The Snare of College Accreditation: And How to Avoid It

In the special report, the life-long secularizing effect of college accreditation is shown to be undesirable for Christians, and a snare worth avoiding. Since the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1926, Christian leaders have been sounding the alarm and were even willing to suffer jail sentences to avoid accreditation. Is accreditation somehow better today, or have the watchmen on the wall simply not been heard? The monopolizing effect of accreditation has been keeping Christian educational innovation in a box. Scholarly research has shown conclusively that accreditation doesn’t even accomplish its own stated purposes. This report exposes the issues and provides direction for Christians who understand that God has called His people to take dominion; even in College accreditation. Free to family network members upon request or available for purchace

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The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

Introduction to the Special Report titled

The FamilyUniversity Network: Unplugging Institutional Higher Education

 or

 What is a FamilyUniversity?

Stepping BeyondHomeSchool and ChristianColleges

toward Family Spiritual and Economic Prosperity

In this special report, the family university is biblically defined and shown to be a preferable choice for higher education; in essence, extending home education through the college years. Why not build your Christian family enterprise with the energy, funding, and infrastructure that would otherwise build the state or private institutions?

It is common knowledge today that serious moral problems exist in families, churches, schools, colleges, corporations, and political arena. These problems have academic, moral, and philosophical roots reaching back centuries, and have been promoted by the systematic separation of knowledge from faith in God. The significant amount of teaching required to equip people with the ability to discern the times and apply Scripture by faith to all areas of life, requires diligence in all areas of learning, and at all levels of education.

Secular universities are openly hostile to the Christian worldview, and the best of the Christian colleges cannot replicate the family away from home. Worldview assessment of 1177 students in 18 Christian colleges over 7 years demonstrated that Christian students are graduating from Christian institutions with a secular humanism worldview even where their professors have a Biblical Theist worldview. Even the above average Christian colleges are little better than their secular counterpart because the curricula are developed under the same institutional accreditation guidelines, the same text books are used, many of the faculty were trained at secular institutions, and the family learning context is ignored.

Even the best of Christian distance education does not purposefully involve the family in the learning process, nor couple with individual family convictions, nor uses the family knowledge base, nor earns family income. It is time to unplug institutional higher education and bring higher education home.

This special report defines the family university and network with Scriptural support. It also introduces individuals and families to a practical way that they can implement the Christian philosophy of education through developing their own family university and complementary business as a part of the dominion mandate (Psalm 8).

University education needs to be reinvented with a Biblical understanding to strengthen the family and church. Read this special report to learn how each family university can uniquely provide the humble, relational, and Spirit led ideal Biblical higher education for their young adults to participate in building a strong Christian family, church and culture.

"If the networks I have described could emerge, the educational path of each student would be his own to follow, and only in retrospect would it take on the features of a recognizable program. The wise student would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new goal, insight into difficulties encountered choice between possible methods. Even now, most persons would admit that the important services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or counsel, given at a chance meeting or in a tutorial. Pedagogues, in an unschooled world, would also come into their own, and be able to do what frustrated teachers pretend to pursue today." Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1970.

The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

• Jesus learned mathematics from His godly step-father in the family business. This discipleship and home educating context enabled Joseph to share the Scripture and his life example with Jesus throughout the day and night as a Scriptural lifestyle (Deuteronomy 6:7). Families can, therefore, extend devotional reading and talking “by the way” to include the Biblical perspectives in mathematics as presented in this special report.

• The work of mathematics disciplines the mind, which translates into increased personal discipline in all other areas of life. Patience, accuracy, precision, thoroughness, neatness, and creativeness are also manifestations of the image of God, which benefit man as they are diligently developed (Proverbs 10:4-5) in young or old people. However, developing these traits without Christ at the center can lead students to find their secular life, and essentially proclaim “I can do all things without Christ.” In contrast, Christ desires that we find His life in us. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. Matthew 10:39 This special report helps anyone return to Christ in the learning and using of mathematics.

