Dr. James Bartlett:
Battling The Accreditation Monster
With The Biblical Life Experience Degree

Loss of faith among students at both secular and Christian colleges is a well known fact. The obvious culprit is removal of the young person from the protective home environment.

The solution promoted by Dr. Bartlett should be equally obvious. If homeschooling makes sense in the lower grades, why not extend that same rationale into the college years. That is the underlying premise of the Biblical Concourse and the life experience degree.

How do we account for the lure of the college campus? Dr. Bartlett spent 17 years as a college professor and member of the accreditation team at a major American University. During that period he came face to face with the corrosive effects of the American accreditation system.

This experience led him into a period of in-depth Bible study and search of the literature. He emerged with a vision for the life experience degree and the Biblical Concourse, which he founded in 2004.

Dr. Bartlett is also Executive Director of the North Dakota Home School Association. His goal is restoration and development of the Biblical life experience degree in post-secondary education. Dr. Bartlett and his wife Lynn home school four boys in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota and can be reached at 701-263-4574 or by visiting biblicalconcourse.com

If you have a son or daughter contemplating college, you don’t want to miss our challenging and inspiring interview with Dr. James Bartlett.

The Biblical Concourse of Home Universities helps each participant develop their own alternative to college that is consistent with their family and church values. Participants include high school students, college students, graduate students, and professionals desiring to continue their education. The Concourse provides knowledge and people resources that help implement Biblical truth and creatively challenge the cultural norms in each occupation.

Participants invest in their own offices, shops, laboratories and businesses as they develop and accomplish their own courses and curricula. This is, in effect, a Biblical life experience degree. It results in the lowest cost, most time efficient and directly useful high quality education, which purposely builds family economies and motivates multigenerational faithfulness to God. Details are on the website at: http://biblicalconcourse.com

2. How did you first get involved in the accreditation issue at North Dakota State University?

I was a new faculty in the engineering college teaching aircraft manufacturing laboratories and courses in a new program. Each faculty member participated in gathering the needed institutional and student data toward gaining program accreditation. I attended the training workshops for ABET Accreditation at a Society of Manufacturing Engineers conference in about 1992. During my 17 years at NDSU, I was involved in gathering the accreditation data, editing accreditation documents, hosting accreditation teams, analyzing accreditation visit results, and in the attempts at implementing improvement recommendation for two departments.

3. What did you learn from that experience? In what ways is modern education the antithesis of a life experience degree?

That accreditation homogenizes, secularizes and minimizes education while maximizing its cost and enshrining an education monopoly. Research into the value of accreditation has demonstrated conclusively that accreditation does not ensure quality. The paper that I wrote titled, “The Snare of College Accreditation,” proves these points and provides authoritative references that also apply to elementary and high school education (http://biblicalconcourse.com/AcreditationSnareBC.pdf).

4. What are the weaknesses of the accreditation system in American Christian education?

The removal of the family and church authority from over the education of a young person is the most subtle weakness. This leads to parents disconnecting from the educational process, and their children, as they put their faith in the surrogate of accreditation. Accreditation criteria also tend to make schools look alike in scope, sequence, time in subjects, and more. This minimizes student and educator motivation to be all that God has uniquely gifted and called them to.

Accredited schools cannot respond promptly to new directions because of the institutional momentum (ball and chain) that accreditation adds. Accredited schools are also forced into a corner to raise funds to pay for accreditation related expenses, increasing the cost to families and lowering teacher compensation, without corresponding value added.

5. Specifically, how have Christian secondary schools and Christian colleges succumbed to the lure of accreditation?

Notice that the reason Christian schools and Christian colleges become accredited is to be able to answer “Yes, we are accredited” to parents who have been taught to ask this question by the Marxist leaders of our culture.

The bottom line is that accreditation is a modern marketing program intended to move control of education from the parents to the government or institutions which exclude free-market competition in education. The schools and colleges are motivated toward accreditation to increase their market share. In other words it is all about money and where money trumps God’s Kingdom in priority, there is bound to be subtle consequences (1 Timothy 6:10).

6. In what ways has this been damaging for them?

History shows that accreditation is a step that many Christian schools and colleges have taken that leads them to slowly become a secular or compromised institution. The common path to secularization of 17 Christian institutions of higher learning is shown in the table below.

How Christian Institutions Became Secularized without Awareness:1. Embraced assumptions from secular sources (e.g., value of accreditation). 2. Understood identity in context of national, intellectual, and social agendas.3. Let religious identity become formality with less and less meaning.4. Recruited students via Christian values promise without all committed Christian faculty.5. No longer worked at integrating faith with disciplines.6. Focused on individualized faith.7. Considered that which is good and right as not a subject of knowledge.8. Assumed success based on attendance, buildings, and the creation of wealth.

The full paper which I wrote on this topic is titled, “Secularization by the Christian Educator” (http://biblicalconcourse.com/HSDSecularization.pdf)

7. Can you give us some historical examples of how church and family gave up on the idea of a life experience degree?

The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Evangelical denominations all have many cases where their colleges gradually disengaged from their churches with accreditation as a component. The book titled, “The Dying of the Light” by James Burtchaell provides the lengthy details on colleges such as Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Trinity University, Jamestown College, University of Tulsa, Wesleyan College, Boston University, Cornell, Mercer University, Belmont university, Anderson College and many more.

In the 1980s, Christian school leaders in North Dakota were willing to go to jail rather than get their schools accredited. They understood what J. Gresham Machen understood in 1926. When the U.S. Department of Education was forming, J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, and founder of both Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, presented a Joint Committee of the United States Congress with important reasons for not forming the U.S. Department of Education.

He explained that standardized education is based on the assumption that people are essentially machines and can be mass educated; similar to the mass production of automobiles in a factory. However, since people are not machines; but created by God to love and serve Him and others, standardized education functions to significantly limit education and enslave people.

8. What can be done to resolve the problems that you have uncovered? How can we restore the life experience degree?

Awareness of the accreditation and secularization issues is first. Then parents, students, and professionals need to learn how to put God’s Kingdom first in the context of their occupation, which is no small task. The course titled, “They are Your Inalienable Rights!” is one way for people to begin learning and working like only Christians can (http://biblicalconcourse.com/YourInalienableRightsAd.pdf).

Return from Life Experience Degree to America Betrayed 1787