Recently I read my nine-year-old a biography of John Stott. (In 2005, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.) Stott’s biographer, Julia Cameron, emphasized Stott’s life-long commitment to university students with these words:

[University] Students will soon become schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers, lecturers, writers, and journalists. Some will go on to serve in government. All these people influence the way others think. To change a nation, you have to begin in the universities. (p104)

This is true, and Dr. Stott placed wise and persevering effort on universities. But to truly change a nation, you have to begin in the family in the earliest years of life because those formative years are the most powerful predictor of whether a child will enter university. If you wait until university, the underclasses will always be underrepresented, and nations will not change. Indeed by waiting until university, the educational class system becomes even more entrenched.

Given the cultural power that universities (and especially elite universities) have, that is probably the point at which students must learn the inordinate cultural power of the family in the earliest years of life. If this is done, both the power of the university and the power of early formation in the family are employed for the common good.