American education careens from generation to generation, supported at times by a heady idealism, at other times by financial expediency. We have passed from a period of optimism into the latter stages of widespread distress over the state of our schools.
Uniformly, writers on education in America recognize the symptoms of the problem; they are too apparent to be ignored. These symptoms range from reading inefficiency throughout whole schools to intellectual malaise among graduate students in selective universities. They manifest themselves in parental outrage and in armed encounters between undergraduates and the National Guard. But these, we point out again, are only symptoms of the problem. Treating any or all of them does nothing to eliminate the problem itself, for the problem in today’s education is, at root, the problem with today’s society: it is glutted with its own secularism.
The restoration of personal values is what today’s youth seek. They want to become, as Paul Tournier puts it, “whole persons in a broken world.” Even the Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962 by Students for a Democratic Society, cannot be ignored in spite of subsequent violence committed in the name of SDS. It said, in part:
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.… We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things.… Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distances between man and man today.
“Our most pressing educational problem,” says Charles Silberman, “is not how to increase the efficiency of the schools; it is how to create and maintain a humane society.” Yet a humane society can never be derived from a secular matrix, for secularism, with its emphasis upon things as opposed to persons, lacks humaneness and human concern. But there is and always has been a solution available to those who wish it. The American tradition of freedom of choice in education has preserved the American independent schools and among them the Christian schools practicing Christian education.
Christian education takes as its view of the world the assumption, in St. Paul’s words, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” The Christian educator must offer training for the mind and body; he must prepare his students for their responsibilities in society. But he must also point them to their need to find favor with God. This he will do by example as well as by direct teaching. His aim in so doing will always be to lead his students and himself in inquiring after the two ultimate questions asked long ago by St. Paul: “Who art thou, Lord?” and “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”
It should be clear to anyone close to American public schools that what Jacques Ellul calls the “technological state” intends to eliminate the human teacher. He will be replaced by a machine in as many instances as practicable, as soon as possible. So says the most influential of the behavioral psychologists, B. F. Skinner: “You can teach much more effectively with devices of one kind or another. In the future they will be commonplace in all instructional situations.”
Although the arguments offered in favor of Skinner’s “teaching machines” are often related to dollars, the primary reason advocated is not merely financial. It is, instead, “educational accountability,” a piece of jargon that measures the degree to which a teacher—human or mechanical—can bring the class to a prescribed level of accomplishment, following a prescribed program of study. The measurement is calculated in terms of “behavioral change.” “That’s all teaching is,” Skinner says, “arranging contingencies which bring about changes in behavior.”
Presumably a human teacher could help his class achieve these “behavioral changes,” although Skinner suggests otherwise. The human teacher possesses dangerous liabilities as far as technology is concerned. He has his own opinions; he is also capable of veering from the approved syllabus. Not so the obedient computer. It is never sick or late or preoccupied with personal problems. It is steady, reliable, and therefore efficient.
Hildegard Hilton, writing in the Connecticut English Journal, reports on an editorial in an educational products catalog. It complains that among “impediments to objective evaluation of products” is “the teaching profession’s concern for children rather than things.” Can this be so?
No wonder, then, that our youth rebel, that the interdiction on an IBM card—“Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate”—has become a slogan for a generation that sees itself, again in Ellul’s words, “smoothed out, like a pair of pants under a steam iron.”
The result of technocracy’s reduction of man to a cybernetic cipher will be, to quote Stanley Burnshaw, “to break through the seamless web” of our wholeness as physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings. When that happens, Burnshaw contends, man will have experienced the loss of Eden all over again. He will know, to his sorrow, the loss of “the primary pattern of human awareness and consciousness: the unitary condition of the species—man in a seamless web of relationships.”
It is this web of relationships that marks the Christian school as long as it continues its heritage: the well-trained, loving teacher caring for the body, mind, and soul of his pupil. This fact will before long distinguish the Christian school from its dehumanizing counterparts; it will also turn the Christian school into a place of refuge for parents who wish to retain the personhood of their children.
In some schools, shorthanded by financial difficulties, the pragmatic can-do teacher seems more useful than the philosophical theorist. Yet it is wrong to assign the value of any Christian teacher on the basis of either/or—either the man of action or the man of reflection. Instead Christian education needs a both/and approach—both the philosophical study of Christian education with its difficult questions and a practical testing of the applications derived from that study. This duality ought to be part of the equipment of every teacher who presumes to serve in the Christian school.
We need Christian art and scholarship practiced by Christian artists and scholars. Those who qualify will be recognizable through willingness to give witness to their personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord; through their desire to use their art and intellect to communicate the love of God to the whole world; through their earnest efforts to follow the aesthetic and spiritual principles laid down in the Scriptures, particularly in St. Paul’s admonition, “Whatever is true … honorable … just … pure … lovely … think about these things.”
They will differ from artists and scholars who are not Christian in several respects, not the least of which is the worth accorded the human being as a potential child of God, reconciled to him by faith. The Christian artist, the Christian scholar, will have as his “unifying principle,” to quote Frank Gaebelein, “the recognition that all truth is God’s truth.” This will be his axiom. He will know, with Maritain, that “truth does not depend on us but on what is.” As for what is, the Christian will find that authoritatively stated in the Bible. Thus truth—the truth about God and man, time and eternity, redemption and judgment—he will take as his world-view, the promontory from which he looks out upon life.
