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Entrances, exits: Christian education and the future

Article  in  International Journal of Christianity & Education · November 2016

DOI: 10.1177/2056997116661805

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Editorial
International Journal of Christianity &
Education
Entrances, exits: 2016, Vol. 20(3) 181–185
! The Author(s) 2016

Christian education Reprints and permissions:

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and the future DOI: 10.1177/2056997116661805

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Beth Green
Cardus, Canada

It is an honour to introduce myself as Canadian regional editor for the IJCE,

particularly because I am so recently arrived in Canada from the United
Kingdom. My reflections in this editorial and on the contents of this issue have
been framed by some disruptive events occurring on the world stage as I have
moved to Canada. My entrance into the country last year coincided with a fresh
wave of international debates on immigration. These were prompted by the crisis in
Syria and illustrated by the terrible photograph of a dead little boy washed up on a
beach. He was Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old son of a refugee family desperately
trying to reach Europe. At the time of writing, June 2016, my home country has
just voted to exit the European Union. In Canada we are watching, in a kind of
morbid fascination, our neighbours to the South fight the long protracted battle of
a US election. Immigration appears to be a salient feature in all of these events.
David Brooks of the New York Times writes that the vision of a ‘global, integrated,
multiethnic future’ seems to be coming apart (Brooks, 2016: 23).
My point in this editorial is not to argue that Christians should vote for leave or
remain, Clinton or Trump. My point is to raise some questions about what we may
expect out of education in all of this. In particular, I wish to ask what vision of the
future Christian education may offer, and to write about how the articles in this
issue have helped me to think about this in constructive ways. It is fashionable at
present to critique the extent to which our systems of education prepare young
people to be resilient in the face of change and disruption. I want to question
whether grit and self-control are enough. I do believe that education has a critical
role in shaping the future, so I want to ask what vision of the future Christians
might be tempted to buy into.

Corresponding author:
Beth Green, Director of Education, Cardus, 185 Young Street, Hamilton, ON, L8N 1V9 Canada.
Email: bgreen@cardus.ca
182 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(3)

The imagination of the less-educated

Those of us engaging with the debates in this journal share an imagination with
regard to professional scholarship; presumably we believe in the importance of
research and we care about the power of its stories to shape the field of
Christian education. We possess considerable cultural capital, and we are ourselves
education success stories, because research and publication are still artefacts that
represent the pinnacle of achievement in the academic system. I have long defended
in my research the importance of robust theoretical work, accurate measurement,
and public, credible evidence of the influence of Christian education. I am not
second-guessing that, but when I sat in Heathrow Airport reading the post-
Brexit analysis in the Sunday broadsheets I realized that the liberal intelligentsia,
of which I am a part, largely blames the rise of trends such as aggressive nation-
alism, protectionism, community breakdown or racism on the imagination of the
less-educated. There seems to be little sense of culpability or willingness to face the
fact that if we shore up education systems that are orientated to the practices of
individualism, atomizing knowledge, privatizing religion, and privileging cognition
over embodied knowing and being, then perhaps no one will be formed to love
their neighbour well.
In this issue, Justin Glenn’s article, ‘Toward a contextual theological reading of
John Amos Comenius’, highlights the consequence of this lack of love in the aca-
demic practice of presentism. Comenius’s radical philosophy for education has
shaped our modern pedagogy and its focus on clear understanding of the needs
of the learner and universal accessibility to education regardless of race, gender,
class or religion. Glenn points out, however, that secular advocates prefer to ignore
the inconvenient truth that Comenius’s philosophy is only truly radical and only
defensible because it rests upon a deep theological commitment to the belief that
all human beings are made in the image of God. Glenn’s argument is that it is
incoherent to separate out Comenius’s theology from his educational philosophy.
For Comenius, education is capable of playing a soteriological role – a means to
restore the image of God in a broken and fallen humanity. To deny the authority of
God, the dependency of the created, and the reality of sin and brokenness and yet
still pin our hopes on education to save our future is an example of what it really
means to be less-educated.

Grit and resilience

Professor Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania is the authority on
‘grit’, which she defines as the ‘the tendency to sustain interest in and effort towards
very long-term goals’ (Duckworth et al., 2007: 1087). In a helpful response to this
research, the editor of a blog for Education Week, Larry Ferlazzo, points out that
the children of immigrant families in his English language classroom already dem-
onstrate a deep acquaintance with the practices of holding on desperately and
sacrificially to long-term goals. Yet Ferlazzo (2016) is worried about the narrative
that all it takes to succeed is hard work and character. To what extent, he asks,
Green 183

are we realistic about deeply embedded socio-economic injustices? Might it not be

