Question

[MKJ]

And, in the end, if we don't decide very carefully what we are trying to accomplish - that is what success is - we find ourselves up defining success in terms of whatever it is we measure. And hence the US obsession with standardised tests.

Yup. I think this is also an instance of a marketplace mentality inserting itself into thinking on education, where it clearly has no place.

 

[mark46]

1) I don't know how many times I need to say that I prefer a public schools system with a non-religious world view. I greatly prefer that to a public schools system run by particular religions, the majority religion of any particular region.

You can say that secular education is impossible as many times as you wish. That does not make it so. You can choose to call materialism or humanism religions. That is simply self-serving in your wanting to make "secular" impossible. I have no clue why you think that "secular" implies no philosophy or neutrality, whatever that means in this context. There are many theories of education, many ways to teach. Using a religious foundation is but one.

Yes scientists have a scientific world view. a secular one by definition.

Public education can reflect religious ideas as the basis of its teaching or not. I choose NOT.

The comment of the 1800's or the 1950's was not meant for ebia or you, but for another poster. I apologize for any offense.

2) Bishop Wright has responded to the mistaken idea that the US is in any way a secular country. His views were based on the time he spent teaching here.

3) You can judge the state of Christianity any way you wish. There are many ways. I have not found one where I prefer the situation in Europe or Australia or Canada.

You judge our religious marketplace and see chaos and heresy. I see folks seeking after God. Never have so many spent so much time seeking God.

I would much rather folks be seeking and failing than not seeking at all, as is the case for large numbers in Europe. The number of atheists is huge. The place of religion in society is one of marginalization.

4) You judge the quality and state of the Catholic Church by OBOB. You must know just how unrepresentative the board is. Half of the US is either Catholic or lapsed Catholics. They are varied educations and views. Many more will come back to the Church when (and if) the Holy See acts to prevent the occurrence of future scandals and acts to become more transparent and more focused on the poor.

5) As an aside, I understand that there are those who consider those who differ with them to be atheists or the AntiChrist. However, I must note that faith is all but a requirement for our political leaders. It is important that we know their faith journey. The majority of our Supreme Court is Catholic.

HOW DOES ONE JUDGE THE STATE OF CHRISTIANITY?
In the US, we look to membership and participation in ministries. Looking to message board extremists does not seem to be a better way.

You keep avoiding engaging with the actual discussion. And you keep claiming that I and I think ebia hold positions we do not, which is pretty annoying. Who said anything about wanting to go back to the 1900s or any other time - yet you keep bringing it up. Please, stick to what is being said.


You dont have secular education, that is the point. What neutral worldview is this so called secular education based on. Answer that and maybe you will have a chance of convincing someone you have real secular education.

Education is based on a worldview, or no education at all. Humanism and materialism are as much a worldview as Christianity or Buddhism.

Your system does not produce educated adults, so why you think this has been successful I do not know. This is the reason private schools for those who are able to afford them, and homeschooling for others, have exploded in numbers in recent years (and contrary to popular belief, the homeschoolers are just as likely to be secular types as fundamentalists - the biggest increases are among more mainstream folks who simply cannot find good public options) And this is despite a lot of money being poured into these schools.

As for the success of your public education among Christians - do you really feel, over in OBOB, that people have had a public education that makes them better Catholics - many of those who think they are the most devout are really adherents of a sort of conservative Americanism before they are Catholics. Do you really think the plethora of non-denominational sects and break-away groups speaks to the health of evangelical Christianity there. Why is it that new heresies seem to spring up there so fruitfully - Mormonism, Pentecostalism, the JWs, dispensationalism, the prosperity gospel, Christian Zionism.... what kind of education have people had in the so-called secular system that they can fall prey to these things - a lot of them are historically completely untenable. If secular science education is so good, how do people fall prey to the largely intellectually bankrupt arguments for young earth creationism.

Christianity in Canada, and I think Australia, is more low-key in many ways. People in general are not threatened by religious expression though in Canada (excluding Quebec) - you can be a Sikh in the army, or practice Native American spirituality, and not have to worry that you will have to cut hair or beard short. In our law, religious diversity of individuals is seen as part of culture and valuable, and that includes its visible expression.

Europe is a slightly different kettle of fish, and not a block on this issue.

But I think it would be much more interested in the number of orthodox Christian followers in the US if we must resort to the bums in seat way of measuring. The fact that there are significant numbers of people who are dispensationalists counts against the health of American Christianity, not for it.

As far as i know. Bishop Wright has not commented on whether the American idea of neutral secular education is possible.

The argument which ebia and I are making is simple, and you keep running around it. It is that the approach the US has taken is not logically possible. In the name equality of religion they have tried to produce a really neutral school system. But because all education systems are rooted in a worldview, they have failed. They have either had to resort to a non-religious worldview (which is not neutral, it is just as much a philosophical position as any religion); or they have tried to create a system with no worldview, which is impossible.

Humanism, existentialism, whatever, are not neutral. From the perspective of how we think about reality, they are each a kind of religion, so if you want to treat all religion equally in the public sphere, you cannot do so by elevating one of these instead of a theistic religious position.

 

[PaladinValer]

That is not what ebia and I are talking about though.

