The Meaning and Purpose of Higher Education — Ep. 037

In the same way as if, say, we would send a missionary to some far-off place to bring Jesus to those people, claim that for Christ, there'd be a lot of preparation goes into that, a lot of work. It's the same thing with some of these fields of occupation, be it, you know, a doctor or a dentist or whatever. It takes all this preparation so that a Christian can get into that space and do an excellent job, but also you also, in a sense, like claim to that as this is for Christ. That's a really interesting concept. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying here.

That's really neat. So it's, in a way, the, it's what at least gives you the ticket in to begin that process. It's not to say there's no risks involved. Sure. A part of going to a secular university is that they change your mind about things, okay? And that influence is both, say, in the ideas, especially if you're in the humanities or liberal arts. It's embedded right into the ideas. But I tend to think even just in the practices of a secular university, the frosh night, the what orientation is like, how the classroom experience is even structured. There's something just built into those experiences which will cause a Christian to struggle, okay, at some level. So you have to be aware of that.

But you recognize this, there's these skills, they're kind of dormant in and of themselves, and you bring them to life, you animate them with the spirit of Christ, and it's going to fundamentally alter how you deal with those things. And there's even possibility there you could do Christian nursing. So in a way, college isn't the end. That can be a means to something that has so much more meaning in life.

And maybe people just don't quite walk that path always as they should. That's how I like to see it anyway. It's not the end, it's the means to the end. For myself, that's not where I started off. So yeah, that's an idealistic thing. But you know, maybe, I don't know, if people approached it like that. It's awfully fun to reflect that back on everybody else because I haven't done it myself.

So everybody wants to go to college, maybe they should do it that way. Yeah, just don't do it the way I did it. But now that I've actually gotten there, I think you're right. That is really, really interesting. That makes a lot of sense, though.

I like that approach, I think in a way could help, especially the next generation, to understand, you know, the practical realistic value of college and how it can be used for God's kingdom. It can feel kind of ambiguous, like what's the good of all of this?

And if nothing else, even if you don't think that the education should be necessary, that you could do the same thing that an engineer did. And not a lot of folks are willing to say that. But with this mentality that if I just had enough experience, the education's kind of redundant, you could learn it on the job. And you'll notice some difficulties there right away, I think, because most people don't say that. But the reality is of our world that if you want to be an engineer, you first got to study, okay? That's the way you get access to that entire field.

You may not like it very much, but that's the reality we function in. And bringing a positive perspective to the experiences is probably going to turn out a lot better if you see the value of it instead of just seeing it as a necessary evil. Yeah. And seeing it as just a way to get a good job. Yeah, especially that. Yeah. My own educational journey, like I've been over some of the facts about it, you know, in 2011, I graduated from Faith Builders. But the progression, and you've noticed this already, I think is really significant in this, is that you start off from, or that I started off from what's essentially kind of a self-focused and negative reason for coming into college, saying, I don't feel like I'm doing very much that's worthwhile here.

I don't like my job and I want to do something different. Yeah, yeah. So it's negative and it's focused on what I need or what I feel like I need. And there is, that gives me access to something next, which would be Faith Builders. And there's a growing sense of clarity. There's some less ambiguity and begin to be able to serve in new ways here.

And now, as I'm moving toward graduate studies starting here in August, not an absolute certainty that this is what I need to be doing, say, or that it's all spelled out in the clouds now and I just know how the tea leaves have fallen.

It's not that, but I do have a sense of confidence. And that confidence isn't based so much in just, you know, that inward look of like, I'm in so much pain and I want to get out of this, as much as saying now, I see this as a way of serving the people who I am. Yeah, yeah. And I see this as a way of helping my church to grow. I see this as a way of learning how to even lead my family, which is really pretty challenging sometimes.

You feel inadequate there a lot as a father and growing in that, it becomes wrapped up in something much larger.

So again, I think it's important to recognize, at least in my journey, it's been significant to recognize that although I started off at one place that was essentially about getting a different job, of getting away from the pain, I've ended up somewhere that's much more focused on a sense of calling in a maturing commitment to Christ and his work, and at least a growing awareness of where it is that I could fit myself into his kingdom, but much less about myself there.

