Through A Glass Darkly

“In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve.  One is an engineering problem; the other, a metaphysical one.  The engineering problem, as all such problems are, is essentially technical.  It is the problem of the means by which the young will become learned.  It addresses the issues of where and when things will be done, and, of course, how learning is supposed to occur.  The problem is not a simple one, and any self-respecting book on schooling must offer some solutions to it.
But it is important to keep in mind that the engineering of learning is very often puffed up, assigned an importance it does not deserve.  As an old saying goes, ‘There are one and twenty ways to sing tribal lays, and all of them are correct.’  So it is with learning…But to become a different person because of something you have learned–to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered–that is a different matter.  For that to happen, you need a reason.  And this is the metaphysical problem I speak of.”
So says Neil Postman on the opening pages of his book, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School.  Postman argues for a pluralism that adopts an overarching “narrative” that incorporates all other narratives into it.  This “narrative” he calls a god.  We are to serve this god by forming our educational goals and unifying the curriculum around his/hers/its values …“For school to make sense, the young, their parents, and their teachers must have a god to serve, or, even better, several gods.”  Though Postman would deny that he is calling for polytheism in the classical sense, he is nonetheless calling for some form of idolatry–of the monotheistic or polytheistic kind.  Postman is absolutely right in his criticism of modern, chaotic, disjointed education that offers no coherence to its students, no governing “narrative” in which to understand everything else and fashion the future of the culture it is seeking to produce.  It has no aims.  For those of us committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, how can we not see the same things and begin to work out a God-honoring alternative.  I am not talking about getting some families huddled together in the new addition to the church and teach them the lastest approved curriculum from their favorite Creationist sceintist, or the homeshool family who is simply removing their children from the public educational system because they don’t want their children to hear all those four-lettered words or their teenage son looking at the clevage of that cheerleader.  Those are valid concerns for sure, the bible speaks to modesty and seasoned speech.  But is that it?  Is that why we are promoting Christian education.  Listen to Postman’s words and ask yourself (those of you involved in one way or another in the education of children), do we really have a god we are serving in our educational programs?  Are we giving our children a “governing narrative” by which to understand their world, evaluate various competing world-veiws (narratives), and fashion future Christian cultures?  Are we really serving God?