youth and a-contextual learning

August 15, 2007

Since when did geometry have anything to do with a prom date? And when did Early American History help anyone through the terror and trauma of a family imploding on its nuclear core? For that matter, how did second year Spanish help me overcome my increasing fear of the future and insecurity in the present?

Answer: It didn’t.

I’ve been thinking about the idea that much of education (in the US anyway) is performed acontextually. That is to say, lessons are taught and learned kind of randomly — having little or nothing to do with the real day to day life, which accounts for most of our conscious awareness and activity. Certainly this leaves students with a detached relationship to learning. Let me state up front that I dont’ believe that this is about teachers by and large. It’s the philosophy of learning, the life situation of an unchanged education policy.

I’m not offering this as a critique of state education, but as an observation of the way that acontextual learning shapes the way that we teach, learn, and experience the Bible.

In school, you get what you get regardless of what is going on in your life. The teacher appears with a lesson from a plan and plows through with one eye on the clock and the other on the state required minimums. History lessons are seldom tied to the present as a critique of current foreign or domestic policy or events and, as a result, history appears to be detached and lacks importance and relevance. Certainly, the requirement is that students learn to read, but in my experience, they seldom learn to think about what they read. It appears that an emphasis on critical thinking was lost, for the most part, before I started school. Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule! But today, we have education that isn’t teaching anything about being alive. On this side of my primary education, I can’t help but feel that learning should be intimately tied to living.

When we enter into Biblical narrative, I think that we (students) superimpose our acontextuality on top of Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps that’s why when context is introduced in the Gospel story it’s always such an “Aha” moment. Jesus is assumed to be teaching at random, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Jesus taught from the truth of his listener’s hunger: spiritual, physical, and intellectual starvation. He addressed what was. Jesus sparked their learning imaginations and spoke into their present.

It’s a shame that intellectual education and spiritual formation are so different, when school in all it’s various forms should serve to feed, grow and nurture the imagination as it questions our being in the present through the lens of the past and the hope of the future.
—————-
Now playing: The Police – O My God
via FoxyTunes