As the United States of America basks in its 250th anniversary, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about origins.
Origins matter because they often reveal what people believed was worth preserving. They expose priorities, assumptions, fears, and hopes about the kind of society people wanted to build and the kind of leaders needed to sustain it.
Long before America became a nation, educational institutions were already being built and many of them were explicitly theological.
Harvard, founded in 1636, was established primarily to train clergy. Yale followed with similar goals. Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and Rutgers all emerged from deeply religious contexts. The early vision for higher education in America was not merely economic or vocational.
The goal was not simply to prepare someone for a career. The goal was to shape judgment, character, wisdom, and moral responsibility. Education was connected to virtue, leadership, and service to both Church and society.
Of course, those institutions were deeply imperfect because institutions are made up of systems and people. Where there are people, there will always be flaws.
The United States has always carried contradictions. The same nation that spoke passionately about liberty often failed (and still fails) to extend it equally. The same educational systems that pursued truth sometimes restricted access to it.
Yet, it is still worth asking why education occupied such a central place in the early American imagination.
Part of the answer is that earlier generations understood something we are still wrestling with today: Ideas shape people, and people shape societies.
Historically, higher education has always operated with competing assumptions about what education is actually for. One scholar described theological education as existing somewhere between “Athens” and “Berlin.”
Athens represented the classical vision of education centered on wisdom, virtue, and the formation of the whole person. Berlin represented the modern research university with its emphasis on specialization, expertise, and academic rigor.
For centuries, the Oxford tutorial model emphasized something different entirely: close relationships, intellectual dialogue, mentorship, and learning how to think through conversation and accountability.
In simple terms:
Athens asked: What kind of person are you becoming?
Oxford asked: Who is walking with you while you become it?
Berlin asked: What kind of expert are you becoming?
Early North American higher education carried traces of all three traditions.
There was intellectual rigor, moral formation, and mentorship. There was an understanding that education was not merely about transferring information but shaping people capable of sustaining families, churches, institutions, and communities.
Over time, however, much of higher education drifted heavily toward the Berlin model. Expertise expanded. Research accelerated. Disciplines multiplied. Yet formation often weakened.
To be clear, I am not anti-academics. I love scholarship. I have spent over two decades in vocational ministry, including the last 13 years serving in biblical higher education. I’m grateful for rigorous research, disciplined thinking, and the opportunities education has given me.
However, one of the greatest challenges facing higher education today is not simply access to information. It is formation.
Information has never been more accessible. Formation has never been more difficult.
You can learn almost anything online. You can access world-class lectures from your phone while sitting in an airport terminal. Yet knowledge alone does not produce wisdom, resilience, humility, discernment, or spiritual maturity.
Formation requires something slower. It requires relationships, accountability, and community. It requires mentors who help shape not only what you know, but who you are becoming.
This is why I love biblical higher education.
At its best, biblical higher education refuses to separate intellectual growth from spiritual formation, theology from practice, leadership from character, or calling from community. It insists that education is not merely about preparing someone for a job. It is about preparing someone for faithful service.
That does not mean biblical higher education should resist innovation. In fact, I’m excited about the innovations we’re making at Manna University and can’t wait to share them with you in future posts.
As the United States of America turns 250, I think we have an opportunity to recover something important: A deeper understanding of what education is ultimately for.
Before there was a nation, there were schools trying to shape the kind of people who could sustain one.
That vision still carries weight, and in many ways, the future of leadership may depend on whether we recover it.
Dr. Carlo A. Serrano, President