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Organized education is to be seen not precisely in the service of scholarship nor primarily to serve the state or the economy but primarily to serve the task of nurturing, nourishing, and sustaining the quest to meet highest aspirations most profound commitments. The standards of a society and its culture involve concerns for the degree of freedom, equality, justice, and fulfillment enjoyed by its members. Educators have the opportunity and responsibility to engage in the ongoing process of reconceptualizing education. Professional educators, both present and future, must be able to think intelligently about the large questions which underlie educational methods and goals. Teachers, counselors, administrators and curriculum specialists should be familiar with the issues regarding the nature of reality and the purpose of life. When students of educational philosophy have found their way through these basic issues, then they are in a position to select intelligently the aims of education and choose effectively the pedagogical methods which promote them. teacher’s worldview has a great impact on education and values of children transmitted through communication and information interchange.
From a Christian perspective, the philosophy of education is extremely important. Contemporary Christians rightly feel obliged to respond to a multitude of current educational issues, such as the creation-evolution debate in American schools or the apparent lack of sound moral training in public education. Many Christians wrestle with the decision of whether to attend, or to encourage their children to attend, a Christian or other private school rather than a state school. Yet they need more than a convenient set of answers to immediate problems. They need a whole way of thinking about education–a philosophy which relates their religious commitment to educational concerns (Bauckham, 1996). The main point of contact between educational philosophy and Christianity is that they both address the same basic questions: the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the worth of knowledge and so on. There is a variety of answers to these questions. Each group of answers forms a distinct point of view, which, in turn, generates implications for education (Banks, 1997).
The fact that God has made persons to be creatures who form beliefs and seek knowledge ushers educators right to the threshold of epistemology. To be sure, God’s knowledge is total, perfect and impeccable while ours is partial, defective and fallible. Yet bearing the image of God, educators are able to think, judge and know in some ways which reflect God’s thoughts, judgments and knowledge (Singelis, 1998). A theistic world view does not guarantee that efforts to attain knowledge will be free from error, but assures that educators have been endowed with the ability to gain some reliable knowledge about reality. A complete Christian view of knowledge recognizes that reality is complex and that each of its domains must be known on its own terms. There is no single way to discover all the different truths there are (Bauckham, 1996). Educators must discover empirical truths through observation and experiment, historical truths through records and artifacts, logical and mathematical truths by abstract reasoning, and so forth. Christians have no shortcuts for acquiring truths in these areas, but share the same basic capabilities as other humans (Sire, 1990).
What Christians can have is a world view which gives truth an appropriate residence. Christian theism affirms that the world is real and that there can be genuine knowledge of it. Since there is such a thing as truth, one of the deepest longings of being can be satisfied. A Christian epistemological orientation would dismiss at the outset any theory of knowledge which distorts the kinds of knowledge available in a theistic universe. For example, extreme empiricism, which holds that knowledge comes exclusively through the senses, is rejected. But the fact that some knowledge comes through sense perception is a point which a Christian epistemology would grant (Banks, 1997).
In modern education, Christian theism provides a theory of value which fits consistently with the foregoing theories of reality and knowledge. Christian ethics rests on the conviction that the Creator of reality is completely moral and that his creation exhibits a moral structure (Bauckham, 1996). At the outset, the Judeo-Christian world view denies all positions which take fundamental moral principles to be either meaningless (as in varieties of emotivism and subjectivism) or relative (for instance, situationism). Moral principles are meaningful and unchanging because they reflect absolute moral realities. None of this is to deny the fact that persons and cultures sometimes differ in their formulations of fundamental moral principles or apply them in different ways. The very fact that educators do communicate on moral issues–disagreeing, persuading one another and reaching decisions–indicates that there is cognitive content to moral judgments. The fact that most if not all societies agree on the most basic values (love, justice, benevolence and so forth) demonstrates that there is a common moral perception among people, in spite of the fact that they do not always share less essential preferences (Eggen & Kauchak 1994). The world view of Christian theism offers a concept of intrinsic goodness, that is, goodness which does not depend on some extrinsic factor. While other ethical theories are bankrupt at this point, creational metaphysics, with its premium on personhood, provides an important insight into the ontological basis of values (Brink, 1989).
