Education

My mother-in-law studied for her degree in Home Economics during the late '30s and early '40s, graduating summa cum laude from Oregon State University. After marrying her childhood sweetheart, she gave birth to 10 children in 14 years. Her husband, engaged for most of the years when the family was young as editorial director of a religious publishing house, brought home low wages, so frugality was a necessity and the degree served this young mother and her family well.

Food preservation, hygiene, cooking, sewing, and home budgeting were part of the home ec curriculum and, along with the liberal arts training which came with every bachelor's degree at the time, these young women graduated with specialized training for their profession of choice--motherhood. Other women took similarly helpful majors in Elementary Education, Bible, Christian Education (my own mother's major), and Nursing.

Then came the frontal assault on housewifery and motherhood carried out largely by a new and powerful aristocracy, the "Information Class." (Footnote 1) During the late '60s and early '70s this assault reached fever pitch and the academy was ground zero. College and university students were assigned propagandistic tracts such as Ibsen's, A Doll's House, and joined the ranks of those determined to liberate the "Noras" of the world. (Footnote 2) Oxford historian Paul Johnson provides interesting historical details on A Doll's House, noting that both Karl Marx's youngest daughter, Eleanor, and George Bernard Shaw took part in its first private reading in London, Eleanor playing the title role of Nora. Johnson writes, the "clear message" of A Doll's House was that "marriage is not sacrosanct, the husband's authority is open to challenge, [and] self-discovery matters more than anything else." Johnson concludes, "[Ibsen] really started the women's movement." (Footnote 3)

The discipline of home economics (also known as "household arts") was an early casualty. Traditionally, home ec had enjoyed a comfortably apolitical niche in the world of higher education, and the guardians of this discipline had every reason to trust their academic peers would continue to be favorably disposed toward a curriculum so integrally tied to domestic tranquility. It was taken for granted that a dignified and competent wife and mother, devoted to her home and family, was a highly desirable constant in American culture.

To the feminists, home ec was anything but apolitical, so they attacked...

It seems to me that among evolutionary theory's least-exploited weaknesses are its implicit assumptions about the conditions necessary for life to come into existence.

Evolutionary principle, in other words, only comes into play when organic life first forms. But shouldn't adaptive forces be at work even before full-fledged life appears? Shouldn't, for instance, the principles of evolution be equally adept at creating non-carbon-based life forms as carbon-based? Shouldn't evolution be as capable of creating rock-based life as water-based?

It seems silly to claim that evolution can take atoms from the primordial soup to mankind (and beyond) ONLY IF the exact building blocks of carbon-based life are present first. Shouldn't the adaptive powers of evolution be just as capable of raising some form of life from a helium primordial soup as from carbon?

Where does evolution begin? After life's initiation, or before? It seems completely contrary to evolutionary theory's claims to suggest that life requires certain inescapable conditions to form. Isn't the point of evolution that life adapts to exist and survive? Evolutionary forces, if real, should be as active in forming life as in advancing it. Which means that adaptation should include adaptation to non-carbon environments.

Ironically, some at the forefront of evolutionary thought (Kurzweil, etc.) propose an evolutionary jump from man to machine--from carbon-based to non-carbon-based life--as the next major evolutionary leap. But if non-carbon-based life is possible at the more advanced end of the evolutionary spectrum, why not at the outset? If evolution potentially ends at machines, why couldn't it start there as well?

The assumption by evolutionists that carbon is essential for life implicitly establishes evolutionary theory on a foundation of design. Though evolutionists suggest the existence of non-carbon-based life forms elsewhere in the universe, the absence of the slightest evidence for such life forms is damning evidence of evolutionary theory's need for a stacked deck at the outset. Evolution needs a perfectly designed universe even to get out the gate.

Read more on the many ways the universe conspires to support life on earth (what some call the anthropic principle) in this article from the Wall Stree Journal.

God only knows
God makes his plan
The informations unavailable
To the mortal man
We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway
When in fact we're slip slidin away

                        - Paul Simon

(Tim) Yesterday, one of our congregation's Wheaton alumni was talking about other Wheaton alumni she keeps in touch with. She described her friends' typical post-graduate spiritual condition as consisting of a crisis experience a few years after graduation in which a decision is made between throwing it all away or turning and facing the fact that they're a sinner and coming to true Christian faith. Her grief was obvious as she described the spiritual bankruptcy so often characterizing her friends' post-Wheaton lives...

