The Image of God and Education

How we understand humanity should make a huge difference in our parenting and in the way we educate our children.

Here’s a quote from Betrand Russell. “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.” You’d better believe that this is going to significantly impact the education of the next generation. Small wonder in a culture where this worldview holds power in education, that despite attempts at positive spin, we have high rates of youth depression and suicide.

For Christians, we have a far more hopeful understanding of man. We understand that humans, male and female are made in the image of God. We are fallen, but being remade into Christ’s image. We look forward to the New Heavens and the New Earth. This view should impact the way we educate our children. Vaughan Roberts in God’s Big Design puts it this way:

That truth should be reflected in our own goals for life and use of time and in our education and training of others. Are we content in school education and at home simply to prepare the next generation to be economically useful? If so, we are treating them as little more than animals, mere units of production. Above all, we should be concerned to raise them as those who know their God.

Given the truth of the image of God in man, it is not sufficient for us to train our children in a Monday to Friday God-vacuum. Learning about his world needs to be combined with learning to know God himself. In fact, God’s world was designed to give him glory, to speak of him. Psalm 19 puts it this way.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.

Creation speaks of God. It teaches us about him. If we educate our children, yet they fail to recognise this, we are creating intelligent fools. And this is precisely what we are aiming for, albeit unthinkingly when we hand over our children to be educated by those who do not believe the truth of this Psalm.

A ‘Choice’ Education.

Kiwi slang uses the word ‘choice’ as a way of saying something is really good, of top quality. You might say, for example, “that was a choice party” or “that’s a choice car” etc. When it comes to education and schooling in NZ, what is desperately needed is a ‘choice’ education of another kind, as in the literal meaning of the word. Parents should be able to choose from a number of alternatives in the type of schooling and education best suited to their children’s needs. For too long, state schools and successive governments have monopolized the education scene in NZ.

Most people, when it comes to education, would probably put fairness and accountability high on their list of desirable features with regard to teaching and learning. I would like to add a third ingredient. One that is at times, contentious and not popular with bureaucrats, ‘educrats’ and the ‘political left’. It is, of course, ‘choice’, where parents are given real options and choices about the type of schooling they want for their children. After all, parents are the key stakeholders in this whole business of schooling, teaching and learning.

Choice has the power to change the educational landscape and improve educational outcomes for all children regardless of ethnicity or socio-economic background. Choice is an answer to the continuing slide in our international OECD rankings in reading, maths and science. The latest round of results from OECD’s Programme for International Study Assessment (Pisa) report, confirms New Zealand’s entrenched trend of a continuous downward decline in our international ranking.

This, of course, flies in the face of the mantra, “NZ has the world’s best education system”, which has been incessantly chanted for years, by incompetent politicians, bureaucrats and short-sighted teacher unions. All kinds of explanations, reasons and excuses have been put forward by ‘experts’ to account for this persistent slide into mediocrity. Choice, making real, tangible choices available to parents has the potential to turn things around.

However, there are a number of barriers obstructing the benefits of choice and its introduction into the current education scene. Two ‘roadblocks’ are politicians, particularly those on the ‘left’ and the narrow-minded education bureaucrats fighting fiercely to hold on to the status quo and their own considerable power base. Many commentators have accurately pointed out that we continue to have an education system largely shaped by political whim. Politicians and successive governments somehow always presume that they know best. Long term strategic thinking and planning in education will never happen while politicians preside over it.

One example of this political arrogance occurred early on in our current Labour coalition government’s tenure. The newly appointed minister of education, Mr Hipkins, was quoted as saying that the benefits of the competitive model ‘have run their course’. How would he know? He doesn’t! He just decided that the concepts of ‘competition’ and its close ally, ‘choice’ don’t fit with his party’s ideological and philosophical views on education. Perhaps Mr Hipkins should spend some time looking at successful state, integrated and private schools all around the country and then ask some hard questions. For example, “Why are parents sending their children to these preferred schools? What are these schools providing that many others aren’t?” The answers are not rocket science. Preferred schools are providing what parents value and believe is important and not some political utopian vision of mandated conformity.

State schooling is all about compulsion and ‘one size fits all’ model. The Labour coalition government’s closing down of the charter school model, when it came to power, is a case in point. Isn’t it funny how we believe and value freedom of choice in most other aspects of life, but not when it comes to education?

New Zealand’s educational woes will not be solved by just focusing on the key specific components of our education system. Rather there is an urgent need for government and education policy makers to examine why there is a lack of choice, fairness and accountability in our current education system.

