Back to School

It’s no secret that many college students spend much of their four years at school drinking way more than they probably should. Now, a new study is actually putting a number on the plethora of unfortunate consequences that comes from a wild night of college drinking.

Over four years, researchers say the average college student deals with 102 alcohol-related consequences the morning after. These range from blacking out, suffering a hangover, being pressured to have sex with someone, or having to miss work or class because they drank too much the night before.

However, the team found one major factor keeps many students from overdoing it at a college party—strict, disapproving parents. Researchers say college students who thought their parents would disapprove of their alcohol-related dilemmas ended up reporting fewer negative incidents after drinking than their peers who partied harder.

Research professor Kimberly Mallet said, “Kids really look to their parents for guidance in a lot of ways even if they don’t outwardly say it. It’s empowering for parents to know that they can make a difference. We often think of peers as having an influence on drinking behaviors, but we found that parents can make a difference, even after their child has left home.”

Horrific gun violence in schools continues to be an ongoing problem in America, but a new study finds children around the globe are fearing for their safety as well. Researchers have found that one in three adolescents say they feel unsafe in their own school. Importantly, these children did not come from the US, researchers surveyed adolescents from 13 nations throughout Europe and Asia between 2011 and 2017.

Concerningly, two in three children in Japan say they feel unsafe when they go to class. Other countries at the top of the spectrum include Vietnam (1 in 2 children), Russia (1 in 2 children), and China (1 in 2 children). At the opposite end of the spectrum, just 11 percent of girls in Finland and eight percent of boys in Norway fear going to school.

Researchers believe one of the biggest components in creating a school environment that feels safe is the relationship between teachers and students. The study finds that if a student feels their teacher cares about them, they’re more likely to feel safe in school. Fair, clear, and consistent rules while in class also contributed to a student’s feeling of safety.

Meanwhile, students who experience bullying reported feeling less safe on school grounds. Researchers add that the result of feeling less safe at school can lead to mental health problems, which stay with a child throughout their life.

Want your kids to do better in school? Church might be the answer, according to a study conducted by the University of Notre Dame. An article titled, “God, Grades, and Graduation,” suggests that religion can play a critical role for success.

According to the study, abiders are youth who remain active in religious communities and who have adopted their family’s faith as their own. They “are likely to have an academic advantage because religion and schools are complementary institutions.” In particular, “adolescents who thrive in one institution are likely to thrive in the other.”

Among the survey’s participants, the probability of getting grades of all or mostly A’s was about 10% higher among "abiders" than among non-religious students in the same socioeconomic group. According to Professor Horwitz, at Tulane University, a religious foundation can actually overcome challenges associated with growing up in lower socioeconomic circumstances.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Our society treats faith as a game people choose to play, a tradition to be mindlessly followed. But a foundation of faith has far-reaching implications. When we lose faith, we lose our way.

Mariam Aly, an assistant professor at Columbia University, has tried everything to keep her students from cheating. In her cognitive neuroscience class, she gives her students a week to complete an open-book exam. And, as part of that exam, the nearly 180 students in the class have to sign an honor code.

But they're still cheating. And dealing with student misconduct is the worst part of her job. Aly says, "It's just awkward and painful for everybody involved. And it's really hard to blame them for it. You do feel disappointed and frustrated. Students are facing unprecedented levels of stress and uncertainty.”

As college moved online in the COVID-19 crisis, many universities are reporting increases, sometimes dramatic ones, in academic misconduct. At Virginia Commonwealth University, reports of academic misconduct soared during the 2020-21 school year, to 1,077--more than three times the previous year's number. At the Ohio State University, reported incidents of cheating were up more than 50% over the year before.

Annie Stearns will be a sophomore this fall at St. Mary's College of California, where misconduct reports doubled last fall over the previous year. During the pandemic, the challenges of learning online were entwined with social isolation and additional family responsibilities. On top of that, tutoring services and academic resources scaled back or moved online. Some students, facing Zoom burnout, stopped asking for help altogether. Stearns explains, “If you're in class, and then you have to go to office hours, that's another Zoom meeting. And if you have to go to the writing center, that's another Zoom meeting. People would get too overwhelmed with being on video calls and just opt out.”

The story goes on to say, “We're going through such an unprecedented time that (cheating is) bound to happen. They prefer to take the shortcut and risk getting caught than have an email conversation with their professor because they're too ashamed to be like, 'I need assistance.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We are living in unique and extremely stressful times. Each of us will be tested in various ways, whether in academic honesty, sexual purity, substance abuse, apathy, depression, or anger issues. We must keep trusting God and lean on his strength and his Spirit to “pass the test.”

