Academics and Christ: part 2
This is the second half of an article on how academic excellence and Christ-centered worldview relate to each other {see part 1}. Here we include our own lessons from experience and knowledge of educational research. How might a Christ-centered worldview help one learn secular lessons better?
Contemporary Fragmentation: The modern and postmodern worlds are arenas of fragmentation. Continuity and the integral character of ideas are mostly foreign to our contemporary culture. There is no unifying vision of theological or metaphysical foundation. We learn within a multitude of different sub-disciplines and knowledge increases exponentially. None can challenge the volume of knowledge in this Information Age. And though its quality is highly variable, there is no shortage of true information being discovered and produced. Our working definition of truth necessarily divides into two dimensions. We have scientific truth from the latest five years of research in 1000’s of subspecialties. We also have to have our very own ‘walk-around’ version of truth. We accord the experts their authority, but grant ourselves the authority to come up with workable truth for our lives. We create some sort of unity amidst the diversity because we must. We can’t manage the volume of expert truth and can’t live by its absence of a pattern.
Is this only weakness and finitude, or is there something of the divine creative intent evident here? We would assert that finding patterns and unities of truth is what our Creator made us to do. This is true because He made us to learn in relationship with Him. We explore the garden and walk with the Lord; we have dominion over the earth and honor the boundaries given by God. These are not unrelated endeavors. Our minds make sense of ideas and information by finding connections, identifying boundaries, recognizing continuities.
An Example From Memory: Though dizzyingly complex in itself, among the cognitive functions memory is one of the most simple. It can be instructive to attend to how we remember things. Think of a random string of letters. How many can you remember? Make them words. Now how many? Form sentences. How many? Tell a story. Now? Make it rhyme. How many? And put it to music, and now how many can you recall? The raw data has connections and patterns. There is something for us to remember, for the data itself simply doesn’t stick. This is even more true of higher cognitive functions like reasoning and valuing. Our minds seem made to find the world this way.
Educational Recognition: The educational world is not ignorant of this reality. Though lacking any fundamental worldview connections, educators are being challenged more and more by research to offer patterns and contexts for student learning. Reading as a skill is learned through literature as motivation and context. History is not unrelated dates but stories of people and ideas. Science is not information to be catalogued but a process to be pursued by real people in real world settings. Educators make many settings and patterns for student learning, and many of them are successful. But the enterprise is fundamentally artificial, for the secular man inhabits a random world adrift in a random sea of existence. It’s not Darwin alone who set man free of the anchor; man out from under the ‘illusion’ of a divine unity to life is man tossed by the waves of subjective uncertainty.
What Difference Does Worldview Make? Is worldview a magic incantation for learning? No. Because a school teaches in the context of a Christ-centered worldview, can it ignore all the other dimensions of excellent teaching and learning? Again, no.
Is worldview a God-given provision for learning? Yes. Does learning math, English, history and science through an integrated Christ-centered worldview make a difference for that learning? Absolutely.
Most other educational elements being equal, will students being taught through the integrated approach of a Christ-centered worldview excel academically? We would assert from reasoning, research and experience that the answer is yes!