Why not build a Christian family business with the energy, funding, and infrastructure that government or private educational institutions would otherwise build?
It is common knowledge today that serious moral problems exist in families, churches, schools, colleges, corporations, and the political arena. These problems have academic, moral, and philosophical roots that go back centuries, and were fostered by the systematic separation of knowledge and belief in God. The significant amount of instruction required to equip people with the ability to discern the times and to apply Scripture in faith to all walks of life requires diligence in all areas of learning and at all levels of education.
Secular universities are openly hostile to the Christian worldview, and the best Christian colleges cannot replicate the family away from home. The Nehemiah Institute’s worldview assessment of 1,177 students in 18 Christian colleges over a 7-year period showed that Christian students graduate from Christian institutions with a secular humanistic worldview, even when their professors have a biblical theistic worldview. Even the above-average Christian colleges are little better than their secular counterparts because the curricula are developed under the same institutional accreditation guidelines, the same textbooks are used, many of the faculties were trained at secular institutions, and the family context of learning is ignored.
Even the best Christian distance learning does not specifically involve the family in the learning process, does not couple with individual family beliefs, does not leverage the family knowledge base, does not generate family income. It is time to decouple institutional higher education and bring higher education home.
Establishing family universities and networks based on the fellowship of the church is one solution. This can help individuals and families implement the Christian philosophy of education by developing their own family university and complementary business as part of the government mission (Psalm 8).
University education must be reinvented with biblical understanding to strengthen family and church. Christian people can easily learn how a family college can uniquely offer their young adults the humble, relational, and Spirit-led ideal biblical college education to participate in building a strong Christian family, church, and culture.
The usefulness of a network for learning was foreseen by Ivan Illich, philosopher of the 1970s, who advocated home education. He explained: “If the networks I have described could emerge, each student’s educational path would be his own and only in hindsight would take on the characteristics of a recognizable program. The wise student would regularly seek professional advice: help in setting a new goal insight into difficulties encountered choice between possible methods Even today most people would admit that the important services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or advice that obtained at a chance meeting or in a tutorial. in an untrained world, would also come into their own and be able to do what frustrated teachers pretend to be pursuing today.” Ivan Illich, Entschulungsgesellschaft, 1970.
Currently there is only one such family university network, but the time has come for this concept and as such this is probably just the beginning of expanding homeschooling into homecollege.
Thanks to James Bartlett | #Family #University #Network #Unplugging #Institutional #Higher #Education
