Gordon in the News: last updated 06/13/2011
“We are educating young people to be leaders at 42, not merely to get jobs at 22.”
“A liberal arts education is a practical education because it develops just those capacities needed by every thinking adult: analytical skills, effective communication, practical intelligence, ethical judgment, and social responsibility.”
—Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, AAC&U, 2002
“The liberal arts compel us to look broadly. To understand brain science today, for instance, it is essential to know not simply the groundbreaking work of labs at Harvard and MIT in the last century but also the latest experiments at Fudan University in China. To understand the Christian church, we need to read Augustine and Calvin and also to learn about the revivals in Brazil and the courage of believers in Kandahar and Beruit.”
—Broken Glass: Matriculation Chapel Address, Mark Sargent, Provost of Gordon College
“The liberal arts are not merely a received tradition from the world’s past but fully as much an ongoing creation toward its end, toward the fulfillment of all things. All of us are engaged in that creation. We ourselves are the living manifestations of the truth that “makes us free,” the truth that is constantly granted to us in the process of learning.”
—Donald Cowan, physicist
“A Christian liberal arts college enables students to consider all of reality: God, humanity, society, cultural, and natural creation. We can tell the whole truth. The secular university or liberal arts college operates with blinders to the reality of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sovereign over history.”
—Dan Russ, academic dean and director of the Center for Christian Studies
“We live in a culture that makes an integrated educational vision extraordinarily difficult. Fragmentation is the norm for us. We grow up thinking of our Christian faith as something we do on Sunday morning, or in a Bible study, or when we pray. But then we go off to school (or work) and do something else. And we learn to separate 90 percent of what we do from following Christ.
“But Gordon’s vision assumes Christ is preeminent in all things. That the entirety of our lives and our education is integrated in Him. That the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And that means that we are swimming upstream. We better be in good shape, or we’ll be swept in quite a different direction.”
—"A Framework for the Liberal Arts," Stan Gaede, scholar-in-residence at Gordon, president of the Christian College Consortium
“As our culture becomes more militantly secular, on the one hand, and more thoughtlessly religious on the other, the church and the world desperately need young men and women who know and speak the truth in love. While they can learn to do so on a personal level through Christian homes and churches, only a Christian liberal arts experience can educate them to learn to speak the truth in love in all the complex arenas that confront them in this glorious but fallen world. The more specialized education offered in so many institutions will train them to do a job, but only a Christian liberal arts education enables them to understand more fully the Creator, his creation, and those most complex creatures of all, human beings.”