(Tim, w/thanks to Dave) Last week, a friend in Florida wrote to call my attention to an article detailing the results of a political survey of the faculty at Covenant College, the school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America. (Students were polled, also.)

Conducted by the school's Director of Institutional Research, Kevin Eames, the survey received responses from 47 faculty members. Here's what Covenant's administration wants prospective students and their parents to know about these faculty members:

Eighty-eight percent of Covenant's faculty have doctorates or terminal degrees, earned from such institutions as Oxford, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Chicago. Our professors regularly involve students in their research activities.  In fact, many students actually help edit books that their professors are writing.

The administration goes on to describe faculty members as "passionate about teaching and sharing their Reformed faith in a setting that sharpens the intellect and encourages increased awe of our sovereign God." Then, by way of reassurance, Oxford and passion are anchored by the declaration that "all faculty members subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith."

So, what might doctorates from Yale and Stanford, combined with a passion for the reformed faith and the Westminster Standards, lead these men and women to profess to our children about Christ's dominion in these United States and our own confession of that faith in this election year?

Asked, "Do you believe John McCain is a Christian," 33 of the 47 faculty members responding said either "No" or "Not sure." This seems safe since I read just last night that Senator McCain has never received Christian baptism. Likely not one of those faculty members questioning Senator McCain's Christian faith knew that, though.

Still, my concern is certainly not to prove Senator McCain's Christian faith, to get others to agree that he's sincere in his Christian profession, or leastwise to write this post to the end that even one reader will decide to vote for him or the Republican party. Such concerns have not entered my mind.

But on to Senator Obama. Different candidate, same question: "Do you believe Barack Obama is a Christian?" Twenty-one faculty members are definite in their response with five answering "No" and sixteen "Yes."

What ocular disease has led sixteen of our best and brightest to say for the record among students they are paid to lead into a greater knowledge of Christ's Lordship over all the earth that a man who unabashedly promotes baby-slaughter and sodomite marriage is certainly a Christian? If Senator Obama is a Christian, Robert Mugabe is born again and Jean Paul Sartre was a strict subscriptionist Presbyterian pastor.

Or, put another way...

(Tim, w/thanks to the godly mothers of Church of the Good Shepherd) We offer several classes Lord's Day mornings in between two worship services. One on childrearing is taught by Pastor Stephen Baker.

Being the father of five sons, Stephen asked if I'd come into his class for a week and teach on raising daughters. In preparation, I asked Mary Lee to write down some of her thoughts. She, in turn, wrote a couple women of our church (including our daughters) asking for their thoughts...

Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13)

(Tim) Ministering in a university community clarifies the real faith of Christians. If the altar we place our money and children on indicates anything, our help is in education, degrees, and the Academy--not the Name of the Lord.

The Holy Spirit says, "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be, also."

Before she walks across the platform, we (along with taxpayers and rich donors) will have spent enough on our daughter's college degree to go a long way toward buying her a nice starter home. Unite two of our children in holy matrimony and the total spent on both of them for their undergrad and graduate degrees quite often exceeds $100,000. One couple from our church had a combined total of $450,000 in undergrad and graduate loans (admittedly, the highest I've come across), and another couple my wife and I were talking with this past week had $160,000 (quite normal).

Soon after entering the ministry, I was listening to one of those endless discussions concerning denominational identity we've all sat through, and I remember hearing a mainline PC(USA) leader adamantly state that the reason for the existence of Presbyterianism was...

This particular issue's cover article details how, over the past thirty years, homemakers have been forced to subsidize the lives of privilege lived by other women who have forsaken marriage, the home, and childbearing for degrees and professions.

Professional women with salaries high enough to allow them to pay for day care and still turn a profit have not simply been content to leave their homemaking sisters behind, but have built their lifestyle on the backs of those sisters and their hardworking husbands. To anyone who matters, these homemakers are invisible.

