Vision of An Academic Community
One of the great parts of my job is having conversations and laboring with like-minded people. Today* it was talking to Mr. Rohrbacher about how many seminaries are actively trying to recruit students to study on campus because online programs have become so popular.
In the midst of this conversation, I struggled to articulate the purpose of on-campus experiences. Don’t get me wrong, high quality education being available online is a blessing in many ways. But suppose our campuses were abandoned, and all higher education was online, I believe we would lose a great deal. And this applies doubly to primary and secondary education.
The issue is what we believe education is for. Education is spiritual formation. Every other purpose boils down to this. To say “education is for a career” is to affirm the values of careers, to assume that work has something important to say about who we are as humans. To say education is for testing and college prep is again to make assumptions about who are as humans, how we should orient our decisions, and what we value. There is simply no escaping the fact that education is spiritual formation. Because no man can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24) it is vital that we rightly order the various purposes education fulfills.
Given the purpose of spiritual formation, what should such an educational community look like? Time does not permit me to offer a full exposition, nor would that exposition be adequate if time afforded such a luxury. Perhaps I can cast a general vision even if each detail is not brought fully into focus.
First, spiritual formation means cultivating through habit the right orientation of the heart and mind toward God. Habit is the bread and butter of the Christian life and of good education. Your heart is where your treasure lies (Matthew 6:21). As James K. A. Smith titled his book, You Are What You Love. The things we do over and over again, intentionally or unconsciously, shape who we become as people. That shaping then influences our success or failure faced with any given task. A student expected to write essays needs to first form the habit of writing paragraphs. A student expected to write paragraphs needs to first form the habit of writing sentences. A student expected to write sentences needs to first form the habit of writing.
This is not rote repetition. We desire for students to love God above all else. To that end, our vision is for students to love learning and to love the learning process. If students love learning, and are equipped with the tools of learning, they can learn and master anything. This is why we talk about grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Those are tools of learning (and subjects in their own right). To learn any new subject we must first learn the language of that subject (grammar). To learn civics requires learning what a “branch” of government is, what the roles of “executive,” “legislative,” and “judicial” are, etc. Without that grammar a statement like “George Washington was the first president of the United States” may as well be written in Chinese.
Students who love learning and love the learning process don’t have a problem like not getting their homework done. Their problem is a much better problem, it is a problem of being pulled in too many directions at once. The problem is having so much learning to do and not enough time to do it. This student has a science text that covers the four seasons while they are now interested in the nature and function of the cell. In such a vision the textbook provokes more questions than can possibly be answered in one semester or even one year. Learning in the classroom provokes the student on to learning throughout life because the student loves learning so much they cannot stop being a good student.
Textbooks that lead to this are often not textbooks at all, they are what Charlotte Mason would call “living books.” Students are alive, and their minds must be fed on good food. Dispassionate textbooks written as mere outlines of a subject seldom provide nutritious food for the mind. They are the protein bars of schooling, nutritious on paper but not an acceptable substitute for a true feast. Living books feed the growing mind on great ideas, the best in human history. What is the question to which a Democratic-Republic is the answer? John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were not hesitant to ask that question and provide the answer.
An academic community formed along these lines is one in which students sit at lunch and carry on the conversation begun in class. They cannot help but debate Plato’s allegory of the cave because it has arrested their attention. They write poetry not out of drudgery or requirement but because only poetry can express the grief of the family dog passing away. They sing because music makes you brave and the world is full of dragons and danger. In short, such an academic community helps humans be human and rewards such development.
This view toward spiritual formation becomes the rubric by which every academic expectation is evaluated. The test is recognized as a tool for evaluation and formation. We teach to the test only to the extent the test adequately and appropriately measures the true objectives of learning. The classroom experience is oriented around the goals of learning, the goals of learning are not oriented around getting through a certain amount of material (we do not teach the textbook, we teach the students and use the textbook).
We are student-centered not in the sense of letting students determine their own curriculum, but in recognizing if students are not learning we are not teaching. Learning objectives are something students must apprehend and grasp. Students should always be working harder than teachers because learning only really happens in the individual.
In this community it is common place to share more of life. You know who can offer a competitive game of chess. Nothing is more natural than sitting down in a comfortable environment and talking about a book. Leisure is recognized not as laziness but as that opportunity to freely pursue the life of the mind toward the end of knowing and loving God. Sensibilities are so formed that an opportunity for a Psalm sing is never passed up, the common good is the point of reference in discussing politics, and students would tackle (without hesitation) a climate protestor with a can of spray paint charging at a Rembrandt.
This community must be created and maintained by administrators, faculty, and staff working in close collaboration with families. Because of the reality of human sin (Genesis 3, Romans 1) we do not gravitate toward such communities except by God’s grace. Having received that grace we must walk worthy of it, and we must be aware that the principalities and powers actively resist such communities. It is our sacred duty as adults to make such a vision a reality. To be teachers who are inspiring because we ourselves are inspired, to be teachers who are ourselves actively learning and being transformed by what we learn. We must ourselves be formed by the Good, Beautiful, and True if we are to see our students formed by it.
We have made great strides toward such community, even as we still have much work to do. But fellowship is grace and I pray that God may yet grant it to us. This is but a mere sketch of what a truly Christian academic community should look like. It will undoubtedly require revision and refinement. But there is truth in it, and to that extent may it form and shape us.
*I began writing this on December 8th, 2023 but revised it prior to publication.