• We must recover a thoroughly Biblical worldview of the home, church, and society to bless our children with a Christian family heritage. Practicing Christian thought in mathematics is as influential as mathematics itself. As mathematics permeates every subject and discipline and career, so does one’s view of mathematics become mapped into these other areas of life. In other words, just as reading, writing, and arithmetic are foundational to every endeavor, so is the need to seed these areas of study with Christian presuppositional thought such that our young people can bring Christian thought into all of their future studies, career, and influence in society. This special report is designed to awaken Christians to the very important connections between faith and mathematics.

• Secular education is unconcerned with the moral, ethical, social, and religious life of the teacher, just as long as they can convey the mechanical techniques. The Christian thinker and parent, however, is concerned about and even responsible to ensure that God’s perspectives are conveyed through themselves and teachers to their children (Jeremiah 10:2). Christian mathematics is therefore, further distinguished from secular mathematics in its fulfillment of parental and teacher responsibilities. This special report will help students, teachers, and parents be faithful to their educational responsibilities in mathematics.

• There is presently no curriculum available which conveys a Christian world view in mathematics, therefore the content of this special report serves an unusually important role.

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The family university is introduced as a Biblical model for higher education. This builds upon the success of modern home schooling and is facilitated by internet connectivity. While understanding that family universities are uniquely Spirit-led, one family university design is described which uses the internet to conduct worldview education, Christian scholarship education, Christian worldview research programs, apprenticeship programs, and entrepreneurship programs. The encouragement and internet collaboration available through a family university network provides the tools to creatively manage higher learning which is consistent with family convictions as an “economic engine” for family prosperity.

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The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

Secularization by the Christian Educator

Secularism appears to be promoted and preserved by the presence of Christian educators in secular learning institutions. Secular education is here defined as education where Jesus Christ, the creator and sustainer of all matter, is excluded from the dialog. Secular education elevates the concern for worldly provisions over the concern for spiritual development and therefore is neither Scriptural nor desirable. This secular education, combined with the inattention of Christians to philosophical and intellectual life, appears to contribute to the Christian worldview decline and church worldliness. While Christian educators in secular institutions may encourage some students and educators in their faith, they also unknowingly attract Christian students to a secular education and build secular institutions. It will be shown in this paper that the presence of Christian educators in secular institutions contributes more to the secularization of society than to growth of the Christian church.

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The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

Learning Pedagogy from the Master Teacher

Recent education literature shows the value of a real-world environment in terms of experiential learning. This paper shows that this valuable teaching method could be learned by observing the master teacher, Jesus Christ. Problem-based learning, interdisciplinary teamwork, outcome assessment, and distance education, are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of Jesus' teaching methods in the context of engineering education. Novel opportunities for education are identified including student-teacher comparison assessment, the student written textbook, the single faculty curriculum, faculty recruiting of their own students, and a focus on relationship building. An evaluation tool, in the form of a questionnaire, is given with the result of its use presented as a teaching philosophy for engineering educators. The model for learning pedagogy from the master teacher is also shown as transferable to faculty-to-faculty mentor relationships.

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The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

Learning Engineering and More through Entrepreneurship

This paper presents a home business based curriculum that produces professional engineers without institutional education. The benefits and drawbacks of this curriculum are given in terms of educational philosophy, learning environment, research productivity, outcomes achieved, assessment, customizability, time required, financial costs, and societal influence. This curriculum encourages individualization and independent thinking toward maximizing learning and improving a capitalist society. The curriculum development strategy included can be used to develop home business based curriculum for other engineering and non-engineering careers.

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The Bartletts, 1854 107th Street NE, Bottineau, ND 58318.

This paper elaborates on the fundamentals and relationships between sin and corrosion science as the basis for launching several research programs. The smelting of iron ore, chemistry of iron corrosion, and corrosion protection are correlated with original sin, daily sins, and maintaining righteousness, respectively. To demonstrate that spiritual truths can be understood by the things that are made, iron corrosion is paralleled with sin in their: globally destructive nature, object attacked (God-made versus man-made), process (chemical versus spiritual), recovery method (smelting versus repentance), protection methods (cathodic or coating versus abiding in Christ), what they hinder (mechanical function versus truth function), method of observation (outward visual versus inward heart), and how both corrosion and sin represent low energy states.