important to help students to recognize these and assist them to acquire active
citizenship skills? Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz also point out eloquently
that it matters what the long-term goal is: ‘Sustaining interest and effort in a
long term criminal enterprise demonstrates grit, but not many people would say
that is a good thing. We, as teachers, should not just teach grit, but also the equally
important traits of empathy, optimism, flexibility, and a practice of reflection to
decide if the path we are on at any given point is good for us, and good for the
world’ (Mraz and Hertz, 2016).
In my current post as Director of Education for Cardus, I oversee research,
carried out by the Cardus Religious Schools Initiative, which studies the school
sector effect on educational outcomes. We deliberately measure civic and social
engagement as well as religiosity and academic attainment. Collecting these data is
underpinned by a concern to challenge the secular liberal perspective that religion is
an entirely private good which does not belong in public life. Our aim has been to
consider in the round the extent to which diversity in the education system, includ-
ing religious diversity, promotes healthy civic and social engagement, and to exam-
ine how well Christian schools prepare their graduates for forms of cultural
engagement shaped by Christian morality and practice oriented towards an under-
standing of the common good. I am particularly interested in the extent to which
the separation of civic engagement and character development (grit and resilience)
from a distinctive Christian community of practice manifests itself in some models
of Christian education. I think we have to face up to how influential the retreat of
religion from public life has been.
In their article considering the work of the National School Chaplaincy Program
in Tasmania, Christopher Stephen Rayner and Karen Swabey wrestle with similar
issues. The funding for this provision from the Tasmanian government is being
questioned, and the authors are keen that any decision about the service be
informed by credible research, rather than by mere capitulation to the secular
liberal project. The chaplains interviewed for this study worked in secular state
schools. The findings showed, in keeping with trends in the national research, that
chaplains are taking on an increasingly important role in relation to behaviour
management, peer relationships, and providing pastoral support in cases of
self-harm, suicide, and alcohol and drug use. This work is seen by their school
communities as unique, and important for fostering hope and resilience amongst
students and for developing community within school. Note the vital connection
here between hope and resilience. Christian chaplains are practising their eschato-
logical vision in public education settings and it is proving to be essential for the
health and vitality of the community – we strike at the roots of it at our peril.

To give you a hope and a future

The Christian narrative has a very distinctive vision of a future revealed
and embodied in the incarnation of Jesus and expected and hoped for in
184 International Journal of Christianity & Education 20(3)

His physical return. Two articles in this issue demonstrate that it takes complex
diversity in things such as our psychological make up, gifts and preferred ways of
learning, denominational traditions, cultural and historical assumptions to fully
reflect the person of God in the world of education. This is very different from the
homogenized, utilitarian models to which our global education systems appear
enthralled.
Francis, Fawcell, Linkletter, Robbins and Stairs have compared the psycho-
logical type profiles of Christian youth workers in the United Kingdom with find-
ings from Canadian Baptist youth leaders. Among Canadian youth leaders there
were higher proportions of introverts, and sensing, thinking and judging types.
Francis et al. explore the ways that these psychological characteristics interact
with different denominational practices. For example, youth ministers who are
introverts may place more emphasis on the interior journey and on personal
engagement with spiritual tradition and devotions and less on outward-facing
social interactions. The authors argue for profound theological and pedagogical
implications of such diversity, first suggesting that denominational differences in
the church should not be seen primarily as divisive or competitive but as a means
by which God reveals himself fully, and second, recommending that it is both
right to expect different Church traditions to build different models of Christian
education through youth ministry but also to encourage youth leaders who have a
vocation to experience their ministry across denominational settings.
The following line in Fred Edie’s article for this issue has jumped out at me in
particular: ‘Christians who are living toward a Kingdom are in desperate need of
the means to imagine the world other than it is at present’. I suspect that it will be
one of those phrases that will not leave me alone for a while. If we as Christians are
struggling to imagine the world other than it is, then just what has been shaping our
imagination and where is the prophetic voice and hope for the world which God’s
people are called to speak? Edie uses the poetry of Fourth Century Syrian deacon,
Ephrem, as an alternative resource for regular, embodied practices of reflection, or
liturgies, in Christian curriculum. Drawing on the present-day scholarship of
Hogue (2009), Brown and Strawn (2012) and Smith (2009, 2013), Edie makes the
case for using Ephrem’s poems as a form of embodied, liturgical catechesis. This
process, he writes, forms an alternative imagination capable of recalling the treas-
ure trove of symbols and images in the Bible’s narrative which invites people to
critique conventional wisdom, to recall God’s interventions in the past, and to
recast our common perspectives in line with God’s greater vision. This is the
work that Brueggemann (1982: 52) describes as part of the prophetic task, exposing
the lies of the ‘managerial mentality’ of empire. It is, of course, an illusion that the
empire is strong and that we are in control of our own destiny; the only firm
foundation for the future is Jesus. Christian education has a unique task: to prac-
tise in the present the future that it waits and hopes for.
I began this editorial standing on what felt like shifting, uncertain political
ground. I think that we can all expect to have moments when what we are working
for feels profoundly out of sync with the educational practices we are told are
Green 185

important for the future of society and our students. We can also end up in places
where we realize that our educational practices have undermined our very best
intentions and where we recognize our thinking has become lazy or, worse,
deeply compromised. I do believe that being less educated and lacking in grit
and resilience are problems for the next generation and for our civic engagement,
but this cannot be addressed in isolation from a Christian imagination of the
future. Christian education is so much more than a bulwark against the collapse
of the present; it is a signpost of the future kingdom of God, and to that end must
be a resource to equip people to live in that kingdom even when it is profoundly
uncomfortable to do so in the present.

References
Brooks D (2016) Revolt of the masses. The New York Times, 28 June, A23.
Brown W and Strawn B (2012) The Physical Nature of the Christian Life: Neuroscience,
Psychology, and the Church. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brueggemann W (1982) The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Duckworth A, Peterson C, Matthews M and Kelly D (2007) Grit: Perseverance and passion
for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6): 1087–1101.
Ferlazzo L (2016) Response: It’s time to change the conversation about grit. In: Classroom
Q & A with Larry Ferlazzo, Education Week Teacher. Available at: http://blogs.edweek.
org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2015/10/response_is_grit_an_asset_or_
an_excuse.html (accessed 28 June 2016).
Hogue D (2009) Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future: Story, Ritual, and the Human
Brain. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.
Mraz K and Hertz C (2016) Response from Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz, http://blogs.
edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2015/10/response_is_grit_an_
asset_or_an_excuse.html (accessed 28 June 2016).
Smith JKA (2009) Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation.
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Smith JKA (2013) Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Academic.

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