Tuesday, April 13, 2010

An Address to Parents

I have something to say to parents of students involved in Christian schooling, and I'm afraid this must be frank.

I'm in my 14th year of teaching in Christian schools, which of course does not necessarily qualify me to say anything of importance on this subject, so I recommend that you judge what follows on its own merits rather than the merits of its author. Who I am does nothing to validate the truth of what I say; the truth of what I say validates me.

The way I want to approach this is to expose certain myths regarding Christian education in the hopes that these might finally be set aside as unworthy ideas.

Myth 1. Since parents pay a lot for Christian schooling, they should be able to expect deep personal interaction between their students and the teachers.

On what level is this going to be realistic unless we return to the old Oxford tutor model? And what are we going to pay tutors?

The fact is that even in private Christian schools we face the fiscal limitations inherent in any business. Non-profit businesses are still businesses, that either offer a sustainable product at a fair price or they don't. The decision to mass produce education rather than establish a tutor style system is directly related to economics. Christian schools follow the public school model (many students in a classroom setting) because it seems to distribute resources across a large population more efficiently than any other system yet conceived.

Thus it seems unrealistic to expect that a teacher is going to develop a close interaction with all 130 - 180 of his students, even if the parents are paying a lot of money. Perhaps if they paid 20k or more a year, then there would be the necessary resources to hire a bevy of tutors. Of course in our present situation a teacher needs to be available to students, but surely it is foolish to think that a teacher can provide a consistent level of personal assistance outside the classroom to all of his students, unless of course he wants to abandon all other interests in his life.

Myth 2. Students should expect to perform better in a Christian school than in a public school because they enjoy committed teachers.

Perhaps students should expect to perform worse in a Christian school because they are under the care of committed teachers, at least for a period of time.

What are parents paying for when they send a kid to a Christian school? For an ensured outcome? For a nicely decorated transcript? It seems to me that parents need to think about this question. There is a sender and a receiver in the educational exchange. And it is curious that parents who are not always successful producing the right responses in their own children think it a defect in the teacher when he cannot always produce learning in the same child. So what realistically are parents paying for? The answer is simple; they are paying for a first quality sender, and nothing else! How it is received will be determined by innumerable variables outside the teacher's control.

3. The Christian school should carefully guard against students ever being made to feel dumb. Self-esteem is necessary to strong performance.

Bill Gates has confronted this attitude in our society. He sees it as a kind of cult of self-esteem. Instead of producing highly competent, thoughtful adults, we are producing bold, self-assured and impotent narcissists stunted indefinitely in the entitlements of adolescence.

Students today seem to expect incentives to performance. While Gates, and indeed many others, would claim that performance creates self-esteem, our culture seems driven by the notion that self-esteem is a prerequisite to performance. Kids must feel smart before they will become smart, etc. Kids must feel successful at sports before they will become successful at sports.

Now on this point there is some truth, especially from a Christian perspective. God first accepts us and then our actions are produced from confident assurance of our standing in His grace. A child takes its first halting steps away from mom and dad because he knows he is already loved.

But does that mean it is realistic to expect Microsoft to first make affirmations of love and provide personal assurances of fidelity to an employee before a contract is signed? If a child does not receive foundational self-esteem in the home, or more foundationally from God, then whose responsibility is it to provide that self-esteem to him or her? Perhaps the school exists to test and deepen self-esteem rather than to establish it foundationally.

One final anecdote on this and I end. Once I encountered a baseball coach who didn't like that I had failed two of his baseball players. He suggested, rather boldly, that coaches are better than teachers because they have to take the talent they are given and find a role for everyone on the team. They have to train players to make a contribution at whatever level each individual can. This he confidently claimed is not what teachers do in the classroom. If the teacher fails to reach a student, then he takes the easy way out and fails the student. In short, he was accusing me of failing my students, literally and figuratively, while he, of course, was not failing his players. I asked the man a question that effectively ended the conversation. I asked him simply, "Do you have tryouts and do you cut players as a result?"

Here is the question: In a Christian school, is it our job to tend to the fragile psychological lives of our students or to manage and enforce standards of learning? Perhaps we can have a minor role in the former, but surely our primary task relates to the latter.

4. The Bible class should focus on helping students cultivate their relationship with Jesus rather than academics.

It seems to me that some parents believe that Christian character qualifies one to receive an "A" in a theological or philosophical course of study. Some insist that Bible class is "spiritual" and thus should not be a graded subject at all. After all, their teens are active in Church life and missions, and surely piety is the deeper purpose of theological instruction. Why then does a student who is already pious require theological instruction?

Now clearly to turn Bible classes into "pious circles" or "spiritual support groups" or "non-academic Bible studies," etc. would require us to abandon any notion of the Bible class as a rigorous academic odyssey of learning. You can see why. How on earth are we going to assess the progress of a student or assign grades in such a class? Perhaps an "A" grade would involve a certain amount of prayer, fasting, missions effort and church attendance. If one missed a Sunday or two, then of course a "B" grade would follow (unless of course one had a note from a doctor). This becomes absurd quickly. Are we to grade motives as well?

I'm wondering if parents who favor this would also favor seminaries adopting such a procedure? And why can't the same logic extend to other subjects? After all, we want students to "love math and English," yes? Perhaps they would be persuaded to appreciate the subject more if all academic pressure was removed.

And now another angle at this myth. Why should we believe that academic rigor and devotional responsiveness are mutually exclusive phenomena?

One, knowledge is often necessarily anterior to appropriate emotion and action. At least this is what we hope from our physicians and doctors. Why then assume that Christians know all they need to know because they have kind hearts? A doctor can have a kind heart and still kill you if he doesn't know what he needs to know. A Christian can feel compassion for others and not possess the knowledge to help them. Christians can sequester themselves into loving gardened communes far from the evils of society and lose any ability to think well enough to understand or respond to the serious challenges of this world or contribute anything meaningful to it. No, sweet simple oblivious ignorance will not do! As Lewis put it, "Christianity requires a grown-ups head and a child's heart."

Two, those for whom devotional responsiveness comes most naturally vilify those for whom academic rigor comes most naturally and vice versa. And each group polarizes from the other. We end up with the heart people and the head people. We have whole denominations of heart and head people segregated from one another. But surely a Christian school is a place that heralds intellectual excellence in the Christian life! Surely if there is a perceived imbalance in a Christian school, it would be in the direction of head over heart. Does this mean that the school advocates a separation of head and heart? Of course not! In fact we teach as a matter of course that there can be no separation of head and heart in the Christian life, but notice that this is something we "teach" academically because that is the nature of the institution.