Ex-Director's Non-Letter

I thought I heard from under a hug pile of paper a small voice calling, saying "Help, I am drowning! Please help! Write to Margie and them." And I thought the small voice was Fran's and I cried, "Here I am. Send me." That is how all this got started. But I may have been wrong. Perhaps it wasn't Fran. Maybe she didn't ask for a letter. So, let's label this a nonletter from an ex-director and just let me rant.

I am still hanging around the edges of RC, haunting the halls a bit like Bartleby the Scrivener. Next semester I will be offering the Bible Lit course I have often taught before, and there was some talk of doing it as a distance learning experiment on-line. But I am wary of that, allergic as I am to computers and determined as I am to contribute in no way to the advent of the Information Age.

In fact, I fear greatly that we are being enthusiastically sold and meekly accepting a very destructive idea--that education is fundamentally and most effectively the transmission of information. I have read recently that universities better get their courses on-line or get out of the business because machines are simply more efficient processors of data then people are. It makes me very sad.

At best, information is a beginning, a place to initiate the journey to wisdom; but it is also functionally value-less. And education ought to be about value, about differentiation, about knowing the good, the better, and the best. It ought to be the patient, loving handing-on of the means to choose--the ability to disregard the irrelevant and to passionately cling to what is good and true and beautiful. Education is the gift from one person to another of all that is dear.

Remember, should anyone ask, this is not a letter. But I did hear a small voice....

Love, Murray

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