Education is an important dimension of human growth and touches upon every other dimension of that growth. In fact peaks of human progress in history are earmarked by education of a populace. The determinant factors include the prevalent systems, their targeted efficacy and proportional efficiency, and the prevalent philosophies.
Christian education is undoubtedly popular in the four corners of our round world. Yes, it is strange, but true. In as much as we have discovered corners for a round world Christian education seems to be both Christian and yet no so Christian.
This current pandemic crisis can stir us out of our Christian stupor and our benumbed brains.
The Success Story
I do not want to make a sweeping statement that Christian education has always been faulty and aimless, and that it should have only been about imparting Christian morality and spirituality. Humanities and natural sciences do find a definite place in Christian education as they very much resonate with our Christian faith. Christian education has in fact done a lot to the growth and well-being of humanity while simultaneously educating the conscience of the world as its prime goal. It has commendably integrated all these elements in doing the ministry of education in the name of Christ.
Still I would contend that we have fallen short of our goal especially as revealed by the consequences of the present crisis. What can be lost about Christian education would be its very goal: educating towards what God has ordained in Christ. In brief, the goal of our education can either be Christian or non-Christian. There cannot be a generic Christian education. However, people do end up understanding Christian education to be education received in institutions run by Christians and with no reference to Christ.
Philanthropically, Christians are also often known for education especially of the downtrodden ones: to uplift them and provide them a career and place them on a higher rung in the society. It is a commendable remedial measure especially when governments fail to do it. We Christians run institutions to supplement knowledge and skill training found lacking in the mainstream governance of a state.
We Christians can pride ourselves in our successful educational systems. For many a century, indeed we have been considerably successful in our mission of education. Our methods and systems have borne fruit with our Christian philosophies built into them. We can also assert that they were born in history as per need and contingency. This means, we have been able to adapt and change, and evolve apposite systems according to the signs of the times.
Inspect and Introspect
Our success stories need not stop us from examining ourselves nor make us complacent. Now is one such moment in history when the stark reality of a pandemic and unexpected deaths stare in our face. We need to introspect, examine and change: our attitudes, philosophies, and methods and approaches. We need to analyse not merely the efficiency of our methods but the very goals of our efforts. We need to take stock of our situation.
In fact the present conditions of the world demand and impel us to reflect more intensely about our human realities, of daily living, of the purpose of life, things that can bring us fulfilment, rewards and punishments based on our actions, improving the quality of life even when it could be shortened by a pandemic. All reflection, thought, decisions, and effective actions need proper education.
Further, the present context poses some pertinent questions that we need to understand, reflect upon, and finally redraw the course of our life. As said earlier, these depend definitely on the education we have received, our outlook on life, and on our affiliation to prevalent philosophies.
Each of us is a product of our times. And mostly we have been the passive recipients or trainees of the existing popular educational systems. These systems have become so ingrained in us that they probably have blunted our Christian brains. We continue to replicate external educational models in our Christian education.
We seemed to have lost our Christian uniqueness. We have probably allowed into us philosophies and world views which have numbed and rendered sterile our Christian educational system. We have allowed ourselves to be sucked into the whirlpool of popular philosophies and their educational systems.
These we have taken unquestioningly lying down. Yet, these present crises arising out of the pandemic can be an opportunity: an opportunity to shake up our thoughts and question our blunted philosophies and which can spur us on into right actions as Christian educationists. Let us seize the day.
A Variety of Questions
The current pandemic is not merely one single crisis. It has spiralled into several types and counts: economic, social, religious, political, scientific, and ecological, to name a few. What can we learn from the current crises: crises, not merely of an infectious disease, but those other realities that the pandemic has exposed? Learning requires questioning. Here are some questions that we can pose ourselves to think, reflect, and act.
- At the start of the spread of the Covid-19 disease, when the vast majority ran back into villages preferring less-populated locations why did they do it?
- What had made the humans build cities instead of villages? Who are the actual beneficiaries of a city system? Which are more humanizing: cities or villages?
- When we began to understand that privacy and isolation are two different things during the crisis, did that also not expose our heightened sense of individualism ever found in history?
- When the factories with cheap labour closed down in China, were not those industries which interpreted human labour as cheap stand convicted? Can businesses steal from the due profit of the lower rung employees?
- Can there be such a thing called ‘cheap’ human labour? Is not every human entitled to a fair pay?
- Can science and medicine be used for destructive ends? Can they be used for profiteering and for making biological weapons? At the end of the day are they not used for satisfying selfish appetites?
- Is there not the ‘modern’ tendency to misuse science and knowledge? In such a case can we really say that the humans have truly progressed? Is cunningness and marketing deception the winning norm?
- What about those millions of migrant labourers? Human progress does not seem to be part of their lives. Thousands of migrants who suffered in India due to the unorganized lock down may still stand in need of justice. Who would own up responsibility for the injustice caused them?
We do also thus realize that we have managed to produce much information and its technology but not an educated majority. We have missed the crux of true education. We ourselves seem to have been not educated enough to handle crises adequately. We are unable to keep in control a technologically progressing world. And we as Christians have not been able to sufficiently contribute to the education of responsible consciences.
Where did it all go wrong?
We probably have failed in several fronts. We were caught unawares in some areas and while in others we had turned lukewarm in our responses to contingencies. We were caught unawares when new political systems and their philosophies took us by storm in the last two centuries. We did not need to change our faith but we failed to use appropriate language of the educational system. We were not quick enough to respond and regain our stand.
