I thought that this post from R. Scott Clark was really an excellent piece on seminary education. This first installment of several is still fairly long, so I just included a snippet with the link. Oh, and since someone will undoubtedly wonder, although I think very highly of WSC, I have no affiliation with the seminary.
"Americans are busy people who continue to conquer a big place which has, since the 18th century, offered wealth and great influence to those who work hard and who produce a product or service valued by others. Education, per se, has not always been valued for itself. Presently, undergraduate education is highly valued, judging by what the market is willing to pay, as a means to future success. Judging by her graduates, however, what is being sold to the student isn’t always education, at least not as that idea has been traditionally defined. What the culture values is the economic result of having attended an undergraduate school and having obtained a credential. Evangelicals (and too many Reformed folk) are children of this anti-intellectual culture and they often look at the training of pastors in the same way. They like the credential and the license it brings to serve the church but they don’t seem to care for the process or even the substance of education as much as they desire the credential.This antipathy for genuine education appears in a variety of ways but one way in which it has manifested itself is in the proliferation of ad hoc seminaries where the faculty is unqualified , not residential, or non-existent. The problem is, since many undergraduates have not received a proper education either in high school or in college as they are considering where to attend seminary they are poorly prepared to evaluate what constitutes a good seminary education."
"Americans are busy people who continue to conquer a big place which has, since the 18th century, offered wealth and great influence to those who work hard and who produce a product or service valued by others. Education, per se, has not always been valued for itself. Presently, undergraduate education is highly valued, judging by what the market is willing to pay, as a means to future success. Judging by her graduates, however, what is being sold to the student isn’t always education, at least not as that idea has been traditionally defined. What the culture values is the economic result of having attended an undergraduate school and having obtained a credential. Evangelicals (and too many Reformed folk) are children of this anti-intellectual culture and they often look at the training of pastors in the same way. They like the credential and the license it brings to serve the church but they don’t seem to care for the process or even the substance of education as much as they desire the credential.This antipathy for genuine education appears in a variety of ways but one way in which it has manifested itself is in the proliferation of ad hoc seminaries where the faculty is unqualified , not residential, or non-existent. The problem is, since many undergraduates have not received a proper education either in high school or in college as they are considering where to attend seminary they are poorly prepared to evaluate what constitutes a good seminary education."
