Adventist Education in the 21st Century
This spring I received an invitation in the mail which read “you have been selected to join a private gathering of community leaders, thinkers and doers who desire to protect the legacy of Adventist Education.” Wow, I was being asked to be a part of a select group! According to the invitation, this gathering promised engaging discussion, innovative solutions and insights essential to the revitalization of Adventists schools. How could I refuse?
As a product of Adventist education, kindergarten through graduate school, and having had both my parents, my grandparents and now my children and grandchildren educated in the Adventist educational system, I could be a poster child for its support and continued viability. I looked forward with anticipation to this opportunistic event.
Even before attending this meeting sponsored by the Alumni Awards foundation, I was well aware of the grim statistics. In l976 K-12 enrollments peaked at 76,342 and by the 2008-09 school year, attendance figures hit a low point of 54,074, a 29% decrease. In the last ten years, 177 K-12 schools have been closed. (1) Since elementary and secondary schools provide the conduit that feeds Adventist colleges and universities, the very viability of our higher educational system seems at risk.
At the turn of the 20th century, our grandparents could hire a young women with little more than a high school education, and for room, board and a small pittance, she would provide a Christian educational experience for their children. One-room school houses were the norm in most of rural America at that time. When Adventist children reached high school age, they were sent away to live at boarding academies where they could work to help pay their tuition and living expenses.
This model worked well for over a 100 years.
In 1993, a curriculum initiative of the Potomac Conference, driven by the question “How can we prepare our students for the 21st century in a uniquely Seventh-day Adventist setting?” resulted in the formation of a “Futures Commission” and then the issuing of a document known as FACT21. One positive outgrowth of these two initiatives was the development of “AE21 Distributed Education.” The initial intent of this program was to enrich the curriculum and provide additional instructional support for the small one-and-two teacher Adventist schools around the country. This approach, developed and operated by the North American Division, combined the latest advances in technology with an updated curriculum that met all accreditation standards across the county.
Innovative technology was the KEY for its implementation.
I first became aware of AE21 when my grandson became an on-line student in 2006. At 8:00 AM, he would have to be fully dressed for school and sitting in front of a video camera for roll call. The teacher was able to see each student, and students could see and communicate with each other. Often the first issue of the day was to share local weather reports. One of my grandson’s classmates was a girl who was running her dogs in the Alaskan Iditarod.
On camera, the teacher would lecture and question students as in a regular classroom and completed assignments were transmitted electronically. Students also communicated electronically with each other both in class and out of class. Friendships and social interactions were formed on-line and cemented when the students met twice a year in person. The program provides for a one week experience of mission related activities in the fall and a one week of a tour of cultural sites each spring. Both weeks are designed to include a time of strong spiritual emphasis for the students.
I learned that this program employs outstanding teachers from around the country who teach from their home location. These teachers are both well qualified in their perspective fields and have the expertise to interact positively with young people in a technological setting. The secondary curriculum is fully accredited, and the high school diploma is accepted by colleges and universities.
In 2000, the Florida Conference was given authority to operate the AC21 program and in 2004 it was voted to make AE21 a distance learning division of Forest Lake Academy. (2) Currently there are approximately 100 students enrolled in the FLDL program in homes and classrooms around the country.
All of this for 1/4th of the cost of a boarding school experience! What’s not to love?
One would think such cutting-edge innovation with its reasonable price tag would be universally applauded and accepted. Not so – as I was soon to learn. At the Alumni Awards convocation when I suggested the AE21 program be considered as one possible answer to the problems facing the Adventist Educational system, I was taken back and surprised by the resistance to even discussing the program. It appeared to be dismissed right out the door. It was not even an option anyone wished to consider.
Locally, even our own Florida and Southeastern conferences have failed to see the potential of this program. Yes, the initial investment in computer equipment can be expensive – but it is a one- time expense. While parents can buy the equipment and have their students study at home, even small churches have been able to share the initial set-up expense and provide a class room for group study. By doing so the young people from these churches have been able to live at home, work locally and go to the church facility daily for their classes thus keeping them “connected” to their home church. The distance learning program only requires a committed adult be present in the classroom, not an accredited teacher, and the program provides instruction and training for that resident individual.
Forest Lake Academy, my alma mater, continues to fund and staff expensive dormitories even though the numbers of boarding students steadily drops. Recruiting top-quality boarding school teachers who will commit to working 24/7 is a constant battle. People who become teachers are just as dedicated as in the past, but today’s young professionals have lives beyond their workplace. Forest Lake Academy should have become a fully functional day school years ago.
