Ken Smitherman, President of ACSI (retired 2009)
One of the greatest gifts that God has bestowed on His people-creation is communication. As an academic discipline, communication is taught in our schools under the banner of language arts, and it is a significant part of every other academic discipline—yes, even math. I certainly need not rehearse here the broad range of subjects that fall under that banner. What I would offer instead is a challenge to consider just how effective we are in teaching these critical subjects.
I sometimes sense that we get so caught up in the mechanics of some of the subjects that we kneel at the near sacred altars of phonics or grammar or the weekly spelling list; and we neglect to develop our students' minds by focusing our teaching on thinking, reasoning, understanding, and effectively communicating. To teach at such levels, we must take our students from completing fill-the-blank seatwork to reading challenging literature and discussing it in depth.
I was astounded recently as I reviewed a well-known Christian publisher’s eleventh-grade history text. As I examined a section on slavery and secession, I wanted to see how a student’s mind would be challenged to consider the moral and spiritual implications of one of the darkest chapters in American history. I wondered whether the publisher had grasped the rich opportunities the subject offered for teaching and reinforcing biblical concepts. To my amazement the section review in the student edition focused on such questions as, Who succeeded whom as president of the United States? and Who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court during a particular court case?
As Christian school educators, we cannot continue to miss the window of opportunity God has given us to develop biblical minds as we deal with critical issues through the various venues of communication and the arts of language.
J. P. Moreland says disturbingly in his book Love Your God With All Your Mind, "I once wrote a piece for what is most likely the top Christian periodical of the last thirty years, and I was warned to keep my prose at about an eighth-grade level. How far we have come since the time of Joseph Butler (1692–1752) when, as one historian put it, the church could still out-think her critics. Butler was an Anglican minister at Rolls Chapel in England. His fifteen-part sermon series on ethics is regarded as one of the finest pieces of moral reasoning in the history of philosophy and has, in the words of philosopher Stephen L. Darwall, influenced moral philosophy ever since."
If we don’t step up and do it, and do it right, who is going to?
Vol 5 Iss 3 President's Desk