Individuals with standing in a particular professional field sometimes feel free, or even obligated, to cloak themselves in the authority of their area of expertise and make grandiose statements such as this by a professor of biological sciences:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear …. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

Logically viewed, this statement is simply laughable. Nowhere within the published, peer-reviewed literature of biology—even evolutionary biology—do any of the statement of which the professor is "absolutely certain" appear as valid conclusions of sound research. One trembles to think that an expert in the field would not know this or else would feel free to disregard it. Biology as a field of research and knowledge is not even about such issues. It simply does not deal with them. They do not fall within the provinces of responsibilities. Yet it is very common to hear such declamations about the state of the universe offered up in lectures and writings by specialists in certain areas who have a missionary zeal for their personal causes.

First grade teacher, Linda, shares an interaction she had with one of her students on the first day of school. Accustomed to going home at noon in kindergarten, Ryan was getting his things ready to leave for home when he was actually supposed to be heading to lunch with the rest of the class. Linda asked him what he was doing. "I'm going home," he replied. Linda tried to explain that, now that he is in the first grade, he would have a longer school day. "You'll go eat lunch now," she said, "and then you'll come back to the room and do some more work before you go home." Ryan looked up at her in disbelief, hoping she was kidding. Convinced of her seriousness, Ryan then put his hands on his hips and demanded, "Who on earth signed me up for this program?"

As believers, it's easy to feel a little like Ryan when we consider the Christian life. The requirements are daunting—"Surely the Lord doesn't expect me to forgive seventy times seven;" "Surely he doesn't want me to turn the other cheek when someone hurts me;" "What does he mean, 'take up my cross'?" It isn't long before you want to say, "Who on earth signed me up for this program?"

Fresh from a debate on whether or not humans can be moral without God, author and apologist Dinesh D'Souza offers a few reflections on his sparring partner, Princeton University's Peter Singer, a bioethicist:

Singer is a mild-mannered fellow who speaks calmly and lucidly. Yet you wouldn't have to read his work too long to find his extreme positions. He cheerfully advocates infanticide and euthanasia and, in almost the same breath, favors animal rights. Even most liberals would have qualms about third-trimester abortions; Singer does not hesitate to advocate what may be termed fourth-trimester abortions, i.e., the killing of infants after they are born.

Singer writes, "My colleague Helga Kuhse and I suggest that a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others." Singer argues that even pigs, chickens, and fish have more signs of consciousness and rationality—and, consequently, a greater claim to rights—than do fetuses, newborn infants, and people with mental disabilities. "Rats are indisputably more aware of their surroundings, and more able to respond in purposeful and complex ways to things they like or dislike, than a fetus at 10- or even 32-weeks gestation. … The calf, the pig, and the much-derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy."

Some people consider Singer a provocateur who says outrageous things just to get attention. But Singer is deadly serious about his views and—as emerged in our debate—has a consistent rational basis for his controversial positions.

To understand Singer, it's helpful to contrast him with "New Atheists" like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. The New Atheists say we can get rid of God but preserve morality. They insist that no one needs God in order to be good; atheists can act no less virtuously than Christians. (And indeed, some atheists do put Christians to shame.) Even while repudiating the Christian God, Dawkins has publicly called himself a "cultural Christian."

But this position creates a problem outlined more than a century ago by the atheist philosopher Nietzsche. The death of God, Nietzsche argued, means that all the Christian values that have shaped the West rest on a mythical foundation. One may, out of habit, continue to live according to these values for a while. Over time, however, the values will decay, and if they are not replaced by new values, man will truly have to face the prospect of nihilism, what Nietzsche termed "the abyss."

Nietzsche's argument is illustrated in considering two of the central principles of Western civilization: "All men are created equal" and "Human life is precious." Nietzsche attributes both ideas to Christianity. It is because we are created equal and in the image of God that our lives have moral worth and that we share the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nietzsche's warning was that none of these values make sense without the background moral framework against which they were formulated. A post-Christian West, he argued, must go back to the ethical drawing board and reconsider its most cherished values, which include its traditional belief in the equal dignity of every human life.

Singer resolutely takes up a Nietzschean call for a "transvaluation of values," with a full awareness of the radical implications. He argues that we are not creations of God but rather mere Darwinian primates. We exist on an unbroken continuum with animals. Christianity, he says, arbitrarily separated man and animal, placing human life on a pedestal and consigning the animals to the status of tools for human well-being. Now, Singer says, we must remove Homo sapiens from this privileged position and restore the natural order. This translates into more rights for animals and less special treatment for human beings. There is a grim consistency in Singer's call to extend rights to the apes while removing traditional protections for unwanted children, people with mental disabilities, and the noncontributing elderly.

