Trinitas Blog

In our weekly email to parents last Friday, we embedded a video of Dr. George Grant telling the story of replacing the oak beams in the dining hall of Saint Mary’s College, Oxford. That story was part of the first talk I ever heard Grant give some fifteen or so years ago. It is a powerful example of the kind of foresight Christian people should exercise all the time in all facets of life.

People come and people go. That is a truth in any organization. It is human nature, I suppose to some extent, for people to get interested in a thing, even convinced about a thing, then lose interest or become unconvinced over time. Because it is enrollment season and families are deciding whether or not they ought to attend Trinitas, I want to spend the next few weeks focusing on some of the top reasons people give for losing interest in and leaving Trinitas.

Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began to use a form of grading students that resembles what most high schools, colleges, and universities still use today: A, B, C, D, and F. The grades are intended to be a way of measuring and reporting a student’s performance on a given assignment or within a given subject over a period of time. They are useful for that task, but far from perfect. At Trinitas we also grade students using a variation of the aforementioned marks.

Last week I used this space to mention the kinds of colleges Trinitas alumni are attending. I also mentioned last week that we had asked our alumni in a survey last summer to tell us what they are studying or had studied in college. The reason I want to talk about our alumni’s chosen fields of study this week is not to harp on college more, but to hopefully add to the case that a classical education can be good preparation for lots of different endeavors.

Do you ever wonder where all the Trinitas graduates go after graduation night? Most of them eventually trickle back to campus for a visit; in fact, many of them visit often. A few alumni, though, have moved on so fast and so far that they haven’t stopped even once to visit since the day they left. This past summer James Cowart spent a lot of time catching up with as many of the ninety-four Trinitas alumni as possible, and we’ve taken several opportunities to share his findings with you in this space. This week, I want to leave you with some idea about where all the Trinitas alumni have gone.

For years now there has been a constant stampeding noise in American churches—the sound of most of its youth running for the exit. Over the past few decades the church’s acknowledgement of this exodus has run the normal trajectory of such affairs: from being something everyone knows about but is ignoring, to being something the church is confessing like a first-timer at an AA meeting, to finally being something so widely known that the Barna Group published a book about it and whole youth pastor conferences are now built around it.

Last week I revealed that 92% of Trinitas alumni reported they were well prepared for college. Of the few that didn’t feel prepared, four Trinitas alumni stated they started out behind their college classmates in math; two of them were engineering majors, and the other two did not mention their majors in the response. This week, I will explain why they may have started out behind and also talk about where classical students stand in math compared to students in a modern, STEM-focused education model.

For about a decade now in the education world, stem has been the most frequently uttered word by politicians, bureaucrats, curriculum marketers, administrators, and teachers. Not “stem” as in the stem of a flower, but “STEM” as in the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Students are being pushed to pursue those fields for several reasons, not the least of which is that the job market is good in those broad categories. Even though the job outlook is good in those fields, US students are lagging dismally behind students from some other nations in math and science proficiency, a fact that translates directly into economic terms on a global scale, which is another reason educators are emphasizing STEM in recent years and targeting it as an area of focus in K-12 education. The bottom line, though, is that our national deficiency in math and science is more than that: it is a deficiency in education. Math and science are merely symptoms of that much larger problem, and they are front and center these days for the aforementioned reasons.