Educational Ideals

As I mentioned in my last post, I will be starting graduate studies at Regent College next week. During this week, they have attempted to orient the new students. This was not a small 1-5 hour info session, this was a three day long, entirely exhausting, event. Yes, it has taken 3 days to become oriented and I am uncertain if I feel oriented or just overwhelmed. The orientation included a history lecture on the school, an educational mission lecture and a lecture on moral vision. We were also introduced to all the faculty, toured around, forced to meet each other and some returning students, discussed courses, concentrations, ate lunch, had coffee, had communion, sung songs, and were generally informed of very large number of things. During one of the lectures, Regent's view of education was discussed. Ian Provain railed against the modern view of education as a product and students as clients. He told an amusing story of a student complaining to Eugene Peterson for taking too many thoughtful pauses in class and not speaking enough words. Clearly an educational product that contains more words is of more value than one with less, and given the cost of Regent courses, was it really too much to ask for a little less silence and a little more speech? This rant was reminiscent of Zizek's accusation that western society has turned universities from places of education into factories, which produce experts. Provain went on to discuss education as a communal and relational learning experience which ought to be formative for all aspects of person hood and that when it is reduced to an information based product, one has immediately failed. Bruce Hindermarsh added that particularly with theological education to view it as a means to an end is also to fail from the start, for as disciples it is in itself, at least in many senses, the goal.

While I seem in good company at Regent, a last bastion of education for its own sake, I often feel like a dinosaur. Socially, education is viewed almost exclusively as means to a job. So with any education, vocation is the immediate question. And vocational success is also the measure by which we often evaluate the success of an educational investment... BCIT programs advertises their high percentages of graduate employment in a related field, and so they should; BCIT is the ultimate in efficient, expert factory. I say, I feel like a dinosaur because I simply seem unable to be "practical" about education. I keep going to expensive schools, with not obvious or specific job prospects. Furthermore, they are now mostly Christian schools and so barely hold even the value of just general education in the marketplace. I am doomed to be viewed by society as an idiot religious freak and by Christian's as one of those evil educated unspiritual, faith destroying, science believing people. Perhaps, as Zizek points out in the beginning of his book, Living in the End Times: when everyone hates you for opposite and contradictory reasons that perhaps you are on the right track. I will remain hopeful in both God and the ideals of education.