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Schools Debate - Elitism and the Gospel of Christ—A Response

11:51am Monday, 8th February 2010  

David Hastie’s article of Eternity’s December issue provided stimulating and thought-provoking reading. I would like to step back a little from comparisons between elite (Christian Grammar) and Reconstructionist (low-fee Christian community) schools and pick up his references to the “marketisation of education” and parents who “care less about the ‘Christian’ education than giving their kids a leg up the social ladder.”
These comments point to a broader issue facing all those schools that seek to shape how they operate on the basis of their commitment to Christ, and that is the relationship between the gospel and Australian culture, specifically Australian educational culture.
Schools are significant shapers of people. They communicate cultural values and inculcate students with a view of life through teaching practices, attitudes and behaviours of teachers, the substance of the curriculum, the content of school newsletters, the emphases of promotional campaigns, principals’ speeches and even the announcements on school bulletin boards.
Low-fee Christian community schools are also “shapers of people” and have at their core a number of foundational values through which they hope to encourage a Christian view of and response to life. Discussion of these values may assist in the debate about Christianity and schooling.
1Christian parents are responsible for the education of their children and they are free to choose from a number of schooling options according to the dictates of their gospel-informed consciences.
This means that Christian parents are free to home-school their children or choose from the wide range of government and independent schooling options now available. This idea that they are responsible is based on Scriptures such as Deuteronomy 6:6-9, Proverbs 22:6 and Ephesians 6:4.
2Jesus is Lord of all things. It is abundantly clear from Scriptures such as Colossians 1:15-19 that the fullness of God dwells in Jesus, that he is the image of the invisible God, that all things have been created through him and for him and that he has the supremacy in everything.
3The Christian community ought to subject schooling (and every area of life!) to the Lordship of Christ.
The Dutch Prime Minister, and theologian of the late 19th century, Abraham Kuyper was quoted at the dedication of the Free University of Amsterdam as saying, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
For Christian schools this means that the curriculum, relationships, structures, teaching and assessment practices need to be subject to Christ’s Lordship. There is also a range of issues that need to be considered related to the question of who is valued and seen to be valued in schools.
For example, who receives the scholarships, are students with disabilities welcomed, which students are celebrated in school newsletters, speech nights and school noticeboards and how should the school respond to poorer families who would like their children to benefit from Christian schooling?
4A rejection of dualism (the view that there is a division between sacred and secular aspects of life).
If Christ is the meaning behind the creation of the universe and the meaning and purpose of human life, then faith in Christ and a worshipful appreciation of the Lordship of Christ ought to permeate everything we do—even our teaching of mathematics.
 (Teaching mathematics from a Christian perspective may be a story for another time!).
To choose just one example, economics is a discipline based on the fundamental premise called “the Economic Problem” i.e., unlimited wants and limited resources and is a discipline that for many has at its heart Adam Smith’s maxim that it is the “invisible hand” of the self-regulating market which will maximise human happiness.
Jesus is not honoured as Lord if we suggest that the premises of economics are valid because they belong to an area of reality in which the gospel has no interest.
5Finally, the defining question for all Christian schools is “How do we bring the gospel to bear on everything we do?” In order to avoid what Hastie referred to as “coveting thy neighbour’s life resulting in marketisation of education,” Christian schools need to consider areas where educational values are shared with the wider community (areas of common grace) and areas where their educational values depart from those of the wider community.
The latter need to be taken seriously by Christian schools or they run the risk of accommodation with a culture which would like to “marketise” schools and which regards students as units of labour to be trained (and rewarded accordingly) to serve the interests of the economy.
The touchstone is a question that needs to be asked persistently in every aspect of our schooling—“How do we bring the gospel to bear?”
The National Institute for Christian Education website is http://www.nice.edu.au

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