Equal Employment Opportunity laws have piled up a legacy of systemic injustice throughout the wage earning world, leaving half the fairer and weaker sex to raise the children the other half will depend upon for their Medicare and Social Security payments when their life of childless privilege is drawing to an end. Meanwhile, the husbands of these housewives and mothers are in free-fall, trying to support the mother of their children as she gives herself to work that, despite those bright boys and girls in Economics Departments, still hasn't shown up on their gross domestic profit tally sheets...

At that time Jesus said, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. (Matthew 11:25, 26).

(Tim, w/thanks to The Story Behind the Story) Several have pointed me to news items about Wheaton College, recently. The school's about to get a new president. And when a college changes presidents, it's big news. The occasion provides wonderful opportunities for journalists to sell words and profs needing to get it off their chests to pontificate on how indispensable they are and how stupid the trustees are for not consulting them and doing what they want. So with a bunch of Wheaton profs huffing and puffing, it's clear the future of everything most precious is at stake.

During the lead-up to the trustees' announcement of the next Wheaton president, a recent grad wrote a piece that was purchased by Christianity Today's Books and Culture. The piece whined about the previous president's "magisterial" leadership (not a compliment) and ran comments by dyspeptic faculty members licking their wounds over the long years of horrible authoritarianism they've suffered under the current president, Duane Litfin, and his storm-trooper henchman, Stan Jones.

Trace it all back to seventeen years ago when Wheaton's trustees broke the heart of evangelicalism's uber-intellectual, Mark Noll, by choosing a Memphis pastor as their president when Noll had been lobbying for his dear friend and fellow historian, Nathan Hatch. This dust-up had the not-altogether negative result of Noll issuing his very personal payback, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind; which in turn had the not-altogether negative result of making Noll rich off royalties and helping him with the price of a ticket out of Wheaton to that distinctly non-magisterial Roman Catholic school in northern Indiana called Notre Dame. Some may remember that in The Scandal..., Noll complained evangelical schools work their profs so hard, teaching, they don't have time to do research. Now though, on his profile page at Notre Dame, Noll is happy to inform us he "looks forward to concentrating on fewer subjects." So all's well that ends well.

Back then to the present where, almost two decades after their last hire, Wheaton's trustees were poised to celebrate 150 years with their announcment.

But what about this article about to appear in Books and Culture? Could they allow CTi to run it? Was it really helpful?

Actually not. It was hurtful. It would rein in their parade.

"In Fortress Home School, the mother contends with her older boys. No matter who prevails, this contest has no winners. The mother risks overpowering her son or ending every day in frustration and bitterness."

(Tim) Several families here in Church of the Good Shepherd have been working together to found a Christian school that honors God by being led and substantively taught by the fathers of the household. This school also is committed to teaching the doctrines of Scripture that are avoided by mainstream Christian schools who must not provide any instruction that might appear sectarian.

This past week, I was speaking with one of the fathers and he told me of an e-mail written by another father and circulated among the board members of this school that had inspired him. I asked for a copy and if I could post it here on Baylyblog...

(Tim) One of our Homeschooling couples was leaving church last Sunday morning and someone saw they were having an unusual moment of levity and he snapped this pic. At first when I saw it I thought the husband was pregnant, but then I realized he's just fat.

Sadly, this wonderful couple's tried and tried to open up their home for ministry, but every time they've invited someone over for one of their lutefisk dinners, they get turned down. It makes them very sad.

We think the people turning down their invitations do so at least partly because of their weird dress, but really it's not any weirder than the Pentecostals or Gothardites. If you have any suggestions, please send them to me privately. Thanks.

(Tim) Last night on our way out to Vienna, Virginia for Joe Sobran's wake, Brian and I (Charlie Dugdale is also with us) traded Sobran quotes for a while, writing down our favorites.

• A college education teaches one the correct views on racial minorities and provides the means to live as far away from them as possible.
• The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.
• Politician's lexicon: Greed is wanting to keep as much of your wealth as possible. Need is wanting someone else's wealth. Compassion is the means by which the transfer is arranged.
• Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, I'm a Republican.
• Quoting Chesterton: The modern and morbid habit of sacrificing the normal on the altar of the abnormal.
• The U.S. Constitution bears the same tenuous relationship to our government as the Book of Revelation does to the Unitarian Universalist Church.
• Quoting Charles Peguy: No one will ever know how many acts of cowardice have been committed out of the fear of seeming insufficiently progressive.

