Glen Davis

The Wilber­force Forum is a col­lec­tion of excel­lent resources for thought­ful Chris­tians.

At present, they have resources in the
* Arts
* Lit­er­a­ture
* Phi­los­o­phy
* Sci­ence & Math
* His­to­ry and Polit­i­cal Sci­ence

They have more dis­ci­plines in the works. Looks like some­thing to book­mark!

I just read a mar­velous essay by James Schall (a priest and pro­fes­sor at George­town) called A Stu­den­t’s Guide to Lib­er­al Learn­ing (link found from the author’s home­page, which I ran across cour­tesy of the Clare­mont Insti­tute). It’s sim­ply out­stand­ing (although I found the style a lit­tle odd at times).

Schall argues that stu­dents must take respon­si­bil­i­ty for their own learn­ing. Two pas­sages serve as a decent intro­duc­tion:

When a stu­dent arrives at a uni­ver­si­ty, espe­cial­ly a pres­tige [sic] one, he will prob­a­bly think that what he is about to study will be the best that he can pos­si­bly come by. He nat­u­ral­ly expects that what he is get­ting is, in fact, his “mon­ey’s worth”, as they say.… This par­tic­u­lar essay is not writ­ten for stu­dents who have no prob­lems with the sys­tem or who, even less, do not want to find any. They will nev­er know the dif­fer­ence. They will nev­er doubt that what they are being taught is any­thing but the high qual­i­ty stuff that it is tout­ed to be in the brochures and media or, appar­ent­ly, con­firmed by the high cost of their tuition. Often how­ev­er, from one’s reli­gious or philo­soph­i­cal back­ground, from one’s fam­i­ly, per­haps from a friend or a teacher or from some­thing that one chanced to read or see, a young man or woman will be at least alert and, hope­ful­ly, begin to sus­pect that all is not well in acad­e­mia, or in the cul­ture, or, for that mat­ter, in one’s own soul.

and also

E. F. Schu­mach­er, in his great book, A Guide for the Per­plexed, tells of going to Oxford as a young man, that is, of going to what was thought to be the great­est uni­ver­si­ty of his time. He dis­cov­ered that what was taught and dis­cussed there bore lit­tle mean­ing and truth to him. Schu­mach­er was forced to look else­where for some sem­blance of an edu­ca­tion that dealt with the high­est things, that took seri­ous­ly what the great philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious minds real­ly were talk­ing about, issues that he already felt press­ing in his own soul but were nev­er addressed in the great uni­ver­si­ty.

And one last obser­va­tion which I found par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing: In spite of most of what a stu­dent will read on the top­ic, rev­e­la­tion seeks rea­son, is addressed to mind and fos­ters it. The Bible sim­ply has pro­found things to tell us, things we clear­ly ought to know. We now have stu­dents in class, more­over, even those who have gone to church or syn­a­gogue all their lives, who have not the faintest accu­rate idea about what is said in Scrip­ture, a work that almost every gen­er­a­tion before this era has read care­ful­ly either to under­stand or to dis­pute or to live by.

If you find Schal­l’s essay help­ful, you might also want to read my ear­li­er post­ing on Becom­ing Wise In Col­lege.