In the wake of yesterday’s fulminations about the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, and more specifically about seminary education, Jonathon Delacour wonders (and David Weinberger echoes the question), “If, as I am sure is true, your beginning students know less about ‘Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before’, what do they know more about?”
The pitfalls in answering this question are so numerous as to tempt me simply to ignore it. Lacking the good sense that God gave a squirrel, though, I’ll give it a try, if only to amuse the masses who witness my discomfiture when offended colleagues, students, bishops, Baptists, and squirrels lambaste me for my ill-informed temerity.
One thing they know more about is “everything.” I say this not to be a wiseacre, but to observe that the field of things that “everybody knows” used to include much about the Bible, about the saints and heroes of the various theological traditions, about what we believe and they don’t, and so on. In a way similar to the way my students know about actors’ filmographies, or athletes’ statistics, or superheroes’ comic-book numbers, past generations might have known about the generations from Adam to Noah, or about the seven corporal works of mercy, or the content of the Westminster Confession. In this sense, they know more about a whole spectrum of topics than their predecessors, and that’s just fine. On the other hand, now my classes have to make up for what’s lost from a cultural “common knowledge,” and that places an increasing burden on my limited teaching time.
As Tripp indicates in a comment on David’s blog, people know a lot about the jobs and specializations they’ve developed in the course of earning their livings. They probably know more about academic disciplines that blossomed into full academic departments over the past half-century (psychology, sociology, business, and so on). They know more about video games and television programs.
Many people come to faith after many years of from church, and they don’t have whatever benefit of learning might have accrued during years of Sunday School, youth group, Bible study, or Sunday Forums. Now, one might think that a cause for remedial study, but some of these new arrivals have duly-attested calls to church leadership, for which additional study would only interpose delays (and delays for a cause whose value is not transparently obvious to many church leaders). I don’t know what’s filled those years of non-involvement, but it probably wasn’t Church History and Dogmatic Theology.
Another possibility is that the culturally prominent understanding of religious faith has modulated from thinking of theology a science that issues in true (or false) propositions about God to a thinking of theology as a way of talking about a sentiment, that issues in unverifiable claims about one’s orientation to God. So long as theology was thought to involve propositional truth, it would have been important to get the theological answers right; if most influential voices regard theological claims as expressions of exclusively private, personal piety, one has much less stake in whether those claims cohere with the broader theological tradition. Indeed, some teachers and students can take an “expressivist” outlook as a warrant for disregarding the [irrelevant] feelings of dead theologians. One knows one’s own relation to God better than does anyone else, and Augustine knows nothing whatever about my piety — so why bother reading what he said?
There’s a possibility, though, that there are some ways in which some students just plain don’t know as much as an entering seminarian might have been assumed to know fifty years ago. For instance, it once was customary that academically-ambitious high school students study at least Greek or Latin, if not both. Such a student might then continue reading Greek through college (by which time he would have attained sufficient reading fluency to be quite comfortable with the New Testament in Greek); if he went on for advanced study, he’d begin with early Christian theological texts and other related literature. That kind of fluency in ancient Greek would once have been a norm among Ph.D.s in Bible; now it’s a noteworthy exception.
Many high schools and colleges feel increasing pressure to give students higher grades for less distinguished work. I’ve taught at one; I was told by a former colleague that, years after I’d left my first teaching position, people were still saying, “AKMA would have given that paper a D” (a flattering, if unrealistic, perspective on my capacity to resist social pressure to lower my standards). But I have been confronted by students who waved a paper in my face and said, “I got A’s all through high school; how can you give me a B for this?” when the paper in question was plainly unexceptional. Even if all my present students have emerged unaffected by a cultural trend for inflating evaluations, the institution of education has acclimated itself to expecting less of students.
At the convergence of these social forces I encounter students who have not wrought their own erudition or ignorance of the broad outlines of Christian teachings. Seabury students are required to take two (survey) courses on the New Testament, and some students take another course if it fits in (many indicate on their graduation exit interviews that they wish for more instruction in Bible, but my point isn’t to boost Scripture’s status in the curriculum); I have to squeeze as much teaching energy into those two quarters as possible. That’s a challenging assignment, and I’m not in the least bit surprised if our controversies seem to some observers to bear little serious relation to the fullness of biblical or theological understanding.