I understand that; I wasn't directly commenting on whether or not you both are wrong but rather on why things are the way they are, which is more than just what you both are arguing. In fact, I concede that you both have valid points, but it goes a little further.

It is not about comparative religious education or teaching a history of philosophy class, it is much more basic than that.

I agree, but I'm not certain it is universally so within my country. I again cite my own school district, and while it is admittedly above the norm, the norm is not as terrible as even I comment on it. If anything, it is improving.

Every education program is developed with a worldview underlying it. I tend to teach from a teaching philosophy which was developed by an Anglican educator with an Anglican worldview, and that informed he view on what it means to be educated, what it means to be a human being, how children learn, the role of the teacher, what the appropriate subjects for teaching are, and what sort of outcome we are looking for at the end of formal education.

If you look at Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or humanist philosophies of education, you will see the same thing - their basic beliefs about human nature and the nature of reality, the answers they give to the questions I have mentioned, determines the way they set up education.

I agree.

Well, so-called secular schools have to determine all of these things as well. The question then, is what underlying philosophy or worldview are they using to come up with the answers. In many cases with secular public education, it seems to be a whole bunch of them, but not ones anyone has really thought much about.

When I was taking my education courses, there are a distinct emphasis on guiding each child according to his or her specific needs. A sort of modified postmodern approach that takes the strengths of postmodernism (particularly when it comes with children with special needs) while not dismissing the concept of classroom cohesion. There was also the emphasis on using more than just multimedia tools like smart boards or movie clips (important, but still mere tools) but engaging students to synthesize a priori and to guide them with information, tools, and techniques.

And thinking about the underlying assumptions we have, examining them and understanding them, is one of the most important aspects of being really educated. So if the education itself is making these things, it ends up preventing what it is supposed to encourage. It is probably even worse than giving students an explicit and well thought out education from a worldview that does not really match that of the parents.

Students are going to be educated in that worldview far more thoroughly than and individual bit of the curricula, even though it is not taught explicitly. Because it informs and organizes their whole system of education and the values it seems to support.

I agree.

There is a famous story about a writer (whose name I cannot remember) who attended a meeting for parents at his local elementary school. At the meeting, the principle or superintendent was telling parents about all the new wonderful programs and curricula that the school was going to begin using.

The writer listened, and found himself raising his hand to ask a question - he asked the man what it was they were hoping to accomplish with the children using all of these new techniques and programs. The question stumped the superintendent.

I would answer that such new programs and curricula hope to engage students to use their knowledge learned to explore and synthesize to shape and evolve personal paradigms into a more matured and informed whole. Using this paradigm, then to be more knowledgeable and active participants in the world and recognize and appreciate their contribution from the most micro to the most macro scale.

So if the public system needs to offer a really neutral option that treats all worldviews equally, what worldview should they use to decide how and why and what to teach. Because clearly it is impossible to use them all equally.

But it can teach that there are different paradigms that we must learn about and appreciate in order to come to better understanding how the world is interdependent and that we must do our part in learning so that, when paradigms collide, we can find new solutions to reconcile problems outside past mistakes.

Furthermore, the 1st Amendment thing I raised dealt only with things religious. There are many paradigms other than religious ones.

And, in the end, if we don't decide very carefully what we are trying to accomplish - that is what success is - we find ourselves up defining success in terms of whatever it is we measure. And hence the US obsession with standardised tests.

Oh you won't get any argument from me on that. The "No Child Left Behind" act was poorly drawn up and poorly executed.

Mind you, I don't object to universal standards, but there need to be different ways to gauge students' abilities to the standards that both challenge them but also meet and address specific needs for each and don't require having to teach them how they will be gauged.

I remember a political cartoon back when NCLB was passed in which former President George W. Bush was drawn asking a student what he learned during the school year. The child answered in the form of a scantron sheet standardized test. A chilling example, I'm sure you'll agree.

What's irritating is that the method of a lot of basic education was families and churches for years in America. Students had a high degree of literacy, math skills, memory skills, foreign languages and other things. The effectiveness of this approach really can't be argued.

As others have said, the presumption in public school has typically been that "secular" means "neutral". No, secularism is still fundamentally religious. The absence of religion (as secularism purports to be) doesn't make for a non-religious proposition. Rather than being taught the common morality as informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, children have been taught neurotic lessons about recycling and how to use a condom. That may result in what the government considers to be a Good Citizen but it doesn't necessarily lead to a functionally literate adult.

A lot of this is ostensibly couched in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Somehow, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" has come to be interpreted as barring all religion from the public square. This is why liberals should never be trusted with Constitutional interpretation; invariably they make these types of idiotic decisions.

Public education is a failure, period. Time for something else.

I dont really see this as a liberal thing, the interpretation you are talking about is used just as often by what you guys think of as conservatives.

Public education in some countries actually works quite well, and i do not think its failures in North America are all about it being public - they have as much to do with the models that were selected early on by governments. I suppose they seemed a good idea at the time, but they have come to dominate without really being examined much. And the lack of a really coherent philosophy of education is a problem here to - that relates to this issue of trying to create a neutral system, which seems to be enshrined by the courts in the US, and is also the way many provinces here operate on a day to day basis.