Shaping Education
Amid the current banking crisis, it has been reported that finance workers are heading for the teaching profession, leaving the office for the classroom, exchanging the Financial Times for the Times Educational Supplement. It's not about the money or job security, apparently, or even the longer holidays, but the search for a career that will provide a greater sense of fulfilment; a public sector job in a world in which people are valued. May it be so.
To be sure, education is a crucial task and a worthy calling, although it's not immediately clear that being a Christian in education is any easier than being a Christian in banking. Teachers - like the rest of us - have to negotiate what it means to be in the world but not of it. And beyond those who teach are the many whose lives intersect with education on a daily basis - parents, governors, volunteers, local government officials - not to mention the children themselves whose lives are powerfully shaped by the 30 hours or more a week spent at school.
Since education has never been about information so much as formation, it is worth asking what forces shape our post-Christian culture. Christians will be rightly interested in the character-forming elements of education, though may want to raise questions where such education assumes a universal set of morals, a 'civic religion' that unites and transcends all religious boundaries, where the ultimate value of tolerance makes 'good' a matter of personal choice.
The Christian will be conscious that a primary allegiance to Jesus shapes us in distinctive ways, and will want to ask what difference a worldview informed by Scripture makes to the teaching and learning of maths, geography, and history as well as the so-called 'social and emotional aspects of learning'. Christians are citizens of the kingdom of heaven before they are citizens of the United Kingdom, and will recognise that virtues of courage, compassion and honesty look different when they take shape under the lordship of Christ rather than Caesar. In addition, churches will play a crucial role in showing how the teaching of character goes hand in hand with that character being lived out in everyday life.
All this being the case, the school might then become the place for critical, even if respectful, engagement with the culture on the part of Christians, who serve as agents of transformation, bringers of light, for Jesus their lord. In education as in every other sphere of life, may we be 'as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves' (Matthew 10:16).
Antony Billington
May I use your article for a church newspaper with credit properly given and article fully in tact?
Date:
2010-02-08 20:27:44
Author:
Susan Hatch