February, 1997

Dear ICE Subscriber:

It has been ten years since the then unknown and still unknown Rodney Clapp had his article against Christian Reconstruction published in Christianity Today, "Democracy as Heresy." A lot has happened since then, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Christian Reconstruction is still here. I won't say that it's bigger and better than ever, but if the Millennium Bug reaps havoc with the banking system, political systems won't escape the consequences. The welfare State, so beloved of the neo-evangelical academic leadership, will go the way of the USSR. That will open a whole new world of opportunity at the local level for Christians to become active in social action, including politics.

It will also open the door to a whole new era of education, which rests today on a system of State regulation and certification. If the State breaks down, especially the national State, there will be room for educational experimentation outside of the strangling red tape of the educational bureaucrats. The higher educational establishment relies on regional accreditation to control the form and content of higher education. If this breaks down in a wave of bankruptcies of over-indebted colleges and universities, the playing field will be level. A major breakdown in the bank payments system will accomplish this.

Could the banks collapse? Yes. There are two possible reasons: (1) computers that are year 2000-compliant will interact with computers that aren't, thereby corrupting the data of compliant banks; (2) compliant computers will automatically "freeze out" data from noncompliant computers, thereby bankrupting all of the noncompliant banks. If there are many of these — I am counting on it — or some of them are huge money center banks, the bank runs will spread. Then the compliant banks go under. The whole system collapses.

Only if most of the banks on earth are compliant, and only if their "fixes" allow their mutual interaction, will the banking system survive. If the banking system does not survive, the West's 300-year experiment in central bank monopolies and central government debt will come to a screeching halt. Wouldn't that be a fitting end to a statist experiment? The whole thing goes down because of the absence of two numbers in mainframe computer programs!

Do I really think this could happen? Yes. Do I think it will happen? I will not bet my life that it won't. Most of my capital will be hedged by late 1997 against this. How? By restructuring my portfolio to emphasize long-term consumer goods, tools, and commodities that will preserve my middle-class lifestyle and my ability to write. I shall de-emphasize any reliance on future fiat money income.

A Revolution in Education

Today, the cost of bricks and mortar is too high in relation to the content of modern education. As academic standards fall lower, year by year, the cost of sending a child to college increases. To attract tuition-paying students in a market facing competition from State-subsidized tuition, Christian colleges have downgraded their confessional standards. When Christian colleges seek accreditation, they must staff their faculties with men and women holding Ph.D's: Rockefeller's ingenious Trojan Horse strategy developed by the General Education Board (1902). The poorly educated, State-certified, administrative drones who obediently run Christian colleges on behalf of the secular accrediting agencies demand that all new faculty members earn the Ph.D. Parents go along with this secular charade because they think there is no option. So far, there has been none.

If there is a collapse or major disruption of all mainframe computer-operated systems, from the railroads to the Internal Revenue Service, Christians will be in a unique position to begin planning an end run around the existing educational Establishment. When parents start getting laid off from their jobs as the world moves from a smoothly integrated, high division of labor society to a much lower one — which could last a decade or more — Christian parents will no longer be able to afford the luxury of expensive private college educations for their children. Also, they will not want to send their children far away from home. They will not see any reason to pay a small fortune to send a child to some theologically mush-mouthed Christian college that teaches baptized humanism in the classroom, i.e., most classrooms in all of the colleges. The parents most dedicated to confessional education — home schoolers and day schoolers — will be looking for a cost-effective alternative.

Most Christian colleges will go bankrupt if the Millennium Bug is as devastating as I think it will be. These schools draw students from great distances. Parents will no longer send their children so far away, especially to urban areas that are high-crime regions. Parents will either send them to local public junior colleges or to nearby State colleges. The luxury of naively assuming that Billy Bob and Jenny Sue are getting consistently Christian educations will no longer be affordable for most parents. "Just get your degree," parents will tell their children. "Don't pay much attention to what they teach you about creation." (They ought to tell their children this anyway when they send them off to some Christian college, where they will be taught theistic evolution.)

The Christian college today is basically a substitute for the long-defunct institution of the arranged marriage broker and apprenticeship. What a network of churches and church-run camps and training seminars should do as part of the family's tithe, the colleges are doing. They do not do this cost-effectively. But there is nothing like a monetary breakdown to persuade people and people and institutions to restructure their budgets.

The budgets of over-staffed, over-certified, over-indebted private colleges will suffer a monumental revision, beginning in 1999 and continuing for the next decade. To weather the storm, they had better be debt-free and not have offered tenure to anyone. Grove City College may survive, since it has no debt and has not offered tenure to anyone in 40 years. John Brown University in Arkansas is debt-free. Others will find it much harder going. Teaching loads will ijcrease, and even then faculty will have to be let go. Faculty members will suffer pay cuts, too. It will be a hard time for college professors. Most of them will have to enter the real world of competition at a time when the real world will be chaotic: overstaffed at today's prices. The days of academic wine (non-fermented, of course) and roses are about to end. It's about time.

