"What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctive Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job). And so distinctively Christian education is understood to be about Christian ideas—which usually requires a defense of the importance of “the life of the mind.” On this account, the goal of a Christian education is the development of a Christian perspective, or more commonly now, a Christian worldview, which is taken to be a system of Christian beliefs, ideas, and doctrines. But what if this line of thinking gets off on the wrong foot? What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut—what the New Testament refers to as kardia, “the heart”? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions—our visions of “the good life”—and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies and with our minds? What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?"
- Excerpt from Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation by James K. A. Smith (my thanks to Laurence Windham for passing this along)
I've heard good things about this book and read some of it. I think this fits well with James Jordan's comment that we need to educate people as homo adorans instead of homo sapiens - he also is attacking the intellectual emphasis of modern education. If man is primarily a worshipper, what will we teach him? Well, how to worship. If he is primarily a thinker, we will teach him how to think.
ReplyDeleteBut, suppose that the quote you have put up is true, and that education should be primarily about what we love and not what we know - what is this going to look like? The school system, the college system, the university system are all places with an intellectual emphasis. If man is to be educated as a thinker, then the university system will develop. If we want to educate him as a worshiper, will that still work in the university system? Or does it require something foundationally different?
Ryan,
ReplyDeleteGreat questions amigo, and yes, I believe it will be completely different and it'll look more like what Jesus did with the disciples and less like a highschool. We need to revive the word "disciple" though because this is the key concept and not "education". Being a disciple implies all of one's life being formed and trained by worship-love and not just brains.
These leaders to show young disciples the narrow path of peace are readily available too, many just need to be encouraged to embrace their roles. By that I mean fathers and mothers. They are the true disciple shapers who have been they themselves discipled by the Spirit through the Word and through the Household of Faith. Cool? Nope. Trendy? Nah. Jesus' style? Yep.