If you’re a 2008 high school graduate raised in an American evangelical church, chances are you may have been inadvertently poisoned by those idols which Francis Schaeffer warned us of 40 years ago - personal peace and affluence. Get good grades, go to a good college, get a financially stable job, get married, have 2.5 kids, and live in suburbia, so as to isolate yourself from the reality of poverty and a post-Christian culture. It’s not that any of these things are necessarily bad, but idolatrous Christians tragically nurture kids to live for perverted ideals like “a nice life” rather than the costly priorities of the Kingdom.

With the threat of “flipping burgers,” many Christian parents guilt-manipulate the children God has given them into pursuing safe majors like “business,” instead of what God has laid on your heart - maybe political science, psychology, music, sociology, and so on, because God’s sovereignty is not enough to “fall back on.”

After speaking at a Christian youth conference, a high school senior proudly confessed to me that he wanted to be a lawyer because that would enable him to own a nice house to provide for his family. What a depressing vision. It made me nauseated. In John Piper’s words, that’s a wasted life.

I would like to apologize to any high school senior taught to serve the Christian version of the American Dream. You were created for mission and you were never encouraged. In high school, you were baby sat, entertained, shamed, taught how to be “nice,” kept busy with lots of programs, told not to sin (have sex, watch porn, get drunk, have long hair), and ventured on 10-day missions trip to Jamaica over Christmas. But you were never given a picture for your role in the mission of God to redeem His creation. Your faith has been totally undermined by a Christianity of privatization: you and Jesus. You were given the monastic vision of Christianity as a life of personal piety in isolation, raised to live in the Christian ghetto where it’s safe.

Pursuing the adventure of being “salt and light” is not something you were encouraged to do, especially if that meant sacrificing your personal safety and material comfort. Many of you have been discouraged from sharing your life with non-Christians because it was not modeled for you. This is not the way of Jesus, and for that I apologize. Class of 2008, seek first the Kingdom, not putrid idols like a struggle-free life and upward mobility.

Critics of Bush’s No Child Left Behind act have seized on a new survey by Common Core, a nonprofit education-advocacy group. The survey indicts the president’s education system for shortchanging students in the liberal arts. Slate has summarized it as a “depressing survey of what high-schoolers don’t know.”

A Common Core spokesperson told The New York Times that the findings demonstrate that American students are “stunningly ignorant” and pegs NCLB as the culprit, saying it has “impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.” A USA Today article likewise reported that NCLB’s “focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities.”

The study updated one conducted 25 years ago, surveying 1,200 17-year-olds’ grasp of literary and historical topics through 30 questions lifted from the Department of Education’s 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. That it reveals some learning shortcomings isn’t really contested. The study’s critics contend that results don’t paint a total NCLB mea culpa. Instead, they say, the curriculum and the educational environments themselves may have shifted leftward—to the detriment of a well-rounded education. (Though this claim, too, may be as flimsy as Common Core’s.)

For example: Walt Whitman. A shocking 72 percent of 17-year-olds surveyed knew that Whitman wrote the line “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” in his Leaves of Grass. Most agree this is a large number. Yet asked who Job from the Bible was, critics complain, half of students didn’t know. Likewise, 20 percent more students identified Whitman’s Leaves of Grass line than knew the plot of George Orwell’s 1984. While a question on the plotline of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man hit rock bottom, two of the three top-scoring literary questions dealt with racism (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) or slavery (To Kill a Mockingbird). After the bottom-rung Invisible Man question were ones on The Canterbury Tales, Orwell’s dystopia, Job and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. (This was also a multiple-choice test. On the Whitman question, if the three options besides Whitman had included notable contemporaries like William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson, rather than less known, less relevant poets like Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Archibald MacLeish, correct responses would probably have dropped.)

Of the historical topics, 97 percent of students identified Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fewer than 70 percent could pinpoint the purpose of the Federalist Papers, the time period of the Civil War or the fact that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion. Topics like Brown v. Board of Education presented less trouble, and more students knew the ramifications of Watergate than the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. (Although students did do well on questions about the founding fathers.)

This bleak picture—of students unaware of 1984 and what half-century the Civil War took place in—tracks with another recent USA Today survey that asked students to list “the most famous Americans,” not counting presidents or first ladies. Their responses ran, from the top down: MLK, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Ben Franklin, Amelia Earhart, Oprah, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. The list set off a conservative firestorm of commentary about “history as therapy.”

I’m sure that high school teachers all over Western Civilization are happy, happy, so happy that Beowulf is cool all of a sudden.  The animated feature film version of this first great Christian-slash-medieval epic opens in theaters tonight, and I’ll bet some students will be taking field trips to see it.  This is largely unfortunate, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the film.  What’s unfortunate is that there are so many high school literature teachers who show their students film versions of Great Stories in the hopes that students will like them more.  Sometimes the students do like them more, usually they don’t.  Here’s what I mean:

(more…)

Forget what you know about successful high school football programs and the raucous lives of the young athletes.  One football team from a small Kansas town (outscoring opponents this season 704 to zero) is making records and doing it in innovative (which might be considered an old-fashioned) way: “Each player and cheerleader signs a contract pledging to remain alcohol-, drug- and tobacco-free. If they break that promise, they must go to the elementary school to explain to the children why they were kicked off their team […]”