Day 585 of 1000

This is the seventh in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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We took the scriptural admonition to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” very seriously.  We wrote about what we did in this regard fairly extensively.  An example of that is here, but if you search the word “worldview” on this blog, you will find a lot more.  We believe the kids would have floundered in college had we not made the effort, not only to describe why we believe what we believe, but to describe the beliefs of other prominently held worldviews and why we do not believe them.

The kids were prepared for some of the silliness that masquerades as higher learning in their English, Art Appreciation, and even their Biology classes.  You can read about some of the fun they had with their commie, drug legalization fanatic, English professor who made outrageously false statements about Christianity and Christian morality, but changed the subject through non-sequiturs whenever confronted with serious arguments.  The professor had taught at the community college a long time and from everything the kids could tell, he had taught this same introductory writing class in the same way for over a decade.  It was hard to decide whether his ignorance was an outgrowth of laziness or something more sinister.  You can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and here.  The sad part about this class is that they learned nothing about writing that they did not already know.

The Art Appreciation class was even worse in that the instructor reveled in abjectly immoral imagery.  The students were encouraged to break convention in morally objectionable ways.  It was totally unnecessary.  The really good part about this class is that the kids really did learn about different kinds of art and they were required to go to the North Carolina Museum of Art, something for which we are very grateful, because we have been back there many times since they took the class.

We viewed this worldview training the preparation that helped the most in allowing the kids to function well both socially and academically in their liberal arts classes.  The great thing, though, was that it was often not necessary to defend themselves with respect to their worldview.  They had History and New Testament classes where the professors were symapthetic to a Christian worldview.  The worldview training helped there, too.

The odd part, to us, was that very few students arrived at either NCSU or Wake Tech Community College with any kind of coherent well-taught worldview.