An experienced educator once taught me that every pedagogy, or method of teaching, assumes a particular view of students. Each view, in turn, is founded on premises about the nature of these students, their capabilities, and, perhaps most broadly, their purpose for existence. It is these driving premises that subconsciously guide the hand of the teacher, including how to use class time effectively, what skills to focus on, and which curriculum to implement.
As classical educators seeking to retrieve the treasure trove of wisdom and insights about education from the western tradition, we do well to proclaim the Judeo-Christian view of our students, namely, creatures endowed with inherent worth and made in the image of God. Contra popular secular narratives, it is precisely this high view of humanity, along with ancillary beliefs about knowledge and the cosmos, that led to paradigmatic shifts in society and education during the modern era.
However, at times, we can feel lost by this giant phrase “image of God.” What exactly does it mean to bear God’s image? How do we treat people (our students) with inherent worth? Too often we pay lip service to this important Christian doctrine without taking the next step of seeking to understand what it means at a deeper level.
Students as Culture Makers
One helpful way to think about the doctrine of imago dei is in terms of what author Andy Crouch calls “culture makers.” The students in our classrooms–the children, teenagers, and young men and women sitting before us–are present and future culture makers. They have been equipped holistically by their Creator with the minds, hearts, and bodies sufficient for making something of the world that can have real and lasting impact.
Contrast this emphasis on culture making for a moment with what has dominated the scene in Christian education since the latter half of the twentieth century: worldview analysis. Worldview analysis refers to a strategy adopted by Christian schools and ministries in the last forty years for training youth how to respond to secularism and other ideologies that run counter to the Christian faith. It is primarily an intellectual program, insofar as it offers students tools and resources for identifying various worldviews and responding to them with arguments for the veracity of the Christian worldview.
Now there is nothing wrong with training students intellectually for the religious landscape they’ll encounter in what current sociology calls the post-Christian West. I myself have benefited greatly from the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey, along with several worldview-focused organizations. But worldview analysis fails as a holistic outworking of imago dei, in so far as humans are not at the core disembodied cognizers, or thinkers. They are breathing, feeling, loving, embodied creatures. They are therefore not reducible to the beliefs they hold or even values they live by. Consequently, an exclusively intellectual program cannot possibly train such creatures with any degree of adequacy. It will consistently fall short and leave the student oddly misshapen–strong in areas of argumentation but weak in areas of aesthetics and formation of the physical world.
Moreover, the nature of worldview analysis being primarily reactive rather than proactive (it must have an object to analyze) leaves it dependent on what others are already doing or making. On this point, Crouch aptly notes,
“The risk in thinking ‘worldviewishly’ is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which ‘worldview thinkers’ are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.” (64)
Rather than adopt a view of humans and how they interact with culture as primarily an intellectual enterprise, Crouch argues that culture is shaped by culture makers: men and women seeking to create and cultivate new goods and artifacts that will bring fresh meaning to the world and enhance the shared experience of humans as embodied inhabitants of this earth. This view seems to me to be a richer, more holistic, and more accurate portrayal of the human experience. It envision humans as bearers of the divine image to take up a noble calling–not merely as sacrosanct philosophers, but as co-creators with the divine, using their minds, hearts, and hands to make something of the world as God intended them to.
What is Culture?
To understand Crouch’s idea of culture making at a deeper level, let’s first get clear on what exactly he means by culture. For instance, he does not mean ‘high culture’: the activities and interests pursued by society’s cultural elite. Nor does he mean ‘pop culture’: the invisible forces in society that proclaim from on high the current fads and trends for the masses to adopt. Culture can include these elements, to be sure, as well as elements from ethnic, political, and religious cultures, but Crouch is adamant that culture as an abstract cannot be so narrowly defined. Culture, as he conceives of it, is nothing more and nothing less than “what we make of the world” (23). It is the ongoing result of human beings striving to take the world as received and making sense of it through making something of it. Crouch writes,
“The human quest for meaning is played out in human making: the finger-painting, omelet-stirring, chair-crafting, snow-swishing activities of culture. Meaning and making go together–culture, you could say, is the activity of making meaning.” (24)
As you can see from the examples he lists, Crouch is steering us away from a view of culture as merely an abstract, ethereal idea floating through history. Rather, culture in the abstract always comes from specific, concrete human acts of cultivation and creativity. And not just contributions of creativity from the arts, mind you. While great works of art, literature, and music certainly have cultivated the world (or “remade” it, as Crouch likes to say), culture-making is engendered whenever goods are produced that prompt reflection on what the world is like and what is possible within its horizons.
