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7:2 Editorial |
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Written by John Shortt & David Smith
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A recent UK government advertising campaign aimed at recruiting new teachers used the slogan, 'Nobody forgets a good teacher'. In similar vein, a trailer for the film The Emperor's Club tells us that `In everybody's life there's that one person who makes all the difference'. In their article in this issue of JE&CB, Perry Glanzer, Todd Ream and Tony Talbert lead us to think again about our conception of what it is to be a 'good teacher' or the person who `makes all the difference'. They discover in this film an example of how character education within an inadequate narrative framework may not be as good a thing as it might seem to be on the surface. They point us instead to an Augustinian framework which provides for 'grace-filled teaching' and is, they argue, more adequate than both classical and modern approaches to character education. A Christian narrative framework provides for grace, forgiveness and the hope of redemption. |
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7:2 Balancing Tolerance, Autonomy and a Framework for Social Cohesion |
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Written by Tim Pearson
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JOHN HULL'S LIBERAL model of religious education offers a diagnosis of the aspects of religion that are sources of intolerance, and a programme for their deconstruction and removal. He sanctions a certain level of intervention in the religious development of students in order to fulfil the central liberal objective of producing harmony in diversity. This article argues that there are problems with the legitimacy of this programme of intervention because there are fundamental flaws in the theory of knowledge through which Hull's system is justified. These flaws lead to an unnecessary restriction of both student autonomy and the autonomous self-understanding of religious traditions. However, it is possible to replace Hull's qualified modernism with a more adequate and more postmodern epistemology without losing what is valuable in its liberal objectives. Andrew Wright's critical realist theory accepts the contingent nature of rationality and its ramifications, provides a potentially unifying system for social cohesion, and returns to students and religious traditions alike appropriate forms of autonomy. |
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7:2 The Culture of the Christian School |
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Written by Kathy A. Mills
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IN DISCUSSIONS OF educational administration theory, school culture has emerged as a contentious construct characterized by polarized positions. The underlying tensions are between conflicting structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives. These have led to views of Christian school culture and school organization as being either, on the one hand, static, positivist, hierarchical, individualistic and capitalistic or, on the other, dynamic, coherentist, communally interdependent, service oriented and Christ-centered. All schools demonstrate an ethos or organizational culture by default if not by design. It is therefore imperative for Christian school administrators, educators, and the community to consciously define the aspects of school culture that reflect the shared biblical values of the Christian school community. |
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7:2 A Summary Grammar for Christian Prepolitical Education |
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Written by Nigel W. Oakley
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THIS ARTICLE LOOKS at how Christians should be educated for prepolitical involvement in civil society. It does this by proposing a 'summary grammar' based on a reading of three theologians who have influenced Christian political thought (Augustine of Hippo, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Dietrich Bonhoeffer). The summary grammar is expressed in the form of three inter-related tensions on which all prepolitical education must rest if it is to be properly Christian. The first tension concerns the nature of God's kingdom; the second relates to the idea that that the church should be in the world but not of it; and the third is based on how the church relates to that world. I then look at how this prepolitical education could have helped the recent debate over war with Iraq. |
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7:2 Contours of Religion, Scholarship and Higher Education: A Review Essay |
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Written by David I. Smith
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THIS ARTICLE SUMMARIZES and comments on issues raised in Religion, Scholarship and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models and Future Prospects, a book which is the product of the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education. The first two sections of the book deal with faith in relation to the nature of the academy and to disciplinary inquiry. The article focuses mainly on the third section, entitled 'Religious Perspectives on Teaching: Reflections on Practice'. The essays in this section, with one notable exception, fail to adequately tackle pedagogical questions concerning how students are taught and how their identities are shaped in schools and colleges. There is a noticeable drift in most of the essays in this section of the book away from the questions of teaching that provide the ostensible framework and back towards issues having primarily to do with disciplinary scholarship. This process appears to be aided and abetted by a tendency to think of teaching as basically a process of telling. These essays also fail to make reference to any existing work about pedagogy or from the discipline of education. Why this is important is because the relationship between religion and higher education cannot be adequately understood without more disciplined attention to distinctively pedagogical concerns. Reluctance to delve into pedagogy and questions of student formation is ultimately a reluctance to pursue the book's stated theme all the way to its conclusion. |
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7:2 Why Both Classical and Modern Character Education Are Not Enough |
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Written by Perry Glanzer, Todd Ream & Tony Talbert
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IN THIS PAPER, we argue that a Christian analysis of The Emperor's Club, a recent movie about a classics teacher at an American prep school, provides insight into why teaching virtue within a distorted historical narrative and tradition can be destructive for both the teacher and the student. It reveals the limits of teaching character within both a classical worldview bound by fate and a modern worldview that exalts individual control. Moreover, for Christian educators who need to place our teaching in our own narrative while also being aware of the corrupting aspects of other narratives, an Augustinian critique of the film reminds us of the need for grace-filled teaching. |
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Volume 7 (2003) 