Talk
Five: Teach it to your children
Jesus, when asked what was the
greatest commandment, replied: ‘The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our
God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This would have come as no surprise to the
person asking the question. Jesus was
quoting from the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible and it was also part of people’s
daily prayers. The Bible continues by
commanding that we teach these words to our children.
The education of children is a major part of my life
and the life of my Church. If, however,
I judge the success or otherwise of what we are doing by how much it fulfils
the command of the Bible, then I am forced to admit that we are failing
terribly. Failing, not because we don’t
care about children and their education, we do.
But failing because we have got the focus of our education all
wrong. For the Bible, the beginning and
end of education should be no less than God himself. If children leave school not having learnt
about God and not having had the opportunity to enter a relationship with him
in the person of Jesus Christ, then as Christians we have failed no matter how
much else the child may have learnt.
Sherlock Holmes, in one story, tells Dr Watson that
you can tell what an adult is like by looking at their children. It is also true that you can see what parents
most value in their lives by observing what they want for their children. What we prioritize in the upbringing and
education of our children shows what we prioritize in our own lives. The children are a mirror that reflects what
is important to us and what really matters to us. If we prioritize social standing and material
wealth that will be reflected in the choices we make for our children. If we prioritize knowing God and his
commandments that too will be reflected in the choices we make and how we bring
them up. This, as they say, is not
rocket science.
Given how we relegate God to the side-lines of our
lives or, more often than not, ignore him completely, it is comes as no
surprise that God does not play a particularly central role in the education of
our children and the choices we make for them.
We will normally begin choosing a school for them, for example, by
examining the school’s academic performance rather than asking what it teaches
about God.
In the same way that the Church is tailoring its
message in an attempt to make it more relevant and acceptable to the society in
which we live, so too we Christians are tailoring the education we give our
children to be like the education on offer in the society around us. There is very little real difference in the
curriculum pursued in church schools and that followed in any other school that
children may attend.
But if God really is the one ‘in whom we live and move
and have our being’, any education that leaves God out of it cannot be called Christian education. Nor is any education that relegates learning
about God to a few lessons of RE and a religious assembly each week - with perhaps the observance
of a few festivals thrown in for good measure.
If we take God seriously, if we want to love him with all our ‘heart, soul,
mind, and strength’, then we will want our children to do so as well. This will mean radically revising our
curricula to make God their central concern.
It means moving God from the periphery of our children’s education to
its centre.
The author Yuval Noah Harari has written: ‘If this
generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be
decided at random.’ As the One who
created the cosmos, it is only God who can give them the comprehensive view of
life that they need. I am not for one
moment suggesting that children don’t need to learn to read, write, and
add-up. Nor that we should neglect
teaching them about the world in which we live.
It is to suggest that, as we do so, we must do so as people who believe
that as it was God who created the world, it can only be properly studied if we
include him in the picture.
An old Catholic catechism asks the question: ‘Why did
God make me?’ The answer it gives is: ‘God
made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with
him for ever in the next.’
Knowing God should be central both to how we educate
our children and to how, as adults, we live our lives.
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