Finally, I discovered the real reason AE21 is not recognized and promoted. Two words: “turf wars”. It cannot be publicized because unions and conferences do not want their constituents to hear about this program. The very thought of constituent parents paying another conference for the education of their children is anathema. Educational monies must stay within the conference and union geographic boundaries even if that means sending students to the local public high school. Conferences and unions will even invest money to develop their own brand of distance learning if necessary, but heaven forbid they partner and share expenses with another conference.
AE21 is not THE answer to Adventist Education but it is one answer. And it is one of the best kept secrets in our church.
(1) Statistics taken from a written address by Richard Osborn which was delivered at the Alumni Awards meeting February 27, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.
(2) For more information on the AE21 program visit: www.fldla.org
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Comments
I agree that it is a great program and I agree that just like home-schooling it tends to be frowned upon by those people who are invested heavily in the "on-campus" style of learning, be it a local church or a Union with Universities and Academies to Run.
I imagine that an education secretary in the conference and union level might not be re-elected the next term if word got out that they were directing church mebers toward home-school or distance learning through AE21. Church members need to wake up to the fact that the AE21 and Adventist Home-school option are high quality options that should not be discounted and in many cases are the best Adventist eduction option for parents and students.
in Christ,
Bob
___________________________________________
"The Truth shall make you free" John 8:32
Thank you Donna, for introducing a program of which many of us were totally unaware. You have furnished a lot of information helpful in future decisions on education.
This was the first I have been made aware of this program, and now find there are obvious reasons: competition for education is a battle difficult to win if you're the "small guy."
Eventually, as is already happening, the boarding academies will go the way of the dodo bird and even the day academies are having great difficulty operating as enrollment declines on a yearly basis. This results in fewer teachers, fewer students, and a vicious cycle circling like a vulture over a dying carcass.
Is this the major reason young people are not staying in the church? Even 40 years ago the 12-grade academy in my home town (more than 100 years in operation) has not only gradually decreased (less than half its former size) since the 70s but while the records are unknown, and probably never counted, fewer than half have really stayed in the church from that time.
Overwhelmingly, all studies have shown that the home influence is much greater than any other instituion in preserving a family's religion as well as values. As a parent, I am far more interested in seeing those family values of integrity, compassion, and tolerance, practiced by children than a particular denominational adherence.
Donna
I entered SDA church school early in the fourth grade. I had the usual playground confrontations. But I had the best teachers available. The years were 1934-1943. I left EMC with two years of College a devote Seventh-day Adventist. I went with the blessings of Professor Harry tippett, my parents, and many classmates. All of whom I hold dear.
That is not the experience of my Children or Grandchildren. All have a deep faith in the Christ event and a particularly low regard for SDA pre-doctoral education. One teacher in the middle grades had on the chalk board each morning the "Sin of the Day" and then she would "lecture" on sexual behavior far beyond the view of third graders. Another husband and wife team with family "roots" in nationally known SDA Evangelism and publication attempted to "dry" Georgia peaches in their laundry dryer and told the story to six and eight grade students. Imagine the confidence those students had in anything those teachers had to say!
The basic question is why pay money to be brow beaten, brain washed, and ill prepared for proper learning. Thank God for the 29%.
Even Ellen White would be ashamed. Tom Z
I could never understand why SDA schools want to close until I watched what happened with Broadview Academy outside of Chicago a few years ago. In essence, costs rose, the average income of SDA families (many immigrant) fell, and the geographic location was unattractive to city-based churches. I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the students who attended and the dedication of the teachers who worked long hours for inferior wages.
But the bigger problem was marketing...
During the same period, I consulted for the Catholic Archdiocese as they negotiated through their own series of problems, especially the change from largely white to racially integrated student populations. The Catholic solution was to rally parents behind the value of liberal Catholic education, teach cultural awareness and active community involvement, offer programs within the school for students who wanted to be made feel "special", and offer programs for non-Catholics or non-practicing Catholics. The schools have had some stormy periods, but overall have come out shining and are marketed here as THE alternative to public school education.
Religious and secular alternative schools are booming. Catholic schools are booming. Adventists schools....????
Good to learn that online education is developing to meet needs--a cyber track for important educational support for families wanting to educate their children the "Adventist Way".
