The Marks of Successful Schooling

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At Bethlehem College and Seminary, we make a big deal about joy. We believe deep in our bones that pursuing joy is the highest priority we can have. We were made for it. Because, as we love to repeat, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Our exuberant happiness in God, our contagious delight, our unapologetic joy in Jesus magnifies his worth. Fully to enjoy is to glorify.

That means our instructors are first and foremost co-laborers in cultivating joy (2 Corinthians 1:24). We garden gladness, helping our students be happy — so entirely enthralled by our triune God that they spend the rest of their lives, scratch that, the rest of eternity seeing, savoring, and sharing his goodness, truth, and beauty. We aim to educate in serious joy. But what exactly, you might ask, does that look like? If our instructors are practicing the art of husbanding happiness, tending the gardens of our students’ souls, what fruit do we hope to see? What does success look like when schooling makes the highest aim satisfaction?

Education in Joy
Proverbs 15:20–24 provides something of a litmus test of success for Christian education. These five proverbs form a unit, which Bruce Waltke titles “Joy in Education.” Conveniently, each proverb serves as a marker of what successful schooling looks like in the lives of our students. If God blesses our efforts, we may see more but certainly not less than these five pillars.  Allow me to briefly walk through each verse to give you just a taste of the fruit we’re striving for. 

1. Happy Elders
A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish man despises his mother. (Proverbs 15:20)  

The first marker of successful schooling is happy elders. Of course, at the most basic level, we aim to shape the kind of students that their parents can enjoy — sons and daughters they like to be around. We want to continue the long trek toward wisdom that their parents set them on. One of the surest measurements of moving toward maturity is jettisoning folly, the mark of a child (Proverbs 22:15). So with every assignment, every lecture, every discussion, indeed with every word, we aim to inculcate the kind of wisdom that enables our students to live with skill and wonder within God’s good design.

Yet this proverb captures more than just the gladness of biological parents. We also want our ideological parents to rejoice. At Bethlehem, we dwell in old books. In the pages of those books, we enter into conversation with our elders. In Lewis and Aquinas and Augustine, we find fathers in the faith; in Austen and Sayers and Perpetua, we meet mothers who model prudence; in Chesterton and Tolkien and Dante and Paul and countless others, we encounter our elders. As we sit under this cloud of witnesses, striving to read with humility and charity, seeking to see with their eyes and imaginations, savoring their unique visions of our God, we aim to be the kind of learners who make our elders happy. 

And above all else, we seek to make our heavenly Father happy. Wise children are his delight. He is pleased when we increase in holiness and happiness. His gladness is almost too gigantic to shoulder, but as Lewis reminds us, “To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.” We aim at that

2. Good Taste
Folly is a joy to him who lacks sense, but a man of understanding walks straight ahead. (Proverbs 15:21)  

The second marker of successful schooling is good taste. Or better yet, we might say godly taste. The goal is to shape the kind of people who love what God loves, hate what God hates, enjoy what God enjoys, mock what God mocks, and laugh at what God laughs at. Good taste is not finally subjective or arbitrary. Good taste is God’s taste, and we aim to create in our students an aesthetic palate that imitates God’s.

As the proverb makes clear, the fool and the wise can be distinguished by both their appetites and their actions. And in the end, these two are not all that different. Desire drives action; appetite determines direction. Fools wander wherever their fancy leads. They graze on folly (Proverbs 15:14). They scroll through nonsense. They try to chew whipped cream as if it were steak. But the wise man knows better. He is like a tiger that hunts knowledge (Proverbs 15:14). His taste has been honed by habit and refined by discipline, so his “cheerful heart has a continual feast” (Proverbs 15:15). 

Of course, our “powers of discernment” are not changed in a day or a month or a semester but are “trained by constant practice” (Hebrews 5:14). And foolish taste can only be usurped by superior pleasures. “The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to denigrate his present favorites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.” Bethlehem aims to teach students how to enjoy better, indeed how to enjoy Best. We spread the banquet table of the Good, True, and Beautiful and beckon all who will, “Come, eat” (Isaiah 55:1).