The Christian world-view, encompassing all knowledge within the framework of God’s truth, does not admit of compromise. There is no such thing as part-time Christian education. One cannot decide as an English teacher, for example, to stress the evident implications of Christian truth in King Lear or A Farewell to Arms and not insist upon the same standard of truth in the teaching of rhetoric or grammar. The fact that these implications may be somewhat more difficult for the teacher to discern is no indication that they are not present. Too often the failure of professing Christian teachers to find the integration of truth and their discipline results from their inadequate grasp of the subject. Better scholarship produces better saints.
In total candor, it must be said that when a Christian teacher does not represent the whole truth about his subject, including its implicit spiritual ramifications, he is guilty of a serious omission. To the degree that he stands aside from what he knows to be a fuller description of truth, the Christian teacher has diminished his students’ apperception of truth.
The most urgent issues for a Christian curriculum may be summed up by the great Christian commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” To love the Lord God is more than a spiritual act; to love one’s neighbor is more than an emotional gesture; to love and respect oneself is more than a psychological necessity. These are also to be expressed through our minds, through a conscious appreciation of the grandeur of God and the relationship we experience with him and others.
It is no cheap formula to say that love for God may be stimulated through the study of mathematics and science as descriptions of the universe he has created. Love for neighbor may be engendered by a study of world history, anthropology, geography, the languages and cultures of other people. Love and respect for self, which Jesus tied to love for others, may be developed through an appreciation for the total human being; it may also result from the study of literature, national history, and art; it should come from a growing desire to express oneself in language and in other forms of communication.
The curriculum of the Christian school must instill in its students a respect for the past; it must prepare them for the future. But it cannot afford to ignore its responsibilities in the present. Christianity for too long has given its energies to past and future, earning from some critics an accusation of being an obscurantist religion. To be relevant means to be pertinent to the times. The present struggles in American society will continue to be upon us, no doubt in greater intensity, in the years ahead. The Christian school must bring upon these conflicts the light of its biblical perspective.
Issues such as citizenship, poverty, race, and war must be discussed with openness. Current events, about which so many Americans seem oblivious, must not be treated lightly by the Christian educator. The Twenty-sixth Amendment now enfranchises the eighteen-year-old. What will be his political philosophy? The Christian school must accept the bulk of responsibility for enlightening each of its pupils to the political process. Here again, the wholly sedentary approach must be discarded. Students from every Christian school must converge on political assemblies—from town meetings to the Congress of the United States. They must meet local legislators, county executives, and town supervisors of highways and sewers. They must learn why traffic lights seem to take an inordinate length of time to be installed; they must come to understand why the selling of detergents has been banned in their county; they must know both sides of the welfare problem, the housing problem, the labor-management problem.
Idols In A Museum
Skinny green goddesses
shrined in glass boxes—
incense-drencht, deep-carvd
temple walls
lit with hidden tubes—
a huge fresco of Buddha
& 10,000 flower worlds—
a weatherd statue
of a zen monk listening
to one foot passing—
before these bits of stone,
wood, fading paint,
pass the art students,
the noisy families who
don’t hear the chants trappt
in old walls.
In their sterile air
the idols smell no
incense, devour no grain,
or blood … are fed
on the idle stares of tourists,
honord by the guide’s lecture.
On another floor,
in a medieval chapel,
shadows genuflect
to a Christ fixt in wooden
agony—but the prints
of pierced feet lead out
to sunshine.
EUGENE WARREN
For the Christian school to achieve success in its mission requires a new attitude toward excellence. As D. Elton Trueblood has warned, “We must, as Christians, stress excellence. Holy shoddy is still shoddy.” To an embarrassing degree some Christian schools have fostered a spirit of contentment with the second-rate as long as the spiritual attitude remains commendable. Such schools, James Kallas says, offer “a substitution of piety for intellectual effort.” Well-meaning teachers encourage pseudo-Christian explications of literature (Penelope is the faithful Church waiting for the imminent return of Odysseus as emblematic of the Second Coming of Christ).
But Joseph Haroutunian rightly insists, “Christian schools must educate better and not worse than secular schools.” To do so requires a commitment to excellence from each administrator, teacher, and staff worker; it requires the daily practice of such a commitment. In the pursuit of excellence no aspect of the school’s daily business or the individual teacher’s behavior can be set aside as unrelated to the goal. No activity or gesture may be discounted. The school will be what the man is, and the man is known by his common traits.
Yet a warning is necessary to the Christian artist and scholar and to the Christian school pursuing excellence. The pitfall of intellectual pride awaits the haughty, as the Book of Proverbs warns. No teacher, whatever his religious profession, was ever truly successful if his pedagogy became mere pedantry, a show of his superior knowledge. H. L. Mencken advised that the best teacher is “one who is essentially childlike.” Certainly it is not the man who knows much who is the excellent teacher but the man who knows how to express what he knows so that others may learn it.
In one of the truly profound statements about education, Alfred North Whitehead says, “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.” Unfortunately, Whitehead’s definition of greatness, in the context of his remark, rises no higher than the classical literature of Greece and Rome. The Christion artist and scholar, the Christian school, knows a higher source. Examples of purposeful living and estimable character are inadequate of themselves unless they point to the source of true excellence, in the Person of Jesus Christ the Lord.
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the English Department at the Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This essay is excerpted from his book “The Way They Should Go,” to be released this fall, and is used by permission of the publisher, Oxford University Press.
