Do Business Schools and Theological Colleges Share the Same Faults?

There is a current fashion in pointing out the faults of business schools, which is appraised in this article from the current issue of the economist.

Certainly the way business schools focus attention away from human agency within organisations reminds me of the “clergy-centric” results of many theological training programmes. Moreover, the way business schools load-up graduates with fixed ways of seeing the world before the experience is in play to question those ways of seeing is reminiscient of the way theological education often grounds students in fixed assumptions from borrowed fields (like psychology and funnily enough, management). In both cases these are the result of trying to move away from prior models of theoretical preloading (economics and theology respectively).

Where business schools seem to be leading the way is in the literature that questions the models in play and in researching the net effect of their educational processes. There is almost no long term research into theological curricula and fwe if any avenues for funding such research.

[tags] Theological Education [/tags]