(Tim) Yesterday, in the name of teaching normal students how to avoid making students committed to sexual perversion feel bad about their perversion, the young men and women at Bloomington High School North were required to watch a movie that promoted bestiality. In that movie, young perverts complained about how hard it is to be committed to bestiality when normal boys and girls act squeamish about it. They can't change the way they feel about animals, they said, so why can't other boys and girls get over it and learn to accept their unique sexual identity?

Of course, the reason perverts feel bad about themselves is that, even with the help of teachers and school counselors, we have a tough time silencing our consciences. When we give ourselves to sexual immorality, inevitably it takes a toll on us, particularly when we're young and still feel our guilt acutely. When those tempted by bestiality give in to their perversion, depression sets in. Inevitably, depression sometimes leads to suicide.

To fault those normal souls who fight against that same perversion by avoiding the sin and those who advocate it is to blame the victim. The perversion should never be mentioned in public, nor should any boy or girl be able to parade that perversion among our children through wicked and destructive conversations, clothing, or other stylistic signatures associated with bestiality. It's time for the school systems paid for with our tax dollars to stop bullyng our children in the name of tolerance. We don't pay taxes to have bestiality shoved down our sons and daughter's throats...

(Tim) Our American-African correspondent, David Wegener, just sent in this review of John D’Elia's A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America (Oxford University Press, 2008).

This biography is a parable of the dangers of seeking the approval of the world. Didn’t our Lord say, “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Mk 8:36). Yet this is what Ladd sought, and along the way he lost his soul. He was one of the most respected evangelical Bible teachers of the mid-twentieth century. Nobody from my generation can teach on the kingdom of God and not quote George Ladd. Yet he craved the acceptance of the world and, when he did not attain it, his life fell apart. Didn’t the Apostle write, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” (Rom 8:7). The world will never accept us. It can’t.

Ladd became a Christian as a young man, sensed a call to the Christian ministry, trained at Gordon College and then entered the pastorate. Somewhere along the way, he changed direction and began to pursue further education so that he could do scholarly work on the Bible...

(Tim) Dear readers, don't miss the straightforward lessons these Democrats from Wisconsin and Indiana are teaching us right now.

When push comes to shove, have no doubt that being a Democrat is what matters to them--including Representative Peggy Welch of Bloomington. Have no doubt, either, that Democrats always fight for more money for public school teachers and other government employees. Public school teachers provide the votes that put the Democratic Party in office.

In fact, a good way to think of the Democratic Party is the party of death that lives off the votes of public school teachers who elect Democrat representatives with the understanding that their Democrat representatives will give them more money...

(Tim) Many of us at ClearNote Church have cast our votes for Representative Peggy Welch. Speaking personally, I have myself. These past few weeks, Rep. Welch has utterly failed the children of the state of Indiana.

Mrs. David Welch has been saying she's refusing to show up at the Statehouse in Indy because of her commitment to our children's education. In pol speech this means she's against Governor Daniels' reform of government schools. Governor Daniels wants the state to allow poor parents to use vouchers to escape bad school systems, but Rep. Welch and her fellow Democrats are always against school reform. Democrats get into office most consistenly through the votes of public school teachers and other government employees.

But what about our children? Rep. Welch tells us she cares for our children but she's utterly failed them, recently--and not only by opposing the reform of government schools.

While Representative Welch has been refusing to go to work at the Statehouse, House Bill 1205 seeking to take money away from our state's largest baby-slaughterer, Planned Parenthood, failed for lack of a quorom. This was Representative Welch's doing. The bill had made it out of committee and was ready for passage, but Representative Welch and her fellow Democrats cared more about opposing the Governor's reform of government schools than...

Thomas Sowell on "The Education Mantra."

(TB, w/thanks to Jim H.)

As the Obama administration works to advance the wickedness of homosexuality around the world, the gay battle against God and His Word progresses at home. 

Into this battle this week stepped a thoughtful and talented young woman who attends Christ the Word's youth group. Asked to provide her thoughts on homosexuality for a views page in her high school newspaper she wrote:

"Hearing about an individual choosing the way of homosexuality is disappointing. They have given in to the temptation to sin. Am I afraid of the person because of this choice? No. Do I hate the person because they have chosen to give in to a sin? Of course not. Christians are called to love others, even our enemies. I would not love a person any less for the reason of a sin they are committing. Fact is, we all sin and have struggles of our own, whether they are big or tiny, and it makes no difference to God. What makes the difference is overcoming the sin.