Using it as a means of service. Yeah, that's right. Preparing for service, yeah. That's good, yeah. And seeing some places there to noticing more specific and I think real needs that are present and kind of forming yourself around that space. And I think that's something that the younger generation is starting to react to is like, oh, you know, these people just sit in, they just go to college forever, get a degree in whatever, and then end up getting a job just like everybody else that, yeah, you're talking about a much more deliberate path. And deliberate is a little bit too strong, I think.

But I would at least encourage people who are considering college to ask the question, is this helping me to meet a real need? Is this helping me to find a real opportunity? Or is this just some kind of vague, vacuous thing out there that I'm going to try to make up as I go?

Yeah. But neither would I say, especially at the beginning of it. The only thing I had there was the pain. Okay, I don't like what I'm doing. I don't like my life. And this is a way of pushing through or past the pain. And it started off as a very negative thing, a sense of neediness. And it's gradually changed as calling has become more clear, of gaining the greater sense of both who I am and especially, I think, what opportunities God places in life.

It's become more refined and more focused on how can I give? How can I serve? What opportunities are there for me to contribute something to the work of God? And that's kind of come around full circle now towards seminary. But it didn't begin there. And I'm glad it didn't. Yeah. Well, okay, so if you would have dove in, okay, if you would have went straight to seminary, you know, to a graduate degree right off of the bat, I don't know, it sounds like there's a level of preparation that you maybe didn't intend, but it kind of happened along the way. Like you gained some real life skills and some real experiences you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. That's kind of encouraging. Especially, yeah, especially in our circles to have stories to tell that are actually from the field. The time I nearly severed a customer's leg with a fan blade that went crazy, or the time I nearly fell three stories. Those sorts of experiences, I think, are really important. Otherwise, you get really hopelessly just academic. And not practical. Not practical and not experienced in the better sense of it. And that's something that I see as a real strength of Anabaptist culture is we are very practical a lot of times, you know, real world experience and things like that. And almost to a fault to where, you know, college is seen as maybe not as much of a path as maybe something else, because we're really practical.

Yeah, that's, I like that blend. And I think trying to find it, that's not very easy sometimes. And if you're really interested in the practical and you see the skills a person can accumulate, you wonder what's the value of college, isn't that right? Yeah, that, yeah, pretty much.

And that's something I think, especially the younger generation is going to start asking those questions. You know, why spend all of this money on college when I could use that time and money to gain experience in a relevant field and learn something practical? Yeah, it's a fair question.

I do think that, and this just pivot a little bit here and then just ask the question, so what's the value of college education? Right, yeah. And for myself, there's, again, I wouldn't have said all of this to begin with maybe, but in my first foray into college with the work at Penn College where I got that degree in computer science, one of the things that bothered me was that I had to take a lot of programming classes, which I felt were kind of irrelevant to what I wanted to learn, which was networking, okay? And I had to take accounting, which made no sense. Interesting. Whatsoever. And I remember the accounting professor beginning to kind of push on that by saying, hey, look, you guys, I know you don't really care about this class very much because you're here for computer science and you've got to take this accounting class, but I promise you, he said, if you're in computer science for any length of time, you're going to be working with finances and accountants.

And he was right. Frequently now in the work that I did previously and in some of the work that I did, you know, that's what you run into. If you work with computers, you're going to be working with finances.

And if you want to understand computers, you're going to need to understand programming, okay? So I came in wanting just a few very practical skills. I wanted to know how do I fix Windows 98, okay? And they taught me programming instead. And a little bit about Windows 98 and a little bit about Windows Server 2000. And maybe it's becoming clear now as I'm talking, like the reason they did that, they wanted to teach me a mindset, a prepared way of looking at computers and technology, which is founded in programming. Yeah. I wanted the skills. The reason they did that is because the skills are obsolete now. If they would have focused on Windows 98 and Server 2000, I'd be a wreck, okay?

All of that's obsolete. But I do have that mindset, the way of kind of intuitively looking at things, and I can still figure it out because I know how a computer works at that level. Yeah. They knew that because they've been in the field for years and years. Me coming in as a novice, I just wanted a grab bag of skills and then I could run off and flee, you know, and get a great job. That's just not how it works.

And you need, you need as the novice to have apprenticeship with somebody who's been in the field. And that's ideally what college is about, to allow that big picture perspective to inform the novices who are just getting started.