Educational Ideas

Quotes About, Concerns For, Comments On, & Encouragement Toward Education

It’s the end of the semester for most of us teachers. Robin, my wife, is retiring from full time teaching in May. Final papers and grades are due soon. Perhaps this is why I decided to focus on education this week at MarkEckel.com. On this page, find exactly the title you see above.

In a long email I wrote to one of my students this past week I said,

And it should remind us that writing, argument, English, any educational subject is hard work. I hear people say, “Wait til you get into the ‘real world’.” Well. This IS part of the real world! And what you and every student is doing, is hard work. Thank you for the work YOU are doing!

I have never understood why students are told they are not in the real world! All of my students are juggling a myriad of responsibilities in work, family, money, and shoehorning in their studies. They work hard! Isn’t that the real world?!

Here is a quote that should make us sit up and take notice! Meritocracy at the U of Chicago Prof A professor explains that creating elites is human nature. Here is a quote worth pondering about the current state of university instruction and its ultimate goal:

I can only observe that every system of education aims, whether anyone acknowledges it or not, toward producing and privileging a certain human type, and that every society has an elite. Beyond the noisy conflict between defenders of meritocracy and their woke opponents, our society has chosen, and continues to choose, to educate its children with the apparent aim of making a class of leaders who are disconnected from any real solidarity to others but unable to think for themselves, combining the worst qualities of individualism and conformism. Students’ test scores and racial demographics dominate our public debates, but ultimately matter less than the implicit moral ideal towards our institutions teach them to aspire.

If I have anything to say about it, my life has been dedicated to getting students to think for themselves!

Our goal at the Comenius Institute on the campus of IUPUI was for me to attain another degree (M.A. in English) so that I could be inside the university. By God’s good grace I have been teaching there since Fall 2018 and I finished the degree in December. Well, one of my academic, apologetic friends, Donald Williams, made some interesting comments this past week on social media,

You will be handicapped in winning elections if you cede education and culture to the enemy. You will be handicapped in winning souls if you cede education and culture to the Enemy. The best and brightest conservatives tended to go into business, not education, music, literature, or film. The most serious Christians went to the mission field rather than into those callings. Now we are trying to fix this problem by going into politics. Well, some of us should be going into politics. But who was forming the minds and hearts of the people–potential voters and converts–all this time? If you want to go to Washington, you had better first go to Berkeley, Nashville, and Hollywood. If you want to help people go to Heaven, you had better first go to Berkeley, Nashville, and Hollywood.

Our point at Comenius and hopefully for all churches is to be teaching folks how to think Christianly inside the places where they live and work.

And check out some of the educational places I have visited lately:

The Big Questions Institute is an interesting link for collaborative leadership.

Hebraic Thought is a great website for understanding more about First Testament thinking.

Can cows enjoy classical music?! Expand your mind with this fun article!

Howard University is closing its Classics Department. Cornel West called it “spiritual catastrophe.”

The International Journal of Christianity and Education looks promising.

And I am very much looking forward to reading The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

Christian History has much to teach us, especially about educators who have gone before us. Check out the inventor Hannibal Goodwin and all the free information at the site.