Curriculum and the Image of God

We must have a reference point outside of ourselves to which we correspond: the personal, living, triune God. We are personal as he is personal. He is infinite and perfect; we are finite and imperfect, nevertheless we correspond to God in our personhood.
The next part of this blog is to set forth the connection as it relates to curriculum between the personal Maker and the personal made. I have put together some of the characteristics of God and tied them to us and made a connection as to their importance for curriculum. I believe this is important because if we, as the made, are connected to the Maker then to better understand ourselves, we need to look at His characteristics to know our characteristics. Psalm 8:3-5 says (Reading from the NIV) When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings (or than God) and crowned him with glory and honor. Genesis 1:26-27, says, then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he creted them.” So, what kind of a curriculum does a being, who is made in God’s image and is crowned with glory and honor need to sustain his intellectual and physical life. This being we call a person. What must this person have to sustain life in its richness and joy? Mason compared it to a banquet. To sustain the physical life of a child, many things must be done: proper diet, proper physical exercise, guarding against germs, and many more. If you look at the PNEU articles you will see that over the years many many topics were covered to help parents raise their children in the best way possible such as sex education, hygiene, and many others.
But what about the intellectual life or the life of the mind? What does it need? I hope we can begin toward an answer to these questions this weekend.
Let’s look at some of the elements of the personhood of God to help us understand our personhood which will guide us in developing curriculum. This will not be an exhausted list. Categories will overlap and I will be painting with broad strokes.

A Maker

But I want to remind you of the young soviet psychologist, Vygotsky, who I quoted in an earlier blog. Vygotsky died at an early age but he left us with some interesting ideas. Vygotsky puts forth the idea that water, when broken down into its parts, is not the same thing as it is when it is a whole. Polanyi and Macaulay’s point is as Macaulay says, “The ‘meaning’ of a thing demands a ‘maker.’ Taking a thing apart into small pieces does not always help one understand the thing better. Is this not what Paul is after in Romans when he speaks of the potter and the pot. The point is that there is a connection between the made and the maker, and as Polanyi put it ‘the knower and the known.” In our situation we are made in the image of God. Therefore, to study man without looking at the maker would be foolish. To understand ourselves as a whole then we must look at our maker. There is a bond between us and Him that is undeniable. Life cannot be explained sufficiently by only looking at the ‘parts’ of us. Another way of saying that is we cannot be understood by simply picking us apart psychologically, physically, emotionally and so on. The behavourist starts with parts or particulars. As Polanyi indicated. This is not a sufficient beginning. We must first look at the whole. This is Mason’s point. We must understand who the person is in order to design an appropriate curriclum. To do that we must understand the relationship between the Maker and the made.

What Should Be the Basis of a Curriculum

What then should be the basis for curriculum? How should the curriculum be designed for ‘the person’ or individual. Mason said that her founding principle was that the child is a person. This theme runs through and through the work of Mason. I believe it is her most important principle. I want to look at this principle and show how it is important and how it is connected to curriculum. I wish to do that using a bit of a circuitous route to help us understand how our thinking affects our work, curriculum and all areas of life.
Francis Crick discovered DNA. He then declared God redundant. He had discovered the building block that forms man. Understanding the parts or DNA does not give us an understanding of personhood. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Ranald Macaulay on his website reflecting on the death of Francis Crick and Crick’s view of God as redundant after the discovery of DNA writes: “The fact of the matter, assuming Christianity to be true of course, is that Crick and Watson made a serious mistake at this point. As Michael Polyani indicated at the time, when we find an explanation for the properties of an object and how they work, this remains still an inadequate explanation.” Understanding the properties does not guarantee an understanding of the whole. Macaulay gives the example of the properties of a refrigerator and an oven, both made of similar properties, but they perform very different functions. To understand these appliances one must understand the design.

