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THE TRUTH ABOUT INDEPENDENT STUDY There is a line in the movie Goodwill Hunting that is unusually honest and true. A young man named Will was the hero of the movie. At one point, he told an Ivy League student that he would one day realize that he had dropped $100,000.00 on an education that he could have gotten for $10 and a library card. The student replied that he would earn a lot of money while Will would mow his lawn. Will replied that at least he would not be unoriginal. Both were right. School can be a good thing. It might open career paths that would otherwise be unavailable (although there is no guarantee that any degree will lead to employment). School can give graduates greater self-confidence and can lead to the perception of competence. However, school is not necessary for an education. It is possible to get a good education by independent reading instead of taking classes. The secret is knowing what to read. The world is full of books, but few of them are worth reading. In the arena of Biblical Studies and related fields, less than one book in ten is valuable, and outstanding books are rare indeed. More than half of the titles in print are completely wrong and are based on presuppositions that destroy the faith. Reading them may sometimes do more harm than good. Yet there are other books that can change your world and greatly strengthen your faith. Knowing what to read is far more important than the amount that you read. Was Will right in the movie Goodwill Hunting? Can you give yourself as good an education with a library card as you can get by going to school? The answer is sometimes yes, but only in some fields. When you study in a traditional program, you can take labs in Biology or Chemistry. The hands on experience can teach you a lot that you can't learn by reading a book. If you take a course in electricity and magnetism, the equations taught in the text book may be half a line long. It helps to have someone check your work as you learn to use the math. If you take a course in political science, it helps to talk to people who have had real world experience in politics. If you take a seminary course in preaching, it can help a lot to see yourself speak on a video tape. If you study in a strongly academic seminary and learn the original languages, it can help to work through the translation of a biblical book in class. It is a lot easier to get a handle on Greek and Hebrew in a group than to try to plow through the material by yourself. Perhaps the most important thing that you get from a school is the ability to interact with the professor. You can read a scholar's books and get exactly the same information that you would get by taking his class. Yet most people only understand part of what they read. By taking the class and interacting with the professor, a student is more likely to understand the material. So there are real values in studying at a traditional school if you can afford both the tuition and the time. Often though, if you read carefully, you can learn as much on your own. Why is that true? Think about how most courses work. At an undergraduate or even graduate level, many courses are lecture courses. The teacher stands in front of the room and slowly reads through his or her notes. The students write down everything that the teacher says. Then the students study their notes for the test. The teacher's notes really constitute a small book. If the teacher gave copies of the notes to students to read, they could finish the material in a couple of hours. It is very inefficient to copy the material by hand as the teacher slowly reads it. Often, the teacher draws much of the material from one or two course text books. In those cases, students can just read the course texts and ignore much of the lecture. The class discussions might help the students understand the material better, but even that is often not the case. If you read the same texts carefully, you can get the same knowledge much faster. In a really good program, the teacher will draw on a life time of research to present state of the art lectures to the students. (That's often not the case, but it does happen.) However, a really good academic book will do exactly the same thing. In the real world, you can read two or three outstanding books and perhaps a dozen good journal articles about a topic. Doing so may give you as good an education about that topic as taking a class that covers the same material. At a graduate and doctoral level, many classes are seminar courses. In these courses, students are assigned topics. Often a topic may be an analysis of a book or a controversial question that has received a lot of academic attention. At Concordia, I was assigned a paper on the academic debate about the process by which Luther's thinking developed within a three year span of his life. As a non-Lutheran, it blew me away, and it was the worst paper that I ever wrote. Students are required to read their papers to the class and lead a class discussion about the topic. The problem is that students do not have very much experience with research and little time to prepare their material. They may have to write four papers per semester, and they may have to read the first paper a week after they received the assignment. At the same time, they are probably taking four other courses, working at least part time to pay the bills, participating in the life of a congregation, and trying to keep the family happy. Students are not likely to do good academic work in that time frame. Graduate and doctoral level seminar papers tend to be at best superficial. Students do get teaching experience of a sorts by presenting the papers, but the level of research and academic ability presented in the seminars is usually rather limited. If you take three or four topics of your choice related to a subject area and read several books and articles about each topic, you can give yourself at least as good an education as you will receive in a seminar course. In a distance education setting, courses are often based on reading from one to four books (depending on the school), writing a reaction paper to them, and perhaps doing a research project of some kind. Some distance education programs may also include lectures either distributed on CDs or downloaded from the net. These lectures are not better or worse than lectures given to students in traditional on campus courses. They share the same strengths and weaknesses except that you may not be able to ask the teacher questions about things that you do not understand. You may also be able to learn as much by reading a couple of good books on the subject. Taking the course can give structure to your studies, and it might encourage you to work when you would not otherwise find the time. Motivation is a huge issue in any kind of education. It is not unusual for schools to graduate only between 10% and 25% of the students who first start taking classes. For a discussion of this problem, see the Schools and Degree page of the Truth section of this web site. Part of the problem is that modern education is structured as a continuation of the parent/child relationship. The teacher plays the role of the parent and tries to inculcate cultural values and information into the student/child. Kids respond to their parents in several ways. Some are compliant and look for their parents' approval. Some are outwardly compliant but passive aggressive. Others are simply rebellious. When students interact with teacher/parent figures, they respond in the same way. Some are compliant and seek the teacher's