See what just entered my e-mail inbox. It's Wheaton College pleading for even more money. They say their president, Phil Ryken, is convinced Wheaton is "positioned to serve as an increasingly vital base of operations for the global dissemination of the Gospel."

Yes, yes; of course. Everywhere I look, one more sign of Wheaton's service as an increasingly vital base of operations for the global dissemination of the Gospel smacks me in the face. Like this alumnus, Rob Bell. Surely we all see how the degree Bell bought from Wheaton's profs is the foundation of his creation of an increasingly vital base of operations for the global dissemination of the Gospel? If I were Dick Chase or Duane Litfin, I'd be thumping my chest in pride.

Ryken's hucksterism reminds me of Richard Lovelace returning to campus from an invitation-only meeting of PC(USA) liberal and conservative muckety-mucks back in 1982 or so...

(TB: Under another post, a Christian sister we've come to respect has asked a series of questions I make a stab at answering below. For the context of her questions please look at comment number thirteen under the above post. First her comment in full, followed by my responses quoting part of each numbered item in what she wrote.)

I mean this as an honest comment/question, not a baiting or critical one. 

First, I was taught to believe that a wife must submit to her husband and a husband must love his wife as Christ loves the Church. A wife is not a doormat, nor is a husband is a tyrant. Furthermore, a couple will work out a balance of this principle in their marriage that is Biblical and fits their personalities and won't look the same for every couple. I assume you would generally agree with that.

From our public education correspondent, this heads-up. And this one. And this one. When we read of "bullying," keep in mind that educational apparatchiks know no difference between bullying and shaming. Sadly, Christians long ago gave up on shaming as a tool of protection of immortal souls. But shaming is not dead. The shaming of the Christian conscience still works just fine. (TB, w/thanks to...)

Although our good Gov. Mitch Daniels endorsed him, I'm pleased Senator Richard Lugar lost the primary last night. It was time for new leadership.

Speaking of new leadership, the PCA's Covenant Theological Seminary has moved former president Bryan Chapell over to the position of Chancellor and is searching for a new president. You can count on Bryan's stint as Chancellor being quite short before he moves on to another institution.

Sadly, I fear this leadership change has strengthened the hand of Covenant's faculty...

As expected, Brian Chapell will be leaving Covenant Seminary. This coming Lord's Day he plans to be voted on as the new pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Peoria. Grace is one of the few tall-steeple PCA churches north of the Mason-Dixon line and Brian's roots are deep in Illinois, so this seems a good fit.

Much like Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, historically Grace has been a mainline Evangelical church with roots deep in the sort of Reformed dispensationalism popularized by Wheaton, Moody, and Campus Crusade. For forty years Grace was served by Wheaton grad Bruce Dunn who spoke regularly at Winona Lake, Bibletown (Boca Raton), Cannon Beach (Oregon), Moody Founders Week, Moody Keswick, and prophecy conferences.

Which brings us to the subject of dead and dying institutions...

Close to ten years ago, I was speaking with a brother much respected across the PCA to express my concerns over Covenant Seminary's toxic influence. What I saw of Covenant grads, I said, had convinced me Covenant would preside over the death of the PCA, and the only way to turn it around...

This was population control on blacks and Latinos without our knowledge. - Mona Davis, president of NYC Parents Union

A new king came to rule over Egypt who "knew not Joseph." Looking at the fruitfulness of the Hebrews, mortal dread came over him. They'll join our enemies and fight against us. They'll take away our prosperity.

So, like bloodthirsty Herod who slaughtered the infants of Bethlehem, Pharaoh commanded the death of all male Hebrew babies. At first he put the onus on the Hebrew midwives, telling them when they attended births to kill every little boy. The midwives feared God and disobeyed Pharaoh, so "God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied and became very mighty."

Pharaoh then commanded the people themselves to cast every male Hebrew baby into the Nile. It's noteworthy that in the sermon Stephen preached that led to his death at the hands of the Jews, he told the story of the faithlessness of God's people from the patriarchs on, including this recounting of the Hebrews under Pharaoh exposing their infant sons...