Choice and fairness for parents do not exist, especially for families from lower socio-economic groups. Government state schools hold a virtual monopoly and real choice is only available to those families who are able to afford private school fees. These taxpayers, who have already paid taxes for our state education system, have to pay again to make a choice and on top of this, suffer the indignity of paying a third time with the added GST component.

Much has been written about the concept of ‘money follows the child’ or as it is more commonly known ‘the educational voucher system’. Nearly everywhere this has been deployed around the world, it has resulted in vastly improved educational outcomes, particularly in poor ‘low decile’ areas. It is a simple but powerful idea. Every parent is given a voucher which they can redeem at any registered school of their choice. Parents are able to lever some real accountability. They can choose to invest their educational dollars in schools which get results and meet their child’s needs. Suddenly overnight, schools become far more parent and family-focused; the ‘educrat’s’ power and influence is reduced commensurately. School performance and educational outcomes rise.

Achieving any real change and improvement to our current education system will require political will of courage and strong convictions. Teacher unions and the bureaucrats have systematically opposed just about every reform of note in the government-run education system for the past twenty-five years. The principles driving this reactionary bias are fairly obvious: firstly, teacher jobs and conditions must be preserved at all costs; secondly, if any proposed government policy would threaten teachers or the control of the unions over the sector, it will be vociferously opposed.

It will take visionary leadership of conviction and purpose, not pragmatism, to make inroads into a system badly in need of a complete makeover. Unless this happens, we will be destined to continue our downward decline in education rankings and a further round of ‘hand wringing’ accompanied by a plethora of reasons and excuses for further failures, delivered by ‘the experts’ several years on from now.

Continents or Muttonbirds?

In response to a recent study conducted by The New Zealand Initiative highlighting a possible knowledge deficit in New Zealand education, NZ Principals Federation president Whetu Cormick responded in the New Zealand Herald saying:

“For a child in Bluff who might be interested in muttonbirds, they are not going to be interested in the fact that there are seven continents in the world,”

“We need to continue to develop a curriculum that is relevant to the community and in partnership with the community.”

A press release from The New Zealand Initiative suggests these comments reveal a particular weakness in New Zealand education.

The New Zealand Initiative and Whetu Cormick represent two opposite ends of a spectrum in education on the role of knowledge. Is there a set body of knowledge children should be given? What should be the role of knowledge in education? To answer these questions is complex and much depends on personal worldview and one’s perspective of the purpose of education.

The New Zealand Curriculum

For those of you who are not clear on education talk, ‘curriculum’ is simply Latin for ‘course of study’. So what position does our New Zealand Curriculum take on the role of knowledge?

The current New Zealand Curriculum is very open-ended. To give you an idea of what this looks like, consider Mathematics, which in the New Zealand Curriculum is one of the more prescriptive subjects. For level 3, which equates to roughly two years of school (Year 5 & 6), there are 17 main achievement objectives. By way of contrast, the Stage 5 (just one year of school equivalent to NZ Year 5) Cambridge Primary Mathematics syllabus contains 98 learning objectives. It’s fair to say then that our New Zealand Curriculum rejects the older traditional knowledge-rich approach for what could be described as a ‘skills’ or ‘outcomes-based’ approach.

Potential Benefits

One of the main benefits of this approach is the ability of teachers and schools to have the freedom to decide how best to educate the children in response to the needs of their community. Not every community is the same, and a one-size-fits-all model of education is not going to suit every community, let alone every individual child. I think many parents desire that their children learn in a way that reflects their concerns and worldview. Having a government decide what every child should learn about every subject does sound rather Orwellian.

Potential Dangers

Nevertheless, there are a number of dangers inherent in such an open-ended curriculum.

Firstly, it ignores the truth that there is a body of knowledge that our children need to grasp to lead successful and useful lives. One classic example of this is in reading comprehension. More competent readers are better, not because they have acquired superior skills in reading per se, but because they have a better knowledge-base that allows them to understand what they are reading. Another reason we need to have a common body of knowledge is that it facilitates communication in civil society. In communication with others, we assume certain things. Communication becomes difficult and more likely to lead to friction in society when different groups do not have a large shared body of knowledge.

