Our children, the greatest asset our society has, are given to the college and university system in part to produce leaders. America needs leaders . . . men and women of virtue and character who can make hard decisions and who will serve their fellow citizens.
Colleges and universities have a civic duty to produce such leaders . . . it is the right thing to do and if they don’t do it then their very right to exist may be threatened by the enemies of freedom.
Hugh Hewitt engaged in a conversation today with Larry Arn of the fine Hillsdale College and later with me. We discussed Torrey Honors at Biola University and the nature of American education.
Hugh is a brilliant communicator and engages daily in a defense of Western values. What school is most likely to produce friends and allies for Hugh Hewitt? Do we want to send our brightest and best to college to be mentored by men and women who share our values or pay to have our future leaders propagandized by those who reject any duty to civic service?
Listeners to his show need to ask this question before writing a check to a college, “Is this school engaged in its civic duty of training up leaders to defend the very values that make the school possible? Or does it attack those values daily?”
Is the school your child attending plainly on the side of Judeo-Christian virtues and the Western tradition of reason and liberty? Ask. Ask if the school hopes to teach virtue to its graduates. If not, and most schools gave up on this long ago in a mess of moral relativism, ask them what their liberal arts curriculum does? It was intended by the men and women who created it to teach character and service. If the college has given up on that, then what is it for?
Programs like Torrey at Biola University and Hillsdale College will teach your kid to think. They might not turn out as we would wish. . . we believe in liberty after all. However, if the college you are choosing has no intention of teaching character or service, then one can be sure of what they will not get.
These schools have the right to stop educating as C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers were educated. Classically trained graduates of schools like Torrey at Biola University and Hillsdale College would defend that right absolutely, but we have no obligation to support this failure of will and duty by sending our children and our hard earned treasure to schools that no longer do what they were founded to do.
My students have fun at college. . . but they are mostly here to work. They could have fun at home after all without the expensive tuition bill. We are fighting a global war against foes who hate liberty and the Western educational system. It is time to produce another greatest generation that has a serious minded goal of making a difference and defending those values.
If the school is best known for the football team, buy your kid a sweat shirt from that school, a Direct TV subscription to the college football package, and send them to Biola to work.