Posted by AKMA at August 25, 2003 03:41 PM | TrackBackI'm being serious here. I have often wondered at what point in your life did theology, biblical studies, etc. become important to you. In my experience, Bill Coffin's Easter sermon at Batell Chapel was the first time you were impressed by anything about church, but that in itself was only a fleeting flicker of interest. Does the lack of seminarians' knowledge today somehow line up with how much you knew entering college?
Posted by: NTA at August 26, 2003 06:34 AMGood question, Mom.
As you know, though, I lived in a world defined by English literature through most of my adolescence, and it’s hard to spend too long in Shakespeare, Fielding, Pope, Trollope, Dickens, et al., without soaking up a strong dose of just the kind of cultural background of which I was speaking — not such that I would have been able to spin off the details, but that I recognized this information as a pertinent and coherent element in understanding what was up about the church.
Add to that cognate studies in college, and a an urgent sense that this was stuff I had to know once I returned to church after college, and I think I regained a lot of ground that my non-church-going years lost. Indeed, one reason I speak with relative confidence about the effects of lack-of-catechesis is autobiographical (though, as you point out, on the negative side of the equation).
Have I made up for that lost time? It’s not for me to make any claims on that count.
Posted by: AKMA at August 26, 2003 10:36 AM"the institution of education has acclimated itself to expecting less of students"
Isn't it also possible that the institutions to which people flow after higher education have acclimated themselves to expecting more honors and awards and high grades and certifications, so that, competent or not, anyone entering "real life" without such accolades and awards is immediately discarded without a second look?
I regard it as symptomatic that my daughter's sixth-grade middle school included classes that were explicitly labeled "honors"--what a crock. Yet I am susceptible to the fear that her not being in those classes has damaged her prospects.
So I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe...it's more complicated than that?
It is indeed. We may be living in a more general “honor” bubble, or celebrity bubble, which — as other economic bubbles — sooner or later has to deflate in order for people to operate on the basis of more surely-grounded information.
I recall that the process of deciding whom to admit to a Ph.D. program involved reading recommendations from professors well-known to us and unknown to us, whose enthusiasm we had to gauge as best we could. One very famous prof sent us two letters in the same year proclaiming different students “the best he’d had in ten years”; but when someone whom none of us knew, who sent only one letter, said something similar, how were we to guess whether it was hyperbole or plain fact?
Of course, at some point “track record” matters a great deal more than attestation, so that I tended to rely heavily on the essays applicants sent. This was (presumably) their best work; would I want to admit a student for whom this was the best they could do?
Hard to tell how that applies to sixth grade, though. I taught 6th graders once upon a time, but my memories of those days are growing dimmer.
Posted by: AKMA at August 26, 2003 11:41 AMWhat a wonderful post. What a world it evokes in such a few words. You are "generous to a fault," yet manage to convey the contours of a microcosm. Seems you have read Fielding, Pope, Dickens, and yes, Trollope. Thanks be that there are people of your dedication and learning, let alone patience, in teaching.
Posted by: The Happy Tutor at August 26, 2003 08:13 PMThe LCMS seminaries have required Greek and Hebrew "boot camps" during the summer for incoming seminarians without sufficient knowledge of the Biblical languages; is this particularly unreasonable for other subjects entering seminarians are deficient in?
(Also, from a soon-to-be seminarian who feels deficient in more than Greek, what can one do to get ready for sem besides just reading Scripture?)
Posted by: Chris Tessone at August 26, 2003 08:35 PMOne knows one’s own relation to God better than does anyone else, and Augustine knows nothing whatever about my piety — so why bother reading what he said?
That's so sad. There are so many more educated reasons for ignoring Augustine.
Posted by: chutney at August 27, 2003 03:11 PMEach Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Thomasina at January 13, 2004 01:38 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Annanias at January 13, 2004 01:39 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Laura at January 13, 2004 12:55 PMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Reginald at January 13, 2004 12:55 PMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Ninion at January 13, 2004 12:55 PM