© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Dr. Andrew Jackson and friends at SmartChristian.com are in the midst of planning the first Christian Blogosphere Convention, aka GodBlogCon 2005. A location (maybe Arizona, maybe California) hasn't been finalized yet. The organizers are looking for interested bloggers, financial support, and the gift of participation. Christian bloggers can express interest in the project by leaving their contact information at the site.

Give ... and take back.  I suppose one could overlook the backhanded compliment our president has paid to community colleges, first in speaking so highly of the 2-year college system in his State of the Union address and then turning around and taking away from those colleges the $1.33 billion Perkins Grant program. At least that's what is slated to happen if his 2006 budget proposals are in fact enacted by Congress this year.

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a House subcommittee has approved the Job Training Improvement Act (HR 27), thereby moving to continue the Labor Department's 1998 Workforce Investment Act. Says the Chronicle:

At the same time, the Bush administration's budget completely eliminates the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education program and the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership program (a federal fund-matching program for state aid), also cutting adult-education spending by 63%. This "net loss" of funds for community colleges signifies "a move away from career and technical education to a focus at the high-school level on academic skills," according to the policy director of the Workforce Alliance, and advocacy group in Washington, DC.[2]

Here's my take on what's wrong with this picture. One, it takes away from the community college a valuable funding tool for vocational and career programs which cannot often be matched by available or accessible local resources. I am in the final year of my watch over a 3-year Perkins grant that has not only paid for new equipment for a career program in criminal justice, but has enabled the lead instructor effectively to double the program's enrollment over a 4-year period. That equipment brought the lab and facilities to an unprecedented level of sophistication that the College itself could not match. Perhaps the College could eventually have found the money for this equipment, perhaps a donor or a foundation-investment windfall could have paid for it all, but the internal competition for programs within college walls is hot and energetic and operating funds have to be shared with everything else that makes a college operate. A Perkins grant, itself a competitive award among the College's other career-program needs, was able to inject new equipment and resources at a time of real technology shift within the criminal justice field and gave the program a decided edge in competition with comparable 2-year college programs.

Two, it gives an unbalanced shift of focus for the community college, from career and vocation to job training and placement. The difference between a career and a job is not really as subtle as it seems. Preparing people for entry into the workforce is not the same thing as providing a means whereby they learn skills while at the same time learning theory. Education and training seem alike, at least in the sense that the outcome can be some skill in a certain occupational area, but education does far more than training. Education gives perspective, opens envelopes of opportunity, and gives some substance to imagination. It is what helps to spark the entrepreneurial spirit in the small business worker, and it is what helps to energize communities of involvement in economic development. Training provides skills for workers to take with them to employers. It enables jobs. Its direct benefit is felt more directly by, well, the corporation.

My problem therefore is that we have in the Bush administration's FY06 education budget another shift from education to training, from career to job, from entrepreneurial opportunity to wage labor—from self-sustaining, life-enhancing vocational work to slavish attachment to the corporate environment. On the surface it seems like another boon to local economies and their need for workforce development: but beneath its pretty rouged skin are the same cysts of destruction which indenture men to meaningless work, long hours away from home and family, and more success in the "you-have-to-sleep-under-your-desk" workplace.

1.  Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2005.
2.  Chronicle, February 10, 2005. The Workforce Alliance has a copy of the Bush administration's FY06 budget for job training and education, along with an equally interesting Funding Analysis of Key Discretionary Programs Under US Depts Of Labor and Education[.pdf].

A quiver of poisonous errors.  In his Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher identifies six great ideas from the 19th Century:

1. Evolution.
2. Competition, natural selection, survival of the fittest.
3. All higher manifestations of human life—religion, philosophy, art, etc.—are nothing but "necessary supplements of the material life process."
4. Freudian interpretation which reduces the higher manifestations of human life to the dark stirrings of a subconscious mind.
5. The general idea of relativism, denying all absolutes, dissolving all norms and standards, leading to the total undermining of the idea of truth into pragmatism.
6. Positivism, i.e., valid knowledge can be attained only through the methods of the natural sciences.

Of these six great ideas, Schumacher says:

What I find interesting about the list is just how sticky these six ideas really are, or perhaps I should say vestigial, for they seem still to be with us no matter where we turn. What is still most interesting, or perhaps genuinely alarming, is that there doesn't seem to be a seventh great idea to add to the list from the 20th Century. It's as if we are still digesting the same old six ideas, ruminating them into a rancid mass, keeping up appearances in biology, sometimes in social policy, and often still in contemporary literature.

If we could identify an idea that might make it to number seven, my vote is "intelligent design," as a concept that could be seen as effectively expelling the other six stench-ridden ideas, as in a cleansing evacuation.

Still counting, but closer.  With 937 signatures now affixed to the document, that means there are only 63 more signatures needed before the formal Letter of Complaint is sent to the United Methodist Church (UMC) leadership in a move by concerned Methodists to discipline two of their more prominent members—George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. See my earlier blog on the United Methodists Calling for Accountable Leadership petition. You can also get further details about the project at TheyMustRepent.com. This is going to be interesting.

Christian anarchy ... again.  I think it's never productive to ask this question: What kind of government should Christians espouse and promote? Since we shouldn't ask the question, it's also in the end unproductive, I think, to ask whether Christians in the American brand of democracy should be Republican, Democrat, Green Party, Libertarian, left-leaning, right-leaning, conservative, liberal, and blah, blah. It also doesn't help to point to the communal form of government adopted by the Apostles. To talk seriously about government choices for Christians is really an attempt to set up that common schizophrenia in which the seizures of misdirection point Christians either toward the Lord (and away from secular systems) or toward secular systems (and often away from our Lord).

Here's where I'm coming from. Before Jesus was arrested and sacrificed, he prayed for his Apostles—and also for all believers. He prayed thus:

Jesus' sacrifice consecrated Christians to God's service, and his prayer was that his disciples be united in Christ—not as nationalities, but as Christians. As Paul says: "so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others" [Rom 12:5]. Such, then, is the Kingdom of God, that we are all of us in service to one master. Whatever else we are, it is always in second place to our first identity as Christians.

The question we should ask is rather: What political behavior should result from our first commitment as Christians? I say "political behavior" because the only politics which should follow from our first commitment as Christians is really what the world would call anarchism. The government to which we owe our real allegiance is not of this world. We are not of this world. We are merely aliens and strangers here [Heb 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11]. As new creations [2 Cor 5:17], this world is not our home: we are sojourners on this earth, as ambassadors of Christ [2 Cor 5:20].