Education

  • Not What We Expected

    Not What We Expected

    Alissa Wilkinson

    November 14, 2011

    Why this interests me, as a 2001 homeschool grad who attended a small private Christian school for K-5, has a lot to do with the fact that (as Jamie Smith says in Desiring the Kingdom and Ashley Berner says in an article in our latest print issue of Comment) every pedagogy presupposes a philosophical anthropology—that is, every way we choose to educate stands on certain assumptions about human nature (which, in turn, have a lot to do with our religious beliefs and practices).

    In the New York Times magazine this weekend, Margaret Heidenry wrote of her experience as a homeschooled child in the 1970s—a time when, of course...

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  • How Institutions are Born (sort of)

    How Institutions are Born (sort of)

    Milton Friesen

    November 4, 2011

    But where do these odd creatures come from? I fell to pondering this while watching this TED talk about an approach to hyper-local education in India called Barefoot College. It's a well-known case, but what I'm interested in are the design elements that were involved in founding it, the conditions of its birth. Institutions represent densities of people, resources, ideas, buildings, pipes, wires, paper, and so on. The founders of Barefoot College decided to orchestrate these densities by utilizing local resources: grow the institution from the resources that are right around it. They've been running since 1972.

    Our landscape, literal and figurative, is full of institutions. Mostly, we accept their existence without a second thought. From time to time they may try and impress us (see Maclean's new Canadian university rankings) or unwittingly enrage us (try g...

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  • Unlikely Disciples and Damned Lies

    Unlikely Disciples and Damned Lies

    Robert Joustra

    November 3, 2011

    Old news, since the book was published in 2009 and rides that parallel wave of the demolition of the religious right, and outpouring of memoirs and essays of burned activists, smoking for revenge. But Barbara Kay gets it wrong when she says there is a problem with Christ on campus—not just because it's an old news fight, but because she extends the logic of Liberty to all evangelicals, everywhere.

    The Unlikely Discipline: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, a study of Liberty University in Virginia, has sat on my night stand for about three months, and I have made only the most half-hearted attempts to read through it. The few...

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