Worse still, in the modern era we have sold our souls to rampant commercialization. We have been too slow to realize evil in some realities and have only given a lukewarm response. Are not our educational systems directed, repurposed, and controlled by beneficiaries of capitalism, oligarchic socialism, and dictatorial communism? More than ever these systems have come to be the varied manifestations of a global corporatism. The euphemism is ‘multinational companies’.
We as Christian educators have been contributing to the new types of slavery hidden in these systems. We have been committed to their cause churning out ‘employable’ individuals through our educational institutions. We have been serving the god of mammon more efficiently using the resources of the God of the Christians.
The Curse of Corporate Employability
We in India are familiar with the term ‘convent’ education. Those who are ‘convent-educated,’ stand a better chance of employment besides a better social standing. And education in a Christian institution in India would definitely increase the possibility of the ‘corporate employability.’ We voluntarily pawn our time, energy, and all resources to promote this.
We, the Christian educators along with our students and their parents, fight hard to produce the best employable candidates for business and commerce. In reality, such ‘successful’ students form a very small percentage of all those educated in our institutions. We celebrate them as our ‘crowns of glory’ and the victory of our institutions. But meanwhile we conveniently ignore the shame we inherit: parallelly we have also produced the unglamorous low class ‘proletariat’ majority. We seem to bear no much responsibility towards these ‘unemployable’ students. Our institutional visions seem to rarely include any plan or design – neither for creating entrepreneurs and employers nor for self-employable humans. Annually we end up producing several ‘unemployed’ youth. Our educational institutions then probably need to be blamed for contributing to the ‘educated unemployment.’
On the contrary if we had truly kept to Christian education, would we not have been proud of designing curriculum which is village-life based? Will we not educate youngsters towards microeconomics and micro-commerce? Will we not be proud of educating them towards the pride and freedom of self-employability than of the slavery of incorporation into a multinational company? Will we not be proud of educating and working towards self-sufficient villages?
History does bears witness to many successful Christian missions and educational institutions. Most of them were begun in remote villages. These are truly celebrated, because they promoted human dignity, respect, and true freedom.
What Christian Education needs to be
It is time that we examined if Christian Education has actually shrunk from being multi-dimensional to a minimalist, narrow corporate oriented system. Christian Education was to free every human through the Good News of Jesus Christ. On the contrary we seem to have become part of an enslaving system.
Education is always towards transformation: it is neither mere skill training by imparting knowledge of certain sciences, nor is it imparting certain soft skills towards business running.
We Christians have missed the holistic approach to education. Education needs to be education to inner freedom: freedom of the soul, of the mind, of thoughts, of expressions, of creativity aligned with that of the Creator God. Genuine actions spring from such freedom. Thoughts of a free soul bring forth educated actions.
When the goals of education are limited by vested interests, education becomes enslaving. It is rather a negation of education itself – an ‘uneducation’.
Our Christian educational institutions therefore might need to rethink their purpose of existence. Christian education and its principles can never be genuine if it apes the corporate, business, or colonialist philosophies and their ends. In contrast we have Christ and his Good News which is our permanent model of Christian education.
Christian education is to put into practice the principles of education taught by Christ. It is educating towards being a good shepherd (Jn 10:11), educating to forgiveness and patience (Mt 18:21,22), to bringing home the strayed (Mt 18:12), feeding the hungry (Mt 14:16), clothing the naked and caring for the prisoner (Mt 25:36) and being a good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37), of humbling oneself before the Creator God (Lk 18:9-14) and so much more. In Christian education knowledge and skills are only secondary.
Let us not forget Christ’s beautiful declaration: “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6:33). Christ’s calling is be light of the world and to be a town set on a hill (Mt 5:14). Christian education should then base itself on Christ’s Good News.
Good News of Christ educates us to freedom: from sin, death, human slaveries, darkness of the soul, controlled knowledge, manipulated philosophies, and tailored social structures. It basically frees from selfishness and pretentious individualism. It educates to communion of the spirit manifested in equality, in universal brotherhood and sisterhood. It educates to sharing of resources of all types, welfare and growth of every human being, protection and respect of nature and so on.
Let this corona pandemic become a ‘coronal’ moment of realization of how and where we are going. Our Christian education is at the crossroads. This crises has given us Christian educationists and educators the opportunity to introspect. We cannot allow Christian education to fall into the traps of commercialism, competition, and populism. We cannot afford to waste our time, energy, money, personnel and all resources in ‘uneducation,’ promoting commercial slavery and culture of dominance and exclusion. We cannot afford to collude with agencies and structures that promote utilitarianism, casteism in any form, or a culture of death.
Conclusion
Firstly, we need to admit that our Christian education that we glory in is usurped by Capitalistic corporate philosophies. Secondly, we need to re-examine our philosophies and working principles in the light of the Gospel of Christ. Thirdly we need to learn from the consequences of present educational system and our subservience to popular systems. The present crises can be understood as the God-given moment for us Christian educationists to introspect.
Particularly in India we might need to think better and faster especially as our country continues to be pinned down by corporatism. It may be that our lips hum the tune of nationalism while our actual allegiance go to parties funded by the corporates.
We can be sure that the light of the Gospels can educate us towards breaking away and breaking free from cultures and structures of sin.
And a last personal realization: lately, I have realised that the popular metaphor of a global village is a farce. We actually have a global city very similar to an anthill, full of workers. And very soon, the ant and the nest would be evicted by easy lazy snakes. Poor ants rarely learnt the global scripts. Nor did they know they were only slaves who could never own an anthill except in its name. An earthquake-like-pandemic shook up the anthill and revealed the actual occupants of this great anthill – the cunning snakes.
Crises will come. Crises will go. Should I as a Christian not stop, look, and proceed?
Will we Christians emerge out of these crises more educated about Christian education?