I wrote this section of this letter early one morning in January, and when I went home for lunch, I read the front page of the local newspaper. It announced the imminent bankruptcy of Ambassador University in Big Sandy, Texas. The school used to have 950 students. It then moved from the World Wide Church of God's original unitarianism to Trinitarianism. It lost 300 students as a result. It could not survive. This scenario will be replayed over and over, 2000 to 2005, if the Millennium Bug brings down the banks or interrupts freight train deliveries.

There are several likely developments that will transform higher education. First, an economic crisis. Second, a breakdown in government control over education as bureaucrats struggle for job security and income. Non-essential bureaucrats will be fired. Police, fire, and the national guard will get priority in a crisis. The entire federal regulatory system will come apart. This may seem too good to be true, but nothing short of this will restore freedom. This is our window of opportunity. We must plan in terms of it, because working within the system has defeated us every time. We must create alternatives.

Technologically, it is now possible to offer a college education as inexpensively as a day school education. What about buildings? Who needs them? Students can learn at home on the Internet. What about libraries? Corel sells a CD-ROM with some 3,000 classic books and documents for $25. Rival companies put out similar collections. Library of the Future is one of them. A complete collegiate education based on the so-called Great Books can be created on-line through the World Wide Web. While I don't recommend this as a stand-alone curriculum — too humanistic — it is surely possible to substitute a fully content-based education for the tenure-based, bricks-and-mortar, third-rate educations that today's Christian colleges are offering for $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

What about lectures? With Lotus Premier software, I can create effective on-screen teaching modules with lectures and visible images comparable to a blackboard or an original source document. It takes very little hard disk space to put on a one-hour classroom lecture with Premier. If the only thing that moves on screen is the cursor, Premier is highly disk-space efficient. With the new DVD CD-ROM technology, it will be possible to put an entire academic major on one or two disks. It will cost, say, $1 per disk to produce, and maybe less in bulk. Got that, Behemoth State U? Got that, Mushy Christian College? $1.

Technology has created a new opportunity. Collegiate dinosaurs are about to get a lesson in extinction. The combination of economic chaos and incredibly inexpensive computer technology will force a revolution on higher education. The only thing that will give the existing system an advantage is the State monopoly known as accreditation. But the State will be on the defensive. As the market reaps havoc on slow-moving, slow-witted institutions, academic entrepreneurs will be able to use price competition — the monopolist's nightmare — to restructure modern education.

What does a Christian parent really want for his child? A good marriage, a shot at a good job, and a strengthened faith. He is willing today to sacrifice the last one for the sake of a college degree. Parental budgets reflect this. So do Christian college curricula.

What if a Christian parent could buy a home-school curriculum created by a consortium of successful Christian-owned businesses? What if businessmen worked with conservative, pro-business college professors to produce a CD-ROM, Internet-based curriculum? The businessmen would provide a "wish list": specific training and general perspective that they would like their entry-level executives to have received in college. They would work with the professors to provide such training, especially at the upper division level, possibly the senior year. The professors would also prepare a lower division, liberal arts program that would offer core courses in Bible, covenantal citizenship (church, family, state), history, communication — language, public speaking, writing — mathematics, computer skills, and so forth. The businesses want people who can think clearly, work long hours, take responsibility, innovate, cut costs without adversely compromising quality, and maintain ethical standards. This is not what the vast majority of bureaucratic, tenured, term-paper-writing Ph.D.'s can do, let alone train others to do.

The State has funded education. This is wrong. Parents should fund most of it, but with assistance from institutions that have a stake in the graduates: churches, businesses, and professional organizations. Whoever has a stake in the future productivity of the graduates should put up the money and, therefore, set the standards. The State should not have a say in the matter, and therefore should not put up any of the money. The State has replaced the church as the source of the funding. This struggle began within a generation of the invention of the university in the late 11th century. It was won by the State only in the 20th. This victory must be reversed.

Churches and parents need an ally in the war against the State. The obvious ally is free market business. A good, old fashioned economic crisis may get us what we need: decentralized, enterprising businesses that are not functional extensions of the State through regulatory agencies.

If a professor is willing to give his teaching away for free, just once, he could shape the thinking of a generation of home schoolers. If I can locate qualified teachers who will work with me on this curriculum project free of charge or on a royalty basis, I think ICE can do it. But I won't pay them up front. Anyone who has so little vision for the future of Christian education that he must be paid in advance hasn't got anything of importance to say. No amount of money will make an uncreative person creative.

 

Sincerely,