Are Christian schools using pedagogy that removes God from the classroom?

Recently Linda Kardamis posed the following question on her website http://www.teach4theheart.com/

What’s Really Wrong with Our Education System?

Despite the fact that I generally dislike “What’s wrong with…?” questions because they don’t generally offer solutions, I was intrigued by the question and her answers to it really got me thinking.

I’d highly recommend that you go read her post and then come back here.

(ok, for those of you who’ve stayed, in a nut shell she says the root of the problem is: #1 “The family structure is in shambles” and #2 “We have banned God.”… now, go read what she has to say!)

Ok, are you back now? Great.

Now, if you read the whole thing you’ll see I posted the response below… (I’ll elaborate more on it here.)

I’ve rewritten this response so many times I think it will now start a post on my site!

My first response was: I agree with both of your points above but I’d add a third and maybe fourth.

#3 Christians aren’t engaging in the system to the extent needed to institute change. The amount of salt and light in the system is too easily diluted.

#4 Those Christians that are in the system aren’t supported enough by the church at large.

Then I thought more about it… got pulled into my own writing/research mode, sat on the rooftop and thought/prayed about it for a while.

The question you pose is one I find fascinating for several reasons.

For starters, it’s pretty broad… you don’t specify which type of education, Christian or secular. They are very different systems and my first thoughts were that there were very different things wrong with each of the “systems.” The more I thought about it I wondered if it were as true as it seemed at first glance? I think both are struggling with the question “How then shall we teach?” The secular system is spending great resources to build pedagogy and curricula to answer that question based on their own anti-God worldview. As Christians we tend to reject that curriculum or at least do what we can to counter the worldview that it’s built upon but we accept the pedagogy. Pedagogy isn’t worldview neutral!

Are Christian schools using pedagogy that removes God from the classroom?

Now there’s a question to keep you awake at night.

But, is it true? Is the modern teaching pedagogy coming out of public schools really that bad? Does it really strive to remove God from the equation?

Well, for starters let’s look at the intent… why do we have pedagogy to begin with? The simple answer is: to be a catalyst for learning, to reinforce or scaffold the curriculum. Pedagogy is designed to work hand in hand with the curriculum in order to obtain a specific outcome.  Does the outcome for secular schools include God? What then is the intent of secular school pedagogy?

But, is it all bad? There is, after all, a lot of research put into finding the “best practices” in education.

It comes down to this: if you separate one component from the mix and combine it with another, will it lead to a different outcome? Can we use secular pedagogy with Christian curriculum? How about Christian pedagogy with secular curriculum… are they oil and water?

This all goes much deeper than I can answer in a simple post and is one of the major themes I’m working on in my next book. (My latest book, Rooftop Perspectives, focuses on redeeming our curriculum.) I feel all I can do in this format is scratch the surface by asking the questions.

What do you think?