Some of Singer's critics have called him a Nazi and compared his proposals to Hitler's schemes for eliminating those perceived as unwanted and unfit. A careful reading of his work, however, shows that Singer is no Hitler. He doesn't want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by private individuals like you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide.

Why haven't the atheists embraced Peter Singer? I suspect it is because they fear that his unpalatable views will discredit the cause of atheism. What they haven't considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations. In Singer, we may be witnessing someone both horrifying and yet somehow refreshing: an intellectually honest atheist.

Do you ever feel that if anyone found out the truth about you, you'd be finished? Do you go through life basically trying to convince others that you are something you're not—that you're cool when you know you're not, that you're confident or skillful or good-hearted when you know it's not so?

John Corcoran knows what that's like. During grade school he never learned to read or write, but he caused a lot of trouble and somehow kept getting promoted to the next grade. He got to high school and mastered new skills. He says, "I started cheating by turning in other peoples' papers; [I] dated the valedictorian and ran around with college prep kids. I couldn't read words but I could read the system and I could read people."

He received an athletic scholarship to Texas Western College and cheated his way through there as well, getting a degree in education, of all things. Somehow he got a job as a teacher and for the next 17 years taught in high school without being able to read or write. He says, "What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn't the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher's assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin."

Finally he left teaching and became a real estate developer. Later in life he learned to read and write and became an advocate for better educational systems.

In a sense, we're all like John Corcoran. Most of us don't have to fake reading and writing, but we live our lives trying to persuade ourselves, persuade other people, and persuade God himself that we are good people. Deep down inside, though, we have a growing awareness it's not true.

Justin John Boudin, a 27-year-old man from Minnesota, pleaded guilty to fifth-degree assault charges for violently losing his temper. Here's the irony: he was on his way to anger management class when he committed the crime.

According to the criminal complaint, Boudin was waiting at a bus stop when he started to harass a 59-year-old woman. Witnesses say he yelled at her over what he felt was a general lack of respect. When she took out her cell phone to call police, Boudin punched her in the face. When a 63-year-old man tried to stop him, Boudin hit him with a blue folder that held his anger management homework. Police tracked him down by using the papers inside.

In the book Unprotected, an anonymous campus psychiatrist writes:

Radical politics pervades my profession, and common sense has vanished. Dangerous behaviors are a personal choice; judgments are prohibited—they might offend…

Where I work, we're stuck on certain issues, but neglect others. We ask about childhood abuse, but not last week's hookups. We want to know how many cigarettes and coffees she has each day, but not how many abortions are in her past…We strive to combat suicide, but shun discussion of God and ultimate meaning.

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

—William Butler Yeats, poet and dramatist, 1865–1939

In an interview with Wired magazine, filmmaker George Lucas was asked how he would be remembered. Lucas replied:

I'll be remembered as a filmmaker. The technological problems that I solved will be forgotten by then, but hopefully some of the stories I told will still be relevant. I'm hoping that Star Wars doesn't become too dated, because I think its themes are timeless. If you've raised children, you know you have to explain things to them, and if you don't, they end up learning the hard way. In the end, somebody's got to say, "Don't touch that hot skillet." So the old stories have to be reiterated again in a form that's acceptable to each new generation. I don't think I'm ever going to go much beyond the old stories, because I think they still need to be told.

It's true that in blundering about, we struck gold, but the fact remains we were looking for gold—asking the right questions.

—Francis Crick, on his Nobel Prize winning discovery of the DNA's double helix with James Watson.

I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God's word becomes corrupt…. I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.

—Martin Luther (1483–1546)

Robert Raikes was a bit of a dandy—walking about town in his wig and claret-colored coat, and carrying a gold snuff case—but he was also a committed member of the Church of England. "I see my own unworthiness more clearly, and with this plea, I go more boldly to the throne of grace."

His first efforts to live out his Christian convictions focused on prison reform, but he then decided children must be put on the right path before evil habits were formed. One day in 1780, Raikes's newspaper business took him to an impoverished suburb of Gloucester. He was shocked to see so many children "wretchedly ragged, at play in the street." He asked a local woman about this.

"On a Sunday you would be shocked indeed," she replied, "for then the street is filled with multitudes of the wretches who, released on that day from employment, spend their day in noise and riot, cursing and swearing in a manner so horrid as to convey an idea of hell."