3. Abundant Counselors
Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed. (Proverbs 15:22)  

The third marker of successful schooling is abundant counselors. We want our students to have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to sources of wisdom. Like a ship under sail, we want them driven toward safe harbors by the clean sea breeze of good (and often, old) counsel. Education succeeds when students succeed because they have a parliament of wise advisors.

First and foremost, we want them giving their ears and hearts to the Wonderful Counselor (Isaiah 9:6). After all, he holds the key — he is the key to all the riches of knowledge and wisdom (Colossians 2:3). He is the King and Creator of all, and so all things cohere in him (Colossians 1:16–17). He is the wisdom of God and his word to us (John 1:1). No counsel that contradicts his stand.

So we want our students camping out before his throne. We want them ransacking his word for wisdom and plundering his world for knowledge. We want them hungry for revelation — both general and special. And we want them surrounded by host of counselors that mediate his wisdom. Counselors both alive and dead, counselors on the page and in the pulpit, counselors who lecture and listen, counselors with a warehouse of prudence buckets, counselors who are sober-minded, far-seeing, and soul-satisfied. 

4. Delightful Words
To make an apt answer is a joy to a man, and a word in season, how good it is!” (Proverbs 15:23)  

The fourth marker of successful schooling is delightful words. Once our students have observed, understood, evaluated, felt, and applied what wise counselors offer, we want them to communicate with clarity, creativity, imagination, and passion. Bethlehem trains skilled wordsmiths, who wield the apt answer for the joy of others. We want logos-lovers who know how good a fit word is. 

The two halves of this proverb show the wise student knows both how to serve up lovely words and how to delight in them. Her tongue adorns knowledge (Proverbs 15:2). Her words foil the beauty of God and his good designs in creation. She is like a florist artfully arranging her sentences and syllables. She is like a tree planted by living water, whose leaf never withers, who brings forth “apples of gold” in due season (Psalm 1:3; Proverbs 25:11). With poetic effort, she shares the joy she has seen and savored.

And the wise students can taste the sweetness of fit words. “How good it is!” echos God’s aesthetic judgment at the completion of his word-wrought creation. This student is sensitive to beauty. When he hears the concinnity of Coleridge, there is a catch of the breath. When Dante uses the perfect image, he can feel it. When he himself loves others well by laboring over the perfect word, his heart hums with delight.

As lovers of the Word, we aim to create lovers of words. 

5. Eternal Joy
The path of life leads upward for the prudent, that he may turn away from Sheol beneath.” (Proverbs 15:24)  

Finally, and most importantly, successful schooling is marked by eternal joy. All the previous fruit sours and rots without this one. We were made to be happy, created to have our souls utterly and eternally delighted. We were made to enjoy the triune God. Nothing short of sharing in the full and forever joy of the Father, Son, and Spirit can sate the human soul. If education does not ultimately aim at that end, it is less than worthless. 

The writer of Proverbs knew this well. That is why the capstone of this section on education is the “path of life” — a phrase that inevitably draws the Christian hedonist’s mind to Psalm 16:11. “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” This is the way we seek to lead our students along, the way we are walking day by day. Jesus has thrown wide the door to joy, and Christian educators are footmen, beckoning all to enter. 

Ultimately, we seek to echo to our students the call of Aslan: “Come further up and further in.” We are alpine guides, who with light and truth lead the way up the holy mountain to get to God our exceeding joy (Psalm 43:3–4). By God’s grace, the Bethlehem adventure involves the steady trek up from the land of death into the paradise of life. Education in serious joy aims at nothing short of eternal joy

Pray for Joy
That is our aim. We strive for schooling marked by happy elders, good taste, abundant counselors, delightful words, and eternal joy. But we cannot do that without God’s help and your prayers. What Paul proclaimed over his ministry, we proclaim over ours: “Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance” (Philippians 1:18–19). Our situation may not be as dire as Paul’s, but our desire for your prayers is. 

Education in joy, the kind of education Proverbs describes, education that glorifies God by enjoying him cannot happen without the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ and your prayers. Will you join us in praying that our schooling is marked by success?

Clint Manley, M.Div. ’24
Adjunct Instructor