Michael Horton’s two-kingdoms approach to the relation of Christianity and culture, I count him a gift to the church. When it comes to what goes on inside the church (except for obvious denominational differences), I tend to agree with him. But when it comes to how the church should relate to the secular culture, I disagree with his two-kingdoms approach, rather espousing a more positive transformational approach to cultural engagement more like that of a Wesley or a Kuyper. So don’t let these friendly critiques of Horton’s views on culture be taken as a lack of excitement about his views on other things.
His account of Mackenzie University was a very compelling story. Essentially, it is a story of reformation. The president of this historically Presbyterian university, now its chancellor, received his Ph.D. at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and he desired to reform the university and attempt slowly to return it to its Christian roots. Now the university’s divinity school has moved away from its formerly Protestant Liberal theology, and every faculty member now embraces conservative Presbyterian theology.
One of the reasons I found this story compelling is that I wondered to myself, “Is it even theoretically possible that Yale, my own alma mater, which was once committed to theological orthodoxy, could be reformed in this way?”
The reason I was so intrigued by this question is that Horton and others from the two-kingdoms approach to Christianity and culture demur from the view that Christians should be trying to transform culture. Yet here was a two-kingdoms advocate rejoicing in the ongoing, gradual reformation of Mackenzie University—a secularized university in a modern, secularized Western nation—back toward its Christian moorings.
A lot of questions came to my mind:
What’s the difference between reforming an institution or field of study or cultural system and transforming it?*
If the theological seminary of a secularized Western university can be reformed, would it be possible for the whole university to be reformed?
If the theological seminary of a secularized Brazilian university can be reformed, would it be possible for a theological seminary at a secularized American university to be reformed?
If the theological seminary of a secularized American university could be reformed, would it be possible for the whole university to be reformed?
It seemed to me that two-kingdoms advocates who would rejoice about the divinity school of a secularized Western university being reformed would think that it was, at least theoretically, possible for a whole university to be reformed. It would also seem that such two-kingdoms advocates would think such a reformation would be a good thing, a positively good goal—that they would laud the president’s attempts at reforming Mackenzie University.
More questions flooded my mind, like the following: If it’s a good thing for a prestigious university in a secularized nation to be reformed back to its original Christian roots, and that’s something we would laud a university president for attempting to do, then why would we not laud a government leader for attempting to reform a nation-state back to its more theistic roots?
Many conservative theologians have been invited to Mackenzie University to speak at the theological school. No doubt, while they are down there, they encourage the president in his work of reformation, even if they are two-kingdoms advocates. I asked myself:
What would a two-kingdoms advocate do at some point in the future if he were called in to a small nation-state in Africa—let’s imagine for a moment—whose prime minister and the majority of whose parliament was made up of conservative Anglican, Baptist, and Assemblies of God laypeople? What would his advice to them be regarding legislation about, say, abortion or same-sex marriage or sex-trafficking? How would he advise them? Would he say, “Don’t try to bring about change—transformation—to the culture based on the beliefs of the Christian church”?
And then I thought of so many of my good, faithful, evangelical friends who really want to engage the culture from a Christian perspective just as I do but shy away from the word transformation. In some cases, I think, this is because they think it must mean a total transformation—such that, if you want to see cultural change and transformation in the direction of Christian values, you’re necessarily talking about a complete Christianization of everything, in this life (but surely that’s not what most so-called transformationalists are aiming at).
Shortly before listening to the story about Mackenzie University, I had read an article at the Huffington Post about a new art conference, the TRAC conference, which is trying to bring representational art, or classical realism, back into prominence in the arts community. The convener of the conference, artist and professor Michael Pearce, said, “All of us, the people in this room, are slowly changing the direction of the cultural ocean liner. I want to thank you for participating in that. We really, really need to do that. We need to change the direction of the ship.”
What I wonder is, is an artist who wants slowly to change the direction of the “cultural ocean liner” in the art world attempting to bring transformation to the art world? I would think so. And let’s say that, after 20 years, the percentage of his kind of art sold at auction goes from 20 percent to 40 percent of the total art sold, as a result of such efforts for change. Does that count as transformation, even though the transformation is not total?
Another question that came to mind regards personal spiritual transformation: Those of us who don’t believe in entire sanctification or Christian perfection think that we are gradually being transformed spiritually, even though we will never be totally transformed in this life. Why then should we shy away from thinking we should be attempting to bring slow, gradual transformation to a given sphere of culture, whether educational, artistic, scientific, political, etc.?
These are questions that I think are worth asking, as more and more evangelical young people are considering the “Benedict Option” (which I briefly discussed in a recent post). Is it possible to have a broadly Augustinian approach to cultural influence and change—call it “transformationalism,” call it something else—from the vantage point of Christian teaching that is not triumphalistic or unduly negative (in the way that too much political rhetoric from the religious right has been)? And is it possible to embody that mentality in a way that respects the institutional separation of church and state and religious liberty, for which Baptists have been on the leading edge since the early seventeenth century? And is it possible to do that from an eschatological perspective that doesn’t necessarily see complete transformation as occurring this side of eternity?
I like to think it is.
*My guess is that two-kingdoms advocates would say that churchly things such as a school of theology can be reformed, which of course involves their (at least partial) transformation, but that something in the secular sphere cannot be. But would this rule out, say, the business or physics or political science departments at Mackenzie University? Could they be considered churchly and thus reformable / transformable?
by Matthew Pinson | Oct 5, 2015
I am writing this blog post coming fresh from a message by Clint Morgan, general director of Free Will Baptist International Missions, at the semi-annual missions conference on the campus of Welch College. He gave a stirring presentation about the mission of God in the world—including both the need of the world and the progress of the gospel in the world.
His presentation has made me even more committed to standing with our International Missions department in their Thirty Days of Prayer and Fasting during the month of October. We need a renewed commitment to our role as Free Will Baptists in the Missio Dei—the mission of God in the world—that is the theme of our conference.
The Missio Dei extends from our own spheres of influence, to the many individuals and families who have come to our communities from overseas, from church planting in the North American context, to evangelism and church planting in global cross-cultural settings.
It is exciting to see our students at Welch College catch a fresh vision for missions from denominational mission leaders such as Clint Morgan and Free Will Baptist North American Ministries’ Brad Ransom. Please pray with me for our students, that they would seek God’s guidance in discovering their own role in the Missio Dei, whether in going or enabling others to go. And stand with me in committing to prayer and fasting for Free Will Baptist International Missions during the month of October.
