BYU-Pathway

I was excited today to hear about the Church’s announcement of the expansion of the BYU-Idaho pathway program to now be a worldwide educational resource for members of the Church called BYU-Pathway.  There are currently four physical Church schools: BYU in Provo has about 30,000 students; BYU in Idaho has almost 20,000; BYU in Hawaii has about 3000 students; and LDS Business College has about 2000 students.  That makes about 55,000 students who physically attend Church schools.  That number really can’t increase without an enormous investment to build more building, hire more teachers, and have more physical facilities to accommodate more students.  Several years back BYU-Idaho started the Pathways program which is mainly online but also makes use of already built LDS chapels and other buildings to allow students to have physical meetings.  It is also extremely inexpensive which allows it to provide opportunities to many who would never have the chance to get a formal education otherwise.  That program has about 37,000 students, and now with this announcement that number is likely to dramatically increase over the coming years and decades.  It is a testament to the Church’s commitment to education and we could now see the day where hundreds of thousands of students can get a Church education across the world.  I’m sure that President Hinckley—who consistently encouraged us to “get all the education you can” and who created the Perpetual Education Fund—is smiling on the other side of the veil.  In fact, the Pathway program was originally introduced in 2009, which was just a year after President Hinckley passed away, and perhaps he had more to do with its inauguration than we realize.

        What this program and all of Church education has to offer that the secular world can’t copy is summed up in the scriptural phrase “seek learning even by study and also by faith” (D&C 109:7).  President Brigham Young taught Karl G. Maeser when he started teaching at Brigham Young Academy, “Remember that you ought not to teach even the alphabet or the multiplication tables without the Spirit of God.”  Instead of trying to divide secular and spiritual learning into separate experiences, the way of the Lord is that we learn everything with the Spirit of God to assist us.  Elder Eyring shared an experience which illustrates this way of learning: “I was a struggling physics student studying…. In the middle of some mathematics, I had a clear confirmation that what I was reading was true.  It was exactly the feeling I had had come to me before as I pondered the Lord’s scriptures and that I have had many times since.  So I knew that the Holy Ghost understood whatever was true in what I might be asked on an examination in thermodynamics.”  The Lord declared in this dispensation, “I am well pleased that there should be a school in Zion” and today’s announcement seems to suggest that the Lord is well pleased that there should be a school all throughout Zion, whether that be with Saints gathered in Zimbabwe or New Zealand or Zurich or anywhere else (D&C 97:3).

Surely the Church’s emphasis on education is a reminder to all Saints that we should get as much education as we can, whether that be formal training or not.  The Lord has not asked us to necessarily get official degrees recognized by the world but to learn “of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms” (D&C 88:79).  Getting that kind of knowledge entails much more than taking mandatory freshman classes in college; rather, it is the pursuit of a lifetime for the disciple of Christ.