To continue to succeed, the Adventist educational system, here's what I think will be needed:
1. Provide intellectually stimulating, engaging, teaching focused on science, art, literature and the highest in humanitarian and God-oriented values. Adventist "lingo" and "culture" is all too often more important than intellectual honesty and focus on Biblical scholarship.
2. Advents schools don't exist to create a "closed society"--a piously impious remnant, arrogant and stuck on itself--but instead exist to create an open, dynamically diverse, character-of-God-seeking, scriptural, humanitarian people , gracious to all humankind and accepting of differences in religion, culture, and ideology, but totally focused on working for healing in this world---where the discussion and mediation are taking place about ultimate values applied right now. The schools exist to create a discussion and to focus on THINKING, RESEARCH, INVESTIGATION, and discussion about the world that is, that could be, and the graduates role in that world.
3. Avoid close-minded, insular, parochial thinking, all too common...focus on liberal, yet specific education for people to make a difference in their world...to take care of themselves and their community, to help create community.
4. Provide such education online, and in those bricks and mortar facilities--including church---synagogue, and mosque--basements. Provide such education with what we have, scale back, scale up, but always focus on education and taking care of our own children and recognizing that all the children of the world are our children, too. Support the public schools, but see our role as to provide that spark of movement toward the Divine that all children need that is best taken care of within the fold of community.
5. Recognize the importance of creating a space in a secular culture where religious faith is important; recognize that a secular culture is what truly enables diversity and discussion about ultimate things to take place without inter-religious faith and ethnic wars.
5. Slick marketing of so-called "Christian" education should not be the approach, but rather unique--more or less--Seventh-day Adventist education focused on meeting the needs of specific children, specific families, specific cultures, the needs of people coming from many walks,even the children of agnostic and atheist parents who want their children to be fully engaged in practical humanitarian, value-focused education."
6. Continue to recruit superb, curious people for teaching. The testimony of such engaging teachers is the best marketing program for the continuity of Adventist education there is. I believe people will sacrifice deeply when they see their needs are being met by humble, thoughtful teachers and a system predicated on that humility exemplified by the lives of Jesus, Moses, Paul....(and there's where we often fail).
7. Establish endowments to assure the continuity of Adventist education until He comes--and don't let the church politicians rob the money to fill "potholes" in the road to heaven.
8. Finally, I think we Adventists should stop bragging about ourselves and our institutions. It's often counterproductive.
Have a blessed Sabbath...
Wow, I'd never heard about AE21 before. I've been homeschooled my whole life and just graduated from high school, so I think alternative methods of education are great, especially ones that involve computers.
In recent travels to one of the states that stretches far into western time zones, I was talking with people at the school I used to teach at. They are trying to keep their school together after some devastating events in the last few years. Their secondary students have been studying using the Griggs online curriculum, which is perhaps the worst program I've seen (and I've investigated a lot of online homeschool programs, as a teacher, and as a homeschooling mom). I suggested that they try to use the program you've written about here. The biggest problem is that, for their students to do "live" classes, they would have to be at school at 5:00 in the morning.
I also recently saw that there is another academy that is starting or expanding a similar online program.
The problems are as the author has pointed out: turf wars. I hope that the NAD can override some of these turf wars and begin to provide something that is available across the entire nation, not just for certain conferences. These turf wars are really detrimental.
Mom2twoboys,
Yes, you have put your finger on one of the problems with "live interaction"... the time factor. I thought of that when I wrote the sentence about role call at 8:00
AM. However,professional sports and national TV deal with the "time problem" so could AE21. This is "fixable."
What attracted me to the program was my concern for the many 1 & 2 teacher schools throughout the country serving a small church community where parents were hesitate of sending their 14 & 15 year old children away from home. Boarding academies aren't what the use to be. Here was a way to keep the children at home, connected to their local church and still have connections with SDA students around the country.
In my own backyard, there are numerous smaller churches throughout Florida who could provide the equipment and a room for 5 - 10 students at a fraction of the cost of sending them off to Forest Lake Academy - and the students could enjoy the social and spiritual benefits of being a part of the academy experience. But our local Conference seems to ignore this opportunity, preferring instead to pour monies into Dormitories that house fewer and fewer students.
The young people themselves are not only adapt at using this technology - they love it! And they thrive on the opportunities it offers.
So when I first learned of this program - I began looking for Advertisements in the Southern Tidings, Review and other church publications. Nada. Why? Thus my column.