approval. They usually get A's and go on to higher academic degrees. When they finish their doctorates and try to teach, they are surprised to learn how few students are willing to do what they are told to do. Since they are themselves compliant people, they often have little idea how to motivate students who are not compliant. As compliant people, they also internalize the values and judgments of the field. They think that "important" scholars really are important, and they may contribute little that is new and valuable to their fields. Other students are outwardly compliant but passive aggressive. They get B's and C's. They tend to graduate but not go on to higher degrees. Sometimes their perspectives changes after they have been on their own for a few years. Then they may go back to school and do well. Other students are rebellious against the teacher's parental authority. They may challenge the teacher's beliefs, be a pain in the neck, but go on to advanced degrees. If they finish their terminal degrees, they may change the world. More often though, they just get poor grades and drop out of the educational system. Rebellion usually starts in grade school, and it may lead to a life long destructive self-concept. Sometimes very bright people are convinced by the academic world that they are hopelessly dumb and can never learn. That is especially true if students have unrecognized learning dysfunctions like dyslexia that could be corrected. What does that have to do with independent study? When you read books and articles on your own, you don't have to play child to anyone's teacher/parent. You don't have to rebel against anyone's assignments. You don't have to be discouraged by anyone's evaluations. You study and learn what you decide that you want to study and learn. For some people, that can be a very liberating thing. At the same time, compliant people may find it quite uncomfortable because they are on their own. Perhaps the hardest thing to do on your own would be writing the equivalent of a masters thesis or a doctoral dissertation. There are three reasons why that would be difficult to do. The first is that it is a vast amount of work. It took me six years of full time work to write my dissertation. I worked my way through well over 800 academic books and articles. I picked up some Ugaritic and hieroglyphic so that I could follow the ancient texts (as well as using Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic in class every day and passing language qualifiers on Latin, German, and Dutch...). That's a little extreme, but not all that much. The year that I finished my degree at Concordia, four people received their doctorates. One hurried through in six years. Two took seven years, and I took eight. That's eight years after finishing both a M.Div. and a S.T.M. The biggest reason that you would never write a doctoral dissertation on your own is that you would never stay with the project that long. There would be no reason to do that. The second limitation of writing a formal paper is that you must have access to a research level library. You can't read everything that's ever been written on a topic if you don't have access to the books and articles. The third limitation of writing such a paper is that you probably would not choose the right topic. A doctoral dissertation has to make a specific claim that no one has ever made before. It also has to be clearly focused. To find a topic like that in the first place, you need the help of people who have worked in the field for a long time. That may seem like a minor point, but it isn't. Much of what you learn from a masters degree or a doctoral program you learn as you research your formal paper. One reason that some distance education programs don't give very good degrees is that they don't expect students to write papers at that level, and they don't provide the resources to make it possible for the students to do so. OK, that's discouraging. However, in the real world, academic standards are falling everywhere. Even traditional academic schools are reconsidering whether they should continue to require Greek and Hebrew from their students. The number of student who attend seminary every year is decreasing rapidly. That's happening for several reasons. 70% of our young people leave the faith as soon as they graduate from High School. So there are less potential students for the seminaries. College and seminary tuition is rising rapidly. Students can't afford it and are forced to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. Yet seminary graduates may not earn enough money to repay the loans. So why should they go to seminary? It is not at all uncommon for seminary graduates to be over $50,000 in debt on school loans and to take a church that only pays $25,000 a year. Also, those who might be interested in working as a pastor often buy into the Postmodern assumption that truth can not be known. So why should they attend an academic seminary? As all of this hits the seminaries, schools face serious financial pressures. Half a dozen seminaries have closed their doors in the last couple of years. To compete for students, academic schools are converting their programs into practical schools with far less academic requirements. As that process continues, it can be easier to get roughly the same quality education just by reading on your own. There are serious dangers in doing so. The greatest danger is that people read one or two books and assume that the books must be right. So they end up buying into crack pot perspectives that they could have avoided by reading more widely. To get a balanced perspective, it's important to read a lot of different sources on the same subject. That's a lot of work. It's much easier just to pay the tuition for a class and then let someone else tell you what to believe. That approach may or may not lead you to the truth, but it takes much less effort. When you go that route, you are trusting that the professor really has a handle on the truth, and the professor's presuppositions may or may not provide that encounter with reality. Learning is hard work, but the more you do it, the more it grabs you. It changes your life. Another danger is that many of the books written on any given subject are written from incorrect presuppositions. So they interpret the evidence in ways that are also incorrect. The problem is that you have to read fairly widely to evaluate the presuppositions behind their claims. A lot of people are just blown away by books that are not as honest or comprehensive as they appear. Remember that scholarship is basically a sales profession, and many authors are very good at selling their positions. They sound very professional and academically astute even when they are completely wrong. How can Evangelical Virtual Seminary help? Start by going to the Book Store link. Then click on the Yahweh's Song link. Read the files that make up Yahweh's Song. You can read them on your computer or print them. Yahweh's Song is a vast collection of interesting and useful stuff. Some of the material in it is rather controversial, but if you work through the book, you will understand all of the presuppositions that stand behind schools of thought in the field. You will be better prepared to evaluate almost anything that you read that is related to Biblical Studies. Then either work through one of the programs of study noted above or use the Resource Center to find books that sound interesting and useful to you. |
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Copyright © 2009 Dr. Rodger Dalman
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