The concept of persons being made in the image of God provides the ontological ground for ethics. Because humans are the kind of creatures they are–rational, moral, social beings-certain moral considerations are due them. The ontological structure of personhood accords it “inherent value” which cannot be outweighed by the moral consideration of anything which is nonpersonal (Evans, 1996). Although thoughtful Christians may differ on the controversial issue of beauty, some general insights can be developed in harmony with the preceding remarks on metaphysics and epistemology. Just as reality is not illusory and truth is not completely subjective, beauty is not merely a private preference. Beauty in an object is a kind of excellence or perfection (Eggen & Kauchak 1994).
Christian worldview of a teacher is important for education as it becomes a core of education process and high moral values. For a Christian theist, teaching and learning must be built on the confidence that educators can know reality, that truth about the world is accessible to investigations. The principle of commitment to truth, whether anyone’s idiosyncratic interests are served by it or not, must be the cardinal presupposition of intellectual activity (Sire, 1990). At the outset, commitment to truth avoids the underlying skepticism of age. The pervasive epistemic skepticism which surfaces in schools, particularly high schools and colleges, is only one of the many forms which skepticism takes. Students eventually get the message that one cannot now the answers to life’s most important questions (Fergusson, 1998).
In an environment which has no way of determining the answers to basic human questions, the whole academic enterprise becomes downgraded. Two characteristics of educational milieu are relativism and radical freedom. Relativism treats all of life’s major options as if they were of equal value, and radical freedom recommends that, in the absence of any way to tell which option is correct, each person’s opinion simply be accepted as true. In such an environment the pragmatic and practical courses of study generally persist unaffected. However, those studies which deal with large issues–the destiny of humanity, the nature of ultimate reality and the grounds of moral obligation–become regarded as fantasy or, at best, interesting word games which people play. In an environment which has no way of determining the answers to basic human questions, the whole academic enterprise becomes downgraded (Evans, 1996). Two characteristics of educational milieu are relativism and radical freedom. Education is grounded in the mind’s ability to know the truth is prepared to benefit from the best research on how knowledge is acquired and transferred. Recognizing both the importance of affirming solid and enduring achievements as well as the dangers inherent in profound pessimism does not mitigate the harm and obscene reality of the horrors of present condition, worldwide as well as nationally and locally. There are no end of indexes, statistics, and observations to demonstrate and evoke the starkness, depth, and extent of profound and unnecessary human suffering (Glover, 1999).
Significant experience as practioners and theorists provides educators with a unique and necessary perspective to interpret the meaning of educational policies and practices in relationship to the culture’s most profound aspirations. This responsibility includes not only developing critical and sensitive insights but also the task of making these insights vital and accessible to the general public. This task must seek a balance between the ethical requirements to convey the complexities, paradoxes, contradictions, and sensitivities of the crises with the moral competence to offer genuine and viable possibilities for transformation (Glover, 1999; McGinn, 1997). A great deal of the necessary work has already been done by current educational theorists and visionaries and the hope of this paper is to further the development of a greater degree of consensus among the varying views of these critics (Girard & Koch 1996).
The struggle for creating a compassionate community is significantly facilitated through art. In this concept, art is not limited only to the specially talented, but defined as the human process of imagination, creativity, and meaning-working. It is the human genius to play, to dream, to have visions, and to imagine. It is art that gives form to these images, through the creation of rituals, stories, poems, paintings, sculpture, crafts, and so on. In turn, these images guide and help teachers to interpret lives and to make meaning of them (Hunter, 2001). Clearly, this process is critical to responsibility to share in the creation of the world that is part of a vast and mysterious universe, and hence it must be enriched and nourished. It is to the creative process that educators must look for ability to move beyond the horror of present existence and to imagine and therefore make possible a more loving, compassionate, and joyful world (McGinn, 1997).
