We Are Still in the Valley
or What the 'College' Was For

People suppose that colleges in our past were proto-universities, and that they were Christian colleges just because the culture was Christian.

They think that the old Christian college was really a somewhat primitive institution finding its way to what ‘higher education really is’, and when it got there, shed its Christianity naturally.

This completely false story about the nature of the Christian liberal arts college needs to be put to rest.

And it is time for the churches to wake up and return to the work they abandoned.

Read up on this:

St. Augustine: On Education, ed. and trans. George Howie (4th C; Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969)

John of Salisbury, Policraticus: The Statesman’s Book, abridged and ed. Murray F. Markland (12th C; New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979)

Mary-Elaine Swanson, The Education of James Madison: A Model for Today (Montgomery, Ala.: Hoffman Center for the Family, 1994)

Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College (New Haven: Hezekiah Howe, 1828), online

Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History, 2nd ed. (University of Georgia Press, 1991)

Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918; New York: Sagamore, 1957)

Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning: An Episodic History of American University and College Since 1953 (South Bend, In.: Gateway, 1978)