After this shocking encounter, Raikes hired four women to teach the children that next Sunday. After securing permission of the parents, Raikes sent 20 children to each teacher. School began at 10 a.m., let out an hour for lunch, then continued until 5 p.m. The children also attended an afternoon church service. The Bible was the basis of instruction. Raikes's announced purpose was to prevent vice and to encourage good work habits and cheerful submission to God, the law, and their station in life.

In 1783 he wrote an article in his paper, without mentioning his own involvement, noting the success of these "Sunday schools." Readers were fascinated and asked for more information. Raikes provided enthusiastic replies, which were printed and reprinted in publications across England. Other schools soon formed, and Raikes publicized their successes. He was soon able to document a national phenomenon.

His publicity campaign reached its zenith when he was summoned to an audience with the royal family. King George III wished that "every child in my kingdom should be taught to read the Bible."

Sunday schools grew dramatically. In 1787, four years after his first article, there were 250,000 Sunday school students. By 1811 there were 500,000, and by 1831, 1.25 million students in England. Between 1830 and 1833, the population increased 24 percent, and Sunday school attendance increased 225 percent. In 1833 the government began subsidizing the schools. Sunday schools spread to the United States, Scotland, Ireland, and the continent.

Eventually children's education passed into the hands of the state, and religious instruction was eliminated. The Sunday school movement lost its zeal and went into a 50-year membership decline in the early 20th century. Today we see only its faded remnants in the mere hour spent with the clean and well-mannered children of believers. But in its day, it was a remarkable institution. Adam Smith, author of the classic Wealth of Nations, declared that no plan so promising for improving morals had been devised since the days of the apostles.

Don't neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in his own image. God invites and expects us to explore his double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds he has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply his marvelous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and the postmodern world.

In his autobiography, Dr. Lewis Smedes writes of his early years in the faith. A turning point came as a freshman at Calvin College. He writes:

The first class of the first day of my first semester was English composition. The teacher was Jacob Vandenbosch.… [He] introduced me that day to a God the likes of whom I had never even heard about—a God who liked elegant sentences and was offended by dangling modifiers. Once you believe this, where can you stop? If the Maker of the Universe admired words well put together, think of how he must love sound thought well put together; and if he loved sound thinking, how he must love a Bach concerto; and if he loved a Bach concerto, think of how he prized any human effort to bring a foretaste, be it ever so small, of his Kingdom of justice and peace and happiness to the victimized people of the world. In short, I met the Maker of the Universe, who loved the world he made and was dedicated to its redemption. I found the joy of the Lord, not at prayer meeting, but in English Composition 101."

Dr. Ben Carson, world famous surgeon, has performed more than 400 operations a year, mostly brain and spinal surgeries. Besides his faith, his mother is one of the chief reasons he became one of the premier brain surgeons in the United States. Dr. Carson said of his mother, "She was one of 24 children, got married at age 13, found out that her husband was a bigamist, [she only had a] third-grade education, and the thing about my mother is that she never adopted a victim's mentality.…She prayed, she asked God to give her wisdom because my brother and I were terrible students…."

God heard the prayer of Carson's mother. Today Carson's brother is an engineer and Ben went from being ranked as the worst student in his fifth grade class to being named head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins when he was 33, the youngest in the nation at the time. On the occasion of its 200th anniversity, the Library of Congress named him one of the 89 "Living Legends." In 2001, he was chosen by CNN and Time magazine as one of America's top 20 physicians and scientists.

A man received notice that his son, during his senior year in high school, had failed a course. The father, determined that his son would attend the best college, realized that a failing grade would jeopardize his son's chances to enter a top school. The father's immediate reaction was to blame the teacher for his son's failing grade.

Storming into the teacher's classroom, the father proceeded to accuse the teacher of unfairness. He threatened to have the teacher's job if the grade were not changed. The teacher, believing the grade was deserved, would not change the grade and held his ground.

The father left the classroom in a heated rage and headed for the principal's office, where in a torrent he demanded the principal's intervention. The principal, knowing the situation and believing the teacher to be right, stood behind the faculty member and refused to intervene. The father's rage escalated and he began to make threats against the principal. He would go to the school board and have the principal's job. At the height of the tension, there was a brief pause, followed by these words from the principal: "Sir, I can see that you love your son very much."

At that instant the anger that had controlled the father melted away, and became a shower of tears. A sense of healing had taken place through a principal who was full of God's grace and who had become a channel of that grace.

Fifteen-year-old Gilberto Dixon, a 10th grader at Beach Channel High School in Queens, New York, commenting on a city school board decision to forbid the phrase "God bless you" on school property, said,

"High School has nothing to do with God."