The Highest Ed

Reason One Million Why America Needs Christian Educators

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, educators are stuck in a kind of sci-fi reality between students using AI to write their papers and AI designed to catch students using AI to write their papers. Every time a better tool allows teachers to sniff out cheating, a bettertool comes along to evade it.

Long gone are the glorified word processors designed to prevent misspelled words. At least then, students had to do the writing. As AI has evolved, so have students’ options to cheat. Perhaps more disturbing, teachers are in on the cheating, too. Why grade dozens of papers when AI can do it for you? This is only the latest expression of an ongoing crisis in modern education, a crisis aptly described by a Duke University student, quoted in Steve Garber’s masterful book The Fabric of Faithfulness:

We’ve got no idea of what it is that we want by the time somebody graduates. This so-called curriculum is a set of hoops that someone says students ought to jump through before graduation. No one seems to have asked, “how do people become good people?”

What is Education For?

The reason so many students think of assignments as hoops to jump through to “get an education,” is because so many educators see it that way. Education is seen as a product to be marketed and sold, rather than a means of ascertaining truth, pursuing goodness, and recognizing beauty. When teachers have lost their way, it’s difficult to blame students for losing the “why” of education in all the “whats.”

D. L. Moody once said, “If a man is stealing nuts and bolts from a railway track, and, in order to change him, you send him to college, at the end of his education, he will steal the whole railway track.” Put another way, education without a why is doomed to fail. Education without a moral framework only makes people better at being bad.

This is the central focus of “Men Without Chests,” the opening essay in one of C. S. Lewis’s most important books, The Abolition of Man. Lewis clearly saw that attempts to de-moralize education would not give us a world without vice, but a world without virtue:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Here’s how Neil Postman put it:

Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn’t teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. The curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “skills.” In other words, a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

A Higher Vision

Within a Christian worldview, education is for the acquisition of wisdom and the understanding of God. When learning is centered on the Bible, literacy has a purpose. When based on a right understanding of human beings and our purpose in this world, learning is sacred. God made us to enjoy his creation with all our minds, not our computers, under the care of someone who knows his truth.

The job of Christian educators, Dr. John Stackhouse once said, is more than twice as hard. They must be Christians; they must be educators; and they must be Christian educators. It’s a high calling to a higher vision of education.

—This article first appeared at Breakpoint.org. Used with permission of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.