Secondly, this approach is likely to lead to the entrenchment of inequality in society. In a world where we teach children what we deem is relevant to them, we are in danger of depriving them of the knowledge they need to make socio-economic gains. Teachers know that some children come to school with a knowledge deficit. Others have had privileges that come with more educated and wealthy parents. Schools can have a role in reducing this knowledge gap, but only if they are willing to see education as taking children outside of their known world and providing them with the proven riches of the great past civilizations, cultures and thinkers.

Education should be about breaking down barriers and giving children wings, not making assumptions about what they deserve to know. We should bring the best of the past to our children so they can enjoy these treasures that may be outside their community’s immediate knowledge.

Thirdly, an open-ended curriculum such as the New Zealand Curriculum actually requires a very knowledgeable and educated teaching profession who can make sound decisions regarding what needs to be taught. It is doubtful that this is the case. While few would doubt the enthusiasm and diligence of most teachers, given that the entry requirements for a primary teaching degree are some of the lowest in degree courses it seems unlikely that teaching is attracting our most knowledgeable and educated talent.

A fourth concern is that an open curriculum is likely to be hijacked by the issue du jour. This is in fact already happening. The school climate strikes in 2019 are symptomatic of this. Well-meaning and passionate children missed school to protest against climate change. It does seem that very little balance is being provided by schools and teachers on this issue, and our children are being used as pawns in a larger political game.

Faulty Assumptions

Finally, the move toward an outcomes-based model and away from a knowledge-rich curriculum seems to be built on a number of faulty presuppositions. The first is that knowledge itself is unimportant. One does not need to read too widely to find educators arguing that knowledge is irrelevant in the age of Google, “because you can just look it up”. While this might seem a fair enough comment for an adult who has a relatively solid basic grid of knowledge from which to draw, for a child, it is often the case that they will not know the questions to ask. They don’t know what they don’t know! To become a skilled expert in any field, a comprehensive knowledge of your subject (and of course application of this) is always going to be a requirement.

A second faulty assumption is that education should follow the interests of the child. In the Herald article mentioned at the outset, Whetu Cormick is reported as indicating that the curriculum was right to let teachers choose topics that interest their students, because students could always find out other facts on the internet. But perhaps this thinking has things around the wrong way. Children will look up things in encyclopedias or get books out of the library or google them based on their interests at home. They will do this anyway. What they won’t naturally look up is what they may not yet be interested in or even know about. And some of this is the knowledge that a civil society requires adults to know for human flourishing.

A final faulty assumption is that there is no hierarchy in knowledge. Muttonbirds and continents. Are they are equally important? Does it just depend on what you are interested in? Perhaps we could think of knowledge as a jigsaw puzzle. When my children and I attempt a jigsaw puzzle, we always begin by putting the corner and edge pieces together. It would be very difficult to begin with picking a middle piece at random. Certain pieces of knowledge and indeed subjects are like the edge pieces of a jigsaw. They are essential if we are going to get our puzzle anywhere near completed. School, and particularly the primary years, should be about getting those edge pieces put together. This will help our children as they go through life and put in the pieces they are going to need in their particular calling.

Whose Responsibility?

Education is often a battleground in modern democratic nations. Recently during the 2019 UK election, the Labour party at its conference overwhelmingly voted for a policy of abolishing private education and taking the property of private schools into state ownership. And here in New Zealand, we have had our own battles over education. More recently it has been about charter schools. Our previous government, a National-led one, instituted Partnership Schools (Charter Schools), and the current Labour government has scrapped them, with these schools becoming State Integrated schools.

Why is education such a battleground? It’s quite likely that we all instinctively understand its power. In fact, Jeremy Corban’s Labour party is only mirroring Soviet Russia, where there were no private schools. Why? Because those who want to change society understand the malleability of children and the importance of having control of their education. He who controls the education of children controls the future of society.

Adolf Hitler is quoted as saying:

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this great new community.’

Speech November 6 1933 Quoted in The Rage Against God – Peter Hitchens

Not many of us like to find ourselves agreeing with Hitler, but he is right about the power of education. Given this truth, it’s important for us to ask the question, “Who should be responsible for a child’s education?”

The answer is emphatically parents. Why? Parents are closest to their children, and given this, are best positioned to understand their requirements. The principle of subsidiarity applies. In this principle, nothing should be done by larger or more complex organisations which could be achieved by a smaller decentralised one. This principle aims to protect individuals and small groups from a centralised bureaucratic Leviathan. In other words, protecting the rights of parents to educate their children is a step in protecting against tyranny.

Should there be private schools? A better question, perhaps, is “Should there be government schools?”