quick hit: musings on Christian education

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald @ Killing the Buddha describes his experience as an adjunct professor at The King's College (New York, N.Y.) and considers more broadly the fragile balance sought in many Christian colleges between the freedom to learn and the desire to turn out a certain kind of student.

Every Christian college is part school and part Bible camp; its purpose falls somewhere between education and indoctrination. Even the most well-intentioned ones exist, to some extent, to impart certain religious values to their students. Ideally, there is no conflict between good scholarship and the doctrines professed by Christians, but in practice that isn’t always the case. Of course, this tension is seen to a certain degree in all institutions of higher learning—education is never completely free of bias.

There are some Christian schools that do reach toward impartiality, allowing students “freedom within a framework of faith”—as a popular tagline of Gordon College, my alma mater, has it. At the other end of the spectrum, however, are those that aspire to turn out a certain kind of student, with certain political leanings and a mission to remake the world according to a certain conception of Christianity. The King’s College is among the most flagrant among them. I know because I taught there, at its “campus” spread across a few floors—mainly in the basement—of the Empire State Building.

I discuss the history of Christian higher education during the latter half of the twentieth century in my thesis as part of the context out of which the Oregon Extension grew. I thought this article might interest those in the OE diaspora.