The educational establishment is not listening. Debt increases. Parents and students keep paying for exploited part-time workers. Christians refuse not to do better. You can get a college education, borrow no money, be in the city, and be a traditional Christian.
Orthodox. Classical. Christian. College. Debt free.
More than one expert suggested to me that the idea of K-16 education was not prudent. We should take more sensible jobs, they were there, and forget the weird notion that college could cut loose from debt. A group of people gathered on Saint Valentine’s and did for love what nobody would do for a pay check: started something entirely different. What if the persecuted church of Antioch started something new? What if we built off the teachings of Saint Basil and were unafraid of being Orthodox and served anyone who could put up with our views? Maybe a suffering church could start something new. What if all the administrators teach? What if usury, a practice the Orthodox frown on, was kept out of the ministry of education?
A group gathered on the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day, battered, broke, and beaten. One older woman said: “I think the adventure is just beginning.” She was right and so we kept going. We found allies at places like The King’s College (NYC) with innovative president Greg Thornbury and a home at William Jessup University led by the fearless John Jackson. Robert Stacy took a chance on us and joined as Provost, putting his Ivy degree, and experience starting an honors program, to work for the School and College. The Society of Saint Valentine recruited with no address and no budget.
God provided through men and women, patrons and peers, who came and helped. Priests prayed, prodded, and produced something better than anyone could have dreamed. Just before his death, Phillip E. Johnson, UC Berkeley law professor, gave us direction and his papers. We read books from the battered East and forgotten poetry from mother Aksum and the islands of Greece. Hellenism was in our DNA with Latin, French, Spanish, and especially that most Christian of languages Arabic, adding to our Biblical and modern Greek. (We are eager to add Chinese, Hindi, and Russian to our offerings.)
Why?
We are Orthodox Christians and that means Romanian, Bulgarian, Swahili. . .every liturgical language is our goal. We are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church birthed from Athens and Jerusalem drawn tougher with many chidlren.
Can you pay nine thousand dollars a year and get one-0n-one tutorials? What of writing guidance? What if you worked with a K-12 student and the elderly?
You can. Saturday we learned it could be done. There is a way to learn to read well, write well, be numerate, and prepare for work, graduate school, and life in general. These first immortal students took a risk, worked harder than they had to do in conventional education, and graduated. The average debt accrued was nothing. We gave them a guide to Houston sports, museums, diversity and charged nothing extra for the exposure.
What of the rest of debt based higher education?
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