How then shall we teach?

Christian teachers educate children and young people who live, as we do, between memory and vision. In our minds are all the things we know and all the experiences we have had...our memories. But in the Bible, and in our hearts and minds are the visions of how God wants us to be, how God wants God’s world to be, how God wants our place in this world to be. That is somewhat in the present but very much in the future. And this is what our students must learn from us.

How do teachers teach this? First of all, they teach this by always keeping in front of them the three important questions:

1) When God created this part of the world God intended it to be perfect. What would it look like if it were perfect? What would this ocean, this river, this group of people, this country of India look like if it were perfect and the way God wanted it to be?

2) How can we tell that it is not the way God wants it to be? How can we see the effects of sin that distorted God’s purpose?

3) Because Jesus Christ came to save us we can now work to try to make the world as close to the way God wants it to be as we can. We must work at that until Jesus Christ comes again. How may we work to heal and remedy what has gone wrong? How can we help this river, this ocean, these country, these people be more the way God wants them to be. How can we work to change our small part of God’s world?

In Christian schools we use those same questions over and over, as much as we can, in our teaching. How we use those questions will depend on the age and development level of our class of students.

How do we teach this with very young children? I watched this being taught in a kindergarten class one day. In fact, as I watched I first thought, “Is this teacher crazy?” and then when I caught on to what the teacher was doing I thought, “This is much too difficult a concept for kindergartner’s to comprehend. But you will see that I was wrong.

The children were sitting around the teacher and she had a stack of pictures of wonderful animals. Not the kind we know so well in North America but many of them were found only in India, Africa and Australia. She had these pictures nicely glued to colorful construction paper.

She picked up one picture and told the name of the animal and talked about lots of interesting things about that animal. Then she said, “I am going to give this picture to one of you to hold.” She picked a child but before she gave the picture to him she said, “This is my picture of the koala. I made it. It is very beautiful. It is mine. I love it so much. You must take very good care of my picture.” The little boy very seriously said he would and he did as he sat down.

Then she picked up another picture and did the same. At the end of the description of each animal she said (repeat....) (I thought she sounded a bit weird because she as so intense but the children were spellbound by her voice.)

After all the pictures had been given out she said, “You know I am going to give you those pictures to keep. But what do you think I was trying to teach you when I talked about the pictures?”

Hands went up everywhere and then one very tiny boy said, “That we have to love these animals and that we have to see that they are beautiful and that we have to take care of them.” (I was surprised that he had gotten all that.)

Then she said, “Why must we do all those things? Why must we love the animals and see how beautiful they are and enjoy them and take good care of them?” And all the children together said, “Because God made them and God said we had to do that.”

Their quick answers were clearly the result of many many lessons carefully taught so that they would come to these aspects of God’s world and what their places must be in that world.”