These goods, or artifacts, defy simple categorization: they can be anything as complex as the U.S. interstate highway system to something as mundane as cracking a few eggs in a skillet. They can be concrete and physical, like the examples just given, as well as abstract and immaterial, like a musical score or economic theory.
Culture, then, is what happens when human creativity is actualized in the real world. It is the culmination of order and cultivation, two potential states of the good creation God called humans to steward. As the world is enculturated, it flourishes–physically, socially, and spiritually–as God intended it.
Educating Culture Makers
If the students in our classrooms are created to bear God’s image, which as I’ve been emphasizing in this blog, involves making something of the world, we must next ask ourselves: what implications might this have for education?
First, we must not rush to educational methods too quickly. British educator Charlotte Mason famously cautioned educators from misstep In her sixth and final volume on education. Mason writes,
“People are too apt to use children as counters in a game, to be moved hither and thither according to the whim of a moment. Our crying need to-day is less for a better method of education than for an adequate conception of children…” (Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, 45)
She goes on to champion the idea that the very first task of an educator is to contemplate the profound mystery and value a child has qua person. Only after developing due reverence for a child’s existence-as-person, can we then properly ascertain methods for her education.
Mason’s caution is particularly important for us to hear as we live in the late modern era. Part of the problem in modern education is a reduction of the child to materialistic and pragmatic ends. When children are reduced to brain-animated workers, the educational program is stripped of anything with lasting value. Education is reduced to the inculcation of students with information and skills necessary to hold a job. This is precisely what Josef Pieper warns against in Leisure: the Basis of Culture. Pieper, a philosopher writing post-World War II, observed a sociological shift in the West to “total work.” He laments,
“A new and changing conception of the nature of man, a new and changing conception of the very meaning of human existence–that is what comes to light in the modern notion of ‘work’ and ‘worker’.” (23)
For Pieper, the problem is that work has eclipsed leisure as the primary maker of meaning. No longer do humans work to live, but instead they live to work. Human value is determined and evaluated by modern metrics of utility and activity, supplanting the classical metric, if we can call it that, of eudaimonia: physical, spiritual, and yes, vocational flourishing.
Second, as we consider educational methods, we ought to value a broad and varied curriculum over a narrow, specialist-oriented one. From a culture making perspective, one reason for this is that as educators we do not know what the future holds for our students. While certain subjects or skills might elicit noticeable strengths early on, it is very difficult to predict what a student will be doing five, ten, or twenty years down the road. The best we can do in the present is to prepare our students for a life of learning and doing, thinking and making, so that no matter what station of life in which they may find themselves, they are equipped to contribute in unique and creative ways.
Another reason a broad and varied curriculum is preferred for the image-bearer as a culture maker is because each student’s mind is unique, containing specialized interests and affinities. As Charlotte Mason observes, “He is an eclectic; he may chose this or that; our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety and his to take what he needs” (59). Here she is referring specifically to ideas, the food for a living mind.
One of Mason’s basic educational principles is that teachers ought not force-feed their students with preselected bits of information anymore than they should force predigested food into their mouths! To do so would remove them of not merely their agency, but their creative capacity to think, ponder, and know for themselves. Connecting this to culture making, students are equipped properly to make something of the world when they are given the opportunity to explore it for themselves. For this formative learning to occur, educators must recognize both the freedom and bounds of their role. And this recognition begins with the implementation of a broad and varied curriculum that allows the students to joyfully explore and discover what interests them.
The Calling of the Teacher in Culture Making
In this article I’ve made the argument that until we begin to see our students properly as divine image-bearers, and seek to understand what this means at a deeper level, our practices in the classroom may fail to take seriously their inherent value and purpose. Through thinking of the doctrine of imago dei in terms of culture making, though, our imaginations are stirred to view our students, not merely as thinkers or workers or something else, but as dynamic creators and cultivators, endowed by God to bring order and beauty to his good creation.
It is my contention that this little insight has the potential to change everything about the school day for the teacher. It affects how we decorate our classrooms, choosing to fill them with beauty and inspiration rather than with cheap trinkets and glossy posters. It changes the way we approach noteworthy events in history, opening our eyes to see how the brave men and women who have gone before us, shaping culture within their own time and place. And it challenges us to see the vast potential in our students and push them in their studies–not just the ones at the top of the class, but all our students–for their very existence and calling was nothing short of God’s idea. When we see this truth and let it guide what we do in the classroom, we as educators our realizing our own calling, alongside our students, as culture makers, shaping classrooms and the students in it for the good of the world and for the glory of God.