The educational vision encompasses the awe and majesty of the universe as well as the extraordinary capacities of humans to make meaning and create cultural and social structures. It is an education that commits itself to recreating human consciousness and structures in order to make real dreams for justice, harmony, peace, and joy. This commitment involves a deep commitment to the democratic process that enables educators to celebrate freedom, interdependence, and individuality (Hunter, 2001).The commitment also requires educators to be alert to the inevitable possibilities of cooptation and distortion. It is an education whose starting point is not “excellence” or “achievement” but the grotesque realities of an obscene level of unnecessary human suffering. As members of the human community educators need to be reminded that educators have created hunger, war, poverty, and oppression, and as citizens of the universe, educators must renew covenant to repair the world. Such an education links heaven and earth, moral and spiritual consciousness, and society and the individual (McGinn, 1997). It also vitally requires all human energies— the mind, the intellect, the body, the soul, and their unity. It must take into account history and traditions of knowing and must seek to benefit from accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Such an education requires the development of skills, experience and expectations, writing, reading, knowledge of various symbolic systems, deep understanding of several cultures, languages, and histories, significant understanding of several modes of research, the capacity to create and imagine. It is an education in which knowledge, criticality, and skills are necessary but not sufficient since such capacities need to be informed by moral energy and enriched by social and practical skills required of those who would make a world (Sire, 1990).
Certain processes and institutions are inevitable in developing community, most notably a moral framework which informs a political and economic system that creates and distributes the rights, responsibilities, and rewards of citizenship, i.e., a system of justice (Hunter, 2001). However, what holistic educators know only too well, these political and economic policies and institutions interact with other important dimensions of lives and moreover, educators must insist on an education that seeks to integrate all facets of human life, being sure to avoid a onesided or distorted vision of human being. There is, of course, some intended ironic criticism here since it has been my view that, by and large, holistic educators have tended to focus much more on the personal and spiritual than on the social and moral dimensions of education. It is quite true that holistic educators are making an enormously important contribution to society and culture by emphasizing such neglected areas as the intuitive, the artistic, the creative, and the mythopoetic, and for that they deserve thanks and approbation (Hunter, 2001). What is spectacularly exciting is that the conceptual framework of the current holistic-education movement provides for the possibility of a truly holistic education, one that seeks to integrate the inner self with the outer self and thereby connect the personal with social, cultural, moral, political, and economic contexts. To be an educator without a social vision is like being an artist without an aesthetic, and to be a holistic educator without a social vision is to be like an artist without a soul. It’s not that easy to be a visionary educator, however, since what educators want is not any old social vision but one that enables educators to transcend to a consciousness of beauty, love, and compassion. Indeed, it is vital to be reminded that conventional education does in fact reflect a social and cultural vision, and in so doing it serves a particular political and economic ideology (Lewis, 2000; Gudykunst, 1994)).
The impetus for moral education is the fact that God is holy and that he created humans as moral beings capable of reflecting that holiness to some degree. Educators are moral agents, able to know and do what is right. The task of moral education, then, is to help youth realize this aspect of their human nature. A comprehensive approach anchors the objectives of moral education in a theory of what it means to be a moral agent (Lustig & Koester 1999). Christian theism takes a moral agent, at the very least, to be a person who makes moral judgments and performs morally significant actions. Correspondingly, the taxonomy of moral education contains at least two domains, the cognitive and the behavioral. In this context, the cognitive domain pertains to consciousness of moral considerations and ability to make moral evaluations. The behavioral domain relates to tendencies to act in moral ways, to put ethical knowledge into practice (Lewis, 2000).
The process of moral education, therefore, will be concerned with determining the proper sources of moral knowledge and the best means for conveying it to children and youth. Christian theism takes the two major sources of moral knowledge to be the common moral experience of the human race, on the one hand, and the precepts and principles of the Old and New Testaments, on the other. The former source is available to all persons insofar as they are rational and moral creatures; it is part of God’s general revelation (Gudykunst, 1994). The latter source, God’s special revelation, clarifies and intensifies the nature of moral obligations and shows that the whole moral enterprise is rooted in a morally perfect Creator. Properly interpreted, the legitimate sources of moral knowledge concur in the moral obligations they deliver (Lustig & Koester 1999).
