The shift from classical Christian liberal arts education to secular vocational training by the mid-20th century didn’t just undermine the church and Christian education, but it also undermined the very industries and businesses it was supposedly designed to help.

By abandoning the personal apprenticeship model of training and turning training itself into an industrial process, colleges began mass producing “specialists” in this and that with no guarantee of a job. Graduates with only decontextualized classroom training now enter the workforce with lesser skills and no loyalties to their employers and no covenantal bonds or accountability to encourage or protect them. These new mass produced workers thus become little more than impersonal replaceable cogs in the machinery of the industrial order.

Treated like widgets, workers will quickly lean in one of two directions. They’ll either become loyal only to their paychecks and benefits packages, and with the next better offer, they’re gone. Or, workers of the world will unite in socialist-inspired unions to protect themselves against their exploitative  employer-masters and grasp for better security and benefits for less effort.

Either way, replacing a classical Christian liberal arts education with dumbed-down vocational training-as-college has given our nation a less educated, less well trained citizenry and a less flexible workforce.  That’s bad news and bad business all around.

[Adapted from my commencement address, "Turning the World Upside," at Westover Academy in Colville, WA, May 29, 2010]