There has got to be enough kids in 3 adjacent timezones to be viable - so break the country into two such groups, and let the kids in the middle choose which one they join
Most of the material could, of course, be shared by the two groups - and by many other groups around the world
/Bevin
Bevin--I've also been thinking about world interest. The thought and planning that would need to go into this for world use is beyond me (I am not a logistical person). If the curriculum were only the current American curriculum, there wouldn't be a large call world-wide (outside of missionaries' kids who are currently stuck with Griggs if they choose not to attend local schools). If they developed a more "generically" Adventist curriculum (and cut the requirements for, say, American history/lit, rewrote the religion curriculum to reflect a broader audience, and were more rigorous in their maths), it could have a more wide-spread appeal. However, if it is developed to reach "the world", NAD will not feel much obligation to develop it, I'm afraid.
Jim Becraft has many good thoughts as well. I have to comment on #2, however. Inside North America, the SDA schools have become exactly that--a place to protect "our" kids from others and to make an insular people. That is not what Ellen White says, but that's what they've become.
distance learning is already available in a great audio visual format...Sat or Cable TV!!!
between PBS, NOVA, the Science Channel, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, Nat Geo, there is more than enuf to edutain teens
the problems?
1)there is no emphasis on keeping one particular day of the week holy...AND
2)there is that constant problem of
almost 100% of programming constantly showing evidence which counters young earth creationism...while supporting the old age of the earth, and modern geological understandings of science and earth history.
and
3) there is no way for the GC or local Union or conference to collect money.
As the principal of a school that uses Forest Lake's Distance Learning Academy (formerly AE21), I have found it the perfect ticket to enable our school to offer a quality, Adventist high school curriculum on our campus. We will have about 12 students this year taking some (9-10th grade) or all (11-12th) of their high school class work through this program. Of those 12, only one or two would have seriously considered a boarding academy as an option.
Even as the demand has grown for this type of education in our area we have seen organizational support for DLA shrink on many levels. Donna, I share your concern.
It is sad that John Alfke is so determined to attack the SDA church that he will trivialise a tremendously important subject. TV channels provide no quality control, no balanced curriculum, indeed no curriculum at all. What Donna is talking about is distance education, not TV programs. It is blindingly obvious that watching documentary channels isn't a quality education, regardless of holy days, origins, or institutional money. So why waste everybody's time? This is a serious issue and I think we are all greatly indebted to Donna for her informative and thought-provoking article - let's respond to it with the seriousness it deserves.
There are numerous sites offering computer education K-12, simply Google to see them.
If the difficulty of finding an SDA school, isn't the church and home able to furnish the necessary religious instruction?
Does math need a religious slant; English; Civics? Surely, the entire subject matter needs no SDA slant, does it?
There has always been a strong correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education, although saying so leaves you open to charges of "elitism," now the dirtiest of words.
The better educated Americans are, the more likely they are to be affiliated with religions that have made room for secular knowledge (even if the latter contradicts some "sacred" book) or adherents to no religion at all.
About 45 percent of Americans who have no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible, while only 19 percent of college graduates do. Two-thirds of college graduates, but only one-third of high school graduates, believe that living beings have evolved over time.
This is the main reason why fundamentalists are supporters of kindergarten-through-college right-wing schools: in those institutions, fundamentalists can control the message.
Elaine
Mark Twain once observed that there are two deterants to sinning: The Ten Commandments and Cowardice. Conwardice is the best. That explains a lot of evangelism and a lot of pastoral behavior. But how long can one be scared as apposed to being in love? Tom Z.
I recently left AE21/DLA, after working with them for more than 10 years. I was the first teacher in the high school portion of the program, during the second year of the AE21 pilot.
The shift that occurred between the first and second years is the thing that defines the difference between AE21/DLA and other distance education programs (and TV): The interactive component. No other program offers such significant interaction, with students videoconferencing several hours per day in a classroom format, in addition to two face-to-face trips each year. Adults new to the program (on-site facilitators, parents who attend trips as chaperones, etc.) are often surprised at the sense of community already developed when students meet f2f for the first time.
While the time zones are something of a challenge, so far the challenge has not been insurmountable. For several years, three of our four full-time teachers lived in Washington state, and we've had several West coast students. They are up very early, but then so are dorm students in split schedule academies!
Just wanted to add information that may be useful. This is a wonderful discussion.
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