A complete Christian world view affirms that aesthetic education is an important part of a student’s value education. Works of art are mirrors of the human condition and provide a significant avenue of understanding how different artists, cultures and epochs have understood God, humanity and the world (McGinn, 1997). Helpful recommendations for aesthetic education include discussing fine works of art (whether poetry or fiction, drama or dance, painting or sculpture) both from the standpoint of their underlying message and their specific art form. The ultimate goal of aesthetic education is to enable students to become more self-conscious and discriminating in what they enjoy as well as to improve their sensitivity to and judgment about what is admirable (Lustig & Koester 1999). The hope is that this kind of education ultimately enhances all of life. It may be that those who have had glimpses of beauty will be able to improve a world in which there is increasing tension and pressure. Christian theism holds that God created many kinds of reality about which there are whole domains of truth. The eternal God knows all of these truths; but it is task to discover some of them in temporal life. A theistic position on the integration of knowledge can be explained in the following way (McGinn, 1997). First, areas of knowledge are integrated with one another in that they all make best sense when they are firmly planted on the assumptions that reality is orderly, rational and moral. Second, domains of knowledge are integrated when each one, in its own distinct way, sheds light on the nature of the world and the human quest (McGinn, 1997). Knowledge is integrated when it is seen that what happens in one sphere of human endeavor has an impact on other spheres, that the human endeavor is not fragmented (McGinn, 1997).
In sum, the integration of faith and knowledge can be defined as follows. First, faith is integrated with knowledge when it can be shown that the metaphysical, epistemological and axiological assumptions which make best sense of established knowledge are inherent in the Christian world view. Faith is integrated with knowledge when it is seen that the conclusions and insights of the various branches of inquiry are God’s provision for learning more about him and his world. Third, the appropriate integration occurs when the values and convictions of the Christian life are used to evaluate certain aspects of human knowledge. Faith and knowledge are integrated when best information and insights are employed to help refine understanding of Christianity. In order to be Christian, an educational institution need not curtail the presentation of diverse points of view, prohibit the debate of controversial topics, or restrict the direction of conscientious scholarship. Actually, a Christian institution of higher learning should be the most aggressive of all institutions in seeking open encounter with opposing views, stimulating creativity and searching for understanding. Education conducted in this manner can be thoroughly Christian without losing its integrity. Indeed, a version of the Christian faith which is neither dogmatic nor paranoid and which has a proper theory of Christian liberty can be both the ground and the fulfillment of liberal learning.
References
Bauckham, Richard (1996), New Testament Theology: the Theology of the Book of Revelation, Cambridge University Press.
Banks, J. A. (1997). Teaching strategies for ethnic studies (3rd ed. ). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Brink, David O. (1989), Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge University Press.
Eggen, P., & Kauchak, D. (1994). Educational psychology: Windows on classrooms. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Evans, C. Stephen (1996), The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Fergusson, David (1998), Community, Liberalism and Christian Ethics, Cambridge University Press.
Glover, Jonathan (1999), Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Cape, London.
Girard, K., & Koch, S. J. (1996). Conflict resolution in the schools: A manual for educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Gudykunst, W. B. (1994). Bridging differences: Effective intergroup communication. (2nd ed. ) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hunter, C. G. (2001). Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Brazos Press.
Lewis, C. S. (2000). Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Zondervan Publishing House.
Lustig, M. W., & Koester, J. (1999). Intercultural competence: Interpersonal communication across cultures (3rd ed. ). New York: Addison-Wesley-Longman.
McGinn, Colin (1997), Ethics, Evil and Fiction, Oxford University Press.
Singelis, T. M. (Ed. ). (1998). Teaching about culture, ethnicity and diversity: Exercises and planned activities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Sire, James (1990). Discipleship of the Mind. InterVarsity Press.
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