Educating for Christian Rulers:
Creating a New Paideia (part 1 of 3)
Brett King, RMCA Headmaster
I’ve been wrestling with some weighty questions
of late. Maybe it’s the reflectiveness that often comes with the
start of a new year. Maybe it’s the mid-winter blahs, or maybe
it’s the realization that my own children are growing up faster
than I ever could have imagined. Whatever the reason, my thoughts have
led me to wonder if I as a father am really providing my kids with an
adequate Christian education at home and church, and if we as a school
are emphasizing the most important goals of distinctly Christian schooling.
In pursuit of the answers to those difficult questions,
I have spent some extra time reading up on the state of affairs within
the culture at large, reflecting on the practices of the typical modern
evangelical church, and of course, reinforcing my understanding of the
methods and purposes of schooling. One author who has challenged and
expanded my thinking in these areas is T.M. Moore, who writes for Breakpoint
Worldview Magazine.
In his article, “Educating for Christian Rulers,
Creating a New Paideia,” Moore outlines some very important concepts
on the nature and practice of schooling. For the remainder of the Perspectives
articles for this school year, I would like to share with you excerpts
from this important essay. I hope they will enlighten you as much as
they have me. Enjoy!
In the early 1980s the nation was shocked into alarm by a report on the
state of America’s schools titled, A Nation at Risk. So inept, so
ineffective, and so dismal was the state of American education, this report
concluded, that had a foreign enemy done this to us, we would regard it
as an act of war.
A Nation at Risk inaugurated a field day for pot-shotting
American public education. Critic after critic, report after report,
program after program appeared in an effort to fix the problem. “No
Child Left Behind” is merely the current administration’s
obligatory response to the continuing concern about American education.
But I am not sure I know what all the fuss is about. It
seems to me that American education is doing just fine, thank you very
much, and our legislators seem to think so as well, because they keep
rewarding the established system of instruction with more resources
and privileges, year after year.
American education is doing an excellent job at its stated
objectives: creating economical and political men and women who will
find their niche in the materialist economy and bow their knees to the
system of political power, believing that every ill can be amended and
every need addressed by economic and political means. The economy is
growing. So is government. Politics has become a year-round sport. And
the evening news reminds us, day after day, that, at the end of the
day, the only things that matter are the bottom line and the opinions
of those in power (including themselves). I disagree with the naysayers:
American education is doing just fine.
However, I do agree with the opinion stated by Charles
Silberman back in 1978, just before all this educational hand-wringing
and faucet-fixing began to heat up in earnest. In his book, Crisis in
the Classroom, Silberman wrote, “Almost everybody who wrote about
education [in the past] took it for granted that it is the community
and the culture—what the Greeks called paideia—that educates.
The contemporary American is educated by his paideia no less than the
Athenian was by his. The weakness of American education is not that
the paideia does not educate, but that it educates to the wrong ends”
(emphasis added).
The fact is that contemporary educators, in cahoots with
power-preserving politicians, have, through the schools, foisted a worldview
on the American public that is dramatically at odds with the paideia
that nurtured the founders of the republic.
The full article can be accessed at www.breakpoint.org
