Formal Ecucation is Failing

I just read an article in the WAll Street Journal's online version OpinionJournal OpinionJournal@wsj.com. It is the best online paper I receive and I strongly suggest that you subscribe to it.

The article is pasted in below and it affirms the research I did on my doctoral dissertation about training lay and professionals in 1974-75. We have known since the sixties how to help people grow and change. We know what works and what does not work. We know the educational methodis that work and those that do not work. Yet, for the most part, schools, universitis, seminaries and churches continue to pursue outmoded and non-working models to train our children, youth and adult.



(The) Discovery News reports on a new study that suggests "a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth":

A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, [British biologist Bruce] Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, "unfinished."

"The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product -- the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity," he explained.

"But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility." . . .

"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."

This would explain the lack of discipleship in most churches and seminaries.