Thoughts on Constructivism

In the realm of education, postmodernism has brought forth the idea of constructivism. Constructivism holds that the only reality or truth we have is that which is within each of us. Therefore, we all must construct our own reality and meaning about life. What the constructivist implies about learning is that learning occurs within us and we must each construct our own learning.
Charlotte Mason would agree with aspects of constructivism but disagree with others. In the world view of ultimate truth Mason and I would see that as grounded and defined by a Biblical world view where as a constructivist would hold truth as relative. Do not think that Mason would see ultimate truth as individually based as the constructivist would. Truth was grounded in God and his revelation.
When the constructivist says we make our own reality or construct our own truth, they are seeing something true about the process of learning that Mason saw. That is, that we learn and grow from within. You cannot learn for me nor can I learn for you. As Mason said, we must all do the ‘act of knowing’ or the labour of learning ourselves. The behaviourist would have children learning discreet skills one upon another in the hopes that the child will be able to remember them all.
Learning occurs from within because of the image of God that is within each individual. Mason understood that learning then must be done by the person because of her view of personhood. In the constructivist view, the individual must do the labour of learning because the individual is the center of truth and reality. This labour of learning causes a transformation in the child. This requires that we change and grow from within and in that sense the constructivist is correct. But this isn’t the whole picture for Mason. She would acknowledge a greater truth and reality than the individual. But this belief that we change and grow from within is a common belief of Mason and the constructivist.
Instructionally speaking then the constructivist, pragmatist and Mason have similarities. So when one reads John Dewey or the postmodernist, there are many times one agrees with them and feels a kinship with their efforts as they have understood something important about the child learning from within, but yet there are other times in which one disagrees.
There are several constructivist and cognitivist writers that I have found helpful. On reading they are Richard Allington, Brian Cambourne, Regie Routman, Don Holdaway and Frank Smith to name a few.

But is that all there is?

While this is true, this view falls short in its material base. Life shouldn’t just be about achieving social, political and financial position. To say it another way, life isn’t just about the material. But when I begin with only a material base then that is in the end all I have and can be concerned about. Education is not just about learning to have a control and power be it political or financial or social. It is about much more such as, ennobling ideas, beauty, creativity, and relationships to others.
In curriculum the postmodernist, beginning with a material base similar to the pragmatist, emphasizes problem solving, hands-on learning, manipulatives and constructing meaning from within. The behaviourist is not concerned with constructing meaning from within. An example is the traditional spelling test, memorised for Friday, and forgotten by the following Monday. But the 100 a student makes on the test gives one an academic power over others whether we really retain the knowledge or not.

Equal Access

With this emphasis on the individual, I believe the postmodernists have some noble ideas. They believe that all of us should have access to the political and social life of the culture. Let me use as an example the southern local good old boy network. Have you ever tried to get inside of it? It is pretty near impossible. What the postmodernist are saying is that each of us should politically and socially have a chance at the good life not just the local good old boys. Politics should belong to all of us. Equal access to making a decent living for our families should belong to all of us.

Postmodernism

The third influence is postmodernism. As time has progressed being only a set of behaviours destroys a sense of self which ultimately leads to an obsession with the self. Because there are no transcendent values the self is left to define reality. When the world does not have a personal beginning, when there is only the material, and we are only a set of behaviours, then we are left with the individual and that is the essence of postmodernism.
For the postmodernist, reality is centred on the individual not in objective truth. Because truth is viewed as private and each of us has our own set of beliefs, then reality is unique for each of us. Ozmon and Craver in their book Philosophical Foundations of Education identify a postmodern curriculum this way: “Generally, postmodernists hold that the curriculum should not be viewed as discrete subjects and disciplines, but instead should include issues of power, history, person and group identities, cultural politics, and social criticism leading to collective action. Rather than pretend that education has no connection with politics, postmodernists connect educational materials and processes (means) with the imperatives of a democratic community (ends). They envision a curriculum that is successful when it empowers people and transforms society, not when it maintains privileged economic and political interests. It is a curriculum that organizes itself from the inside out, so to speak--that is, from the concrete personal identities, histories, and ordinary experiences of students outward to the more abstract meanings of culture, history, and politics rather than the other way around. In this respect, postmodernists who follow this line of reasoning harken back to a central Deweyan concept of making the learner’s experience the basic starting point.” (pp. 365-366).
But Postmodernism leaves us with only particulars: therefore the individual as our only source of what is real and true is highly valued. The scriptures highly value the individual as made in the image of God and in this sense the postmodernist is correct even beginning from a faulty base.