Tag Archives: formation

The Kingdom of Heaven is NOT like . . .

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At what seemed like a teachable moment in math class earlier this week:

Me: “If you had to be completely honest, would you say that you are concerned about how well your classmates are doing in math, or are you just focused on yourself–your own understanding and performance?  Be honest.”

Several students (under their breath): “Ourselves.”

Me: “Okay, good.  Thank you for being honest.  Now, let’s compare this to our Christian community.  Should it be our concern if our fellow brother or sister is faltering in his or her faith or just generally needs some support in life at the moment?  What about someone we know but whose faith we don’t know about?  If they are struggling somehow in life, should we care?”

Several students: “Yes, of course.”

Me: “So how is that perspective different from how we view our learning in school?”

One student: “Actually it’s the exact opposite.”

Me: “Does it have to be that way?”

I got mostly blank looks after this question.  I think a couple of students may have mumbled, “I don’t think so,” but not because they were convinced; rather I think they probably felt like that was the appropriate Sunday School response.  One thing became very painfully clear, though: no one in the room had spent a lot of time, if any, imagining that the academic part of school might could (or should?) look more like true Christian community.  No one had spent a lot of time worrying about how his or her classmates were doing in school.

If Jamie Smith is right when he says that “all habits and practices are ultimately trying to make us into a certain kind of person1,” then what kinds of persons are the academic climates in our schools making?  In particular, what kinds of persons are the academic climates in our Christian schools making?  If the answers to these last two questions are not really that different from each other, then we have a big problem (or, I guess I should say “opportunity”) in our Christian schools.

If chapel and Bible class and prayer are the only ways in which our Christian schools look different from secular schools, then I think we are completely missing the point.  If we are not looking different–radically different–on the level at which the students live–in their daily reality, their economy, where they are told by the world (and us teachers) that things matter, where they are working day in and day out (and this reality in school is academics, where the currency is grades)–then we are making no difference, and actually we may be doing more harm than a secular school because we have set up a dualism that is more despicable than paganism.

Now one could make the argument that our students’ reality is actually at the level of relationships and acceptance and “likes,” and there is much truth to this and much work to be done in this arena as well.  But I want to focus on the reality that our Christian schools and us teachers have most direct control over, and with which we too easily acquiesce to the modern secular culture of individualism and competition–and that is the reality of academics.

Before this tirade gets out of hand (and please know that I’m implicating myself here as well), I’ll end with a quote from Alfie Kohn:

“Lending an even more noxious twist to the habit of seeing education in purely economic terms is the use of the word “competitiveness,” which implies that our goals should be framed in terms of beating others rather than doing well. When the topic is globalization, it’s commonly assumed that competition is unavoidable: For one enterprise (or country) to succeed, another must fail. But even if this were true–and economists Paul Krugman and the late David Gordon have separately argued it probably isn’t–why in the world would we accept the same zero­sum mentality with respect to learning?”2

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1  Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Jamie Smith, 2009

2  Against “Competitiveness”: Why Good Teachers Aren’t Thinking about the Global Economy, Alfie Kohn, 2007.

Fur Coats vs. Fir Trees: Part 2

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A friend of mine recently sent me the following video. It’s about 10 minutes long, so if you can take the time, please watch it. I will share my thoughts below the link.

http://www.upworthy.com/the-earth-shatteringly-amazing-speech-that-ll-change-the-way-you-think-about-adulthood-4?g=2&c=cp2

I think you would agree that there are a lot of truths in this video, not least the picture that is painted of the self-centered rat race reality of so much of so many of our adult lives and how quickly dismissive we are of those around us. Perhaps you even felt convicted by some of these truths – I certainly was.

But then the crux of the message presents itself, the “alternative” to this way of interacting with the world:

“If you are aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to think differently . . . it’s hard, it takes will and effort . . . but if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer hell type situation as not only meaningful but sacred . . . ” (emphases mine)

So what’s wrong with this approach? What’s wrong with paying attention, with making conscious choices that come as the result of right thinking? After all, Jesus tells us to pay attention or “keep awake” in not one but two parables (Matthew 24 & 25), and Paul exhorts us to “be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12). So clearly attentiveness and right thinking are important. We take this to heart at my school where we actually train our students in the habits of attention and critical thinking.

So what is wrong with the thesis of this video? I think what is wrong is that what is presented is a near-truth, and near-truths are more dangerous than lies.

And here’s the near-truth, as I see it being presented (note this will not sound as poetic as the narrator puts forth in the video): “Your interaction with the world does not have to be this way. You just need to wake up out of your zombie state and choose to think differently. Sure it’s going to be hard, but it is within your power and will and effort to change.”

In other words, “Just man up and be a better person! It’s just a matter of choosing to change the way you think about the world.”

Oh, and by the way, the narrator calls this “real freedom,” “real education.”

But does this account accurately describe how we learn, how we change, how we are transformed, how we are “perfected” into God’s image?

Let’s say that I meet an adult who is admittedly very racist against black people. Maybe he is even consciously ashamed of this disposition, but he explains his racism by saying that he grew up in a white home in a white neighborhood where there was an obvious yet unuttered fear of black people, that he went to an all-white school that was “on the other side of town” from the nearest school that housed black kids, and that once he had a friend who was robbed at gunpoint by a black guy.

I guess I should just tell this guy, “Listen, I know this is going to be hard, but you just need to change the way you think about black people.” If he laughs incredulously at this suggestion, I just need to engage his intellect with logical arguments for why racism is evil and how it does great violence to the human soul.

I think you see my point. Again, I am not suggesting that critical, logical thinking has no place in the formation and transformation of a human soul. If that were the case, this blog and a large part of my job as a teacher would be pointless. But what ultimately forms us and our perception of the world is something much closer to our center of being, much more closely linked to what burns in our hearts and stirs in our imaginations, something that often defies logical articulation, something that has been inculcated within us due in part to our experiences, but due also to the fact that we are naturally and primarily loving, desiring beings.

And this brings us back to James K.A. Smith’s thesis which he establishes early on in Desiring the Kingdom. I will quote him again, this time from a different location and said slightly differently:

“. . . education – whether acknowledged or not – is a formation of the desires and imagination that creates a certain kind of person who is part of a certain kind of people. The facts and information learned as part of the process are always situated and embedded in something deeper that is being learned all along: a particular vision of the good life.”

The fictional (yet to some degree, if we are honest with ourselves, representative of some part in all of us that passes dismissive judgement against some class of people, rather it be because of race, religion, social standing, education, the kind of jeans she wears, etc.) racist character I created above received an “unacknowledged” or “implicit” education that painted a picture of the “good life” as “life without black people in it.”

The point is quite simply this: what seems to “stick” in a person’s core identity are those “teachings” that have been directed towards his heart and imagination, and often times this type of learning actually bypasses our conscious, thinking minds and goes straight to our “second nature.”

Said another way by Charlotte Mason, “Education is an atmosphere.”

So what does this mean for education in a Christian school? Everything. The stakes are perhaps even higher because we are Christian. Symmetry in our “being” and “thinking” is paramount. I will leave you with one last quote from Smith:

“Could we offer a Christian education that is loaded with all sorts of Christian ideas and information – and yet be offering a formation that runs counter to that vision?”