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Dr. Christy Vaughan holds an Ed.D. from Liberty University in Educational Leadership and serves as Secretary for Classical Christian Education International, Inc. (www.2CEI.ORG) and Head of Curriculum and Instruction at Brown County Christian

Academy in Ohio. She has more than 10 years of experience in public and private education in both online and brick-and-mortar classrooms, and she currently offers courses in preparation for a career in Christian education through Kepler Education.

Redeeming the Social Sciences

Why Custom Must Still be Considered

by Dr. Robert Woods

Ihad long been a closet admirer of the Social Sciences, traditionally understood, but like so many had become increasingly troubled with the heightened anti-traditional, anti-Christian, and even ironically anti-humane worldview of too many applications of the social sciences. Academic disciplines and intellectual schools of thought should go through an occasional reexamination to ensure that they have not become blind to certain dispositions and tendencies that may diminish their positive role in assisting with human understanding. As with most machinery that needs a periodic inspection to ensure that all is properly aligned, the self-reflective scholar should seek to do the same within her discipline.

All people who have lived any length of time and all ideas that have been around for a period of time have both a history and a philosophy. This is true of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The influ - ence of the social sciences in our everyday lives is manifested in both the academy and within mass society. “The concepts and terminology of the social sciences pervade almost everything we read today.”1 This imprint affects everything from public discussions of social justice and equity to the way we experience freedom, exhibit manners and morals, and most keenly manifested with the omni-present triumph of the therapeutic. It is with this fact in mind that the nature and function of the social sciences need to be reconsidered.

A clear point of demonstrating the occasional need for reconsidering the origins and orientation of an academic discipline would be specifically the social science of sociology. “The descriptive science of sociology or comparative ethnology thus tends to replace normative science of ethics—or moral philosophy.” 2 Strictly speaking, the historical roots of sociology can be traced back to the theory and practice of ethics or moral philosophy. The difference being that today, Sociology is less explicit in its ideological orientation when historically, moral philosophy was explicit in its prescription of the good life to be lived by good people. Despite this key shift from explicitly prescriptive to overtly descriptive, the social sciences continue to ask questions and seek answers that are central to our self-understanding. Why do we form ourselves, as humans, into the various social formations? Why do we have the social

1 Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 289.

2 Mortimer J. Adler, ed., The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas , Second Edition., vol. 1, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1990), 212.