Category: communication

coding

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Today the secretary of education has offered a radical proposal: instead of teaching children how to use computer programs, we should be teaching them how to create programs. We should be helping them understand — and thus continually reinvent — how computers work.

There have been some splendid quotes flitting around the BBC about the pointlessness of wasting teaching time on Word and Powerpoint when today’s children can master such programmes in a week.  And there have been heartfelt comments about the ways in which students and teachers alike are ‘bored to death’ with the ICT curriculum.

I wish this were so.  I fear too often the teachers are scared to death of the curriculum, even as the students are bored.  And that makes me wonder about the Religious Education curriculum, too.

The RE curriculum is a slippery thing. The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence sounds promising in its stated goals for RE, though I wonder whether most adult Christians could demonstrate sufficient understanding to thrive at Key Stage 4.  In England, it seems more confusing.  If I have understood this right, RE is non-statutory, and thus the Deparment of Education guidelines are deliciously vague (proving insightful understanding and mirroring of the church?).  Each school must teach RE in a way that reflects the religious realities of Britain.  Each school must have an approved curriculum.  Beyond that there is much wriggle room, to allow for different types of schools and different religious traditions.  And, if that is not enough, then parents can always ‘opt out’ of religious education altogether, which raises all sorts of questions about just how essential RE is.

But despite all this, I have a hunch that the teaching of RE is not so very different from the teaching of ICT.  I remember clearly the RE exam questions which could offer a similar number of points (and time) for questions as diverse as ‘what are the five pillars of Islam’ and ‘explain what problems are caused for religious believers by the problem of suffering.’  Over and over again, religion was presented as that which could be reduce to a three point answer: the RE equivalent of rewarding ICT points for multi-coloured fonts and zooming images.

The proposals for the ICT curriculum suggest that we should be teaching children how to think about computers: how do they work? how do I need to think to understand them?  and then, with those basics in place, what creativity can I offer to help shape ICT for the future?

What if we asked the same questions for the RE curriculum? How does religion work? (so, we might begin with: what shapes religious consciousness?  what happens spiritually, cognitively, socially, morally, experientially?)  How do I need to think to understand religious belief? (openness to possibility, desire for meaning, capacity for wonder, bracketing of scepticism to explore trust, experiencing real change of heart…).  And then, the really interesting one: what creativity can I offer to help shape Christianity… Islam… Judaism… Hinduism… for the future?

Behind all this, I’ve been wondering what would happen if we tried to educate children in wonder rather than religion.  But that is for another post.

Today, I simply want to say ‘hurrah for the secretary of education.  RE next, please.’

lessons in reality

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I’ve just learned something rather important.  Things that I think are deeply private needn’t always be so.

I’ve always struggled a bit with Facebook.  I joined reluctantly when I was in Dunoon, and linked to a few church people.  But the more I used it, the more I valued it as a space to connect with old friends and good friends, and I fairly ruthlessly cut down my friends list and ignored new requests to create ‘safe space.’

A brief flirtation with Google+ (all those lovely circles, but hardly anyone there) made me look again at Facebook lists:  a way to filter posts to those for whom they are most appropriate.  I decided it was possible to relax the boundaries a bit — to say yes to friend requests I’d long been ignoring, safe in the knowledge that I could create a ‘close friends’ list of those who I trust enough to bear with a certain amount of venting on my worst days (‘safe space’).

But before I could add people, I needed to look back.  Was there anything lurking that needed to be deleted, any tar pits waiting for me to fall into if the wrong person looked back through my profile.  (I know: who could be bothered looking back through a profile? But it’s always the person you least expect who actually takes the time…)  I have never used Facebook — or any other medium — to talk about people, but still there are times when generic comments become specific to knowing eyes.  So, I trawled all my old posts.

In four years, there were only five updates that I chose to delete.  Two were truly grumbly, one spoke well of something that had happened in the church, but in shorthand ways that could be misunderstood, and two were simply too pathetically self-indulgent to exist any longer in cyberspace.   But that was all.  Really, even those posts could have stood if they needed to.  The earth would not have stopped turning had the ‘wrong’ person read them.

At worst, my Facebook statuses revealed very clearly that state of my moods.  Good days and bad, seasons of tiredness, and moments of joy.  The thing is:  the people who saw me knew those things already, whether they were linked to Facebook or not.  Indeed, they often knew them better than I did, and could perceive both the causes and shifts of my moods long before I admitted them.

So, all that privacy seeking for nothing.
I think it must have had something to do with the goldfish bowl.

But that is really good news.  Because if I have have learned that facebook — my safe space– is really OK, even uncensored, then perhaps there are other anti-goldfish moves that were unnecessary too.  Like loosing confidence in the blog.

Oh, it is a long journey.  Many false promises of returning to blogging, and of learning to write regularly again.  But things are happening.  I simply need to reform habits of discipline and get on with it.

But I’m still (mostly) applying one old rule on Facebook:  when it comes to members of my former congregations, the other person gets to initiate the friend request.  When it comes to young people, or those who are in a particularly fragile phase of life, they get to initiate as well.  I will say yes now.  But they get to choose.

speak again

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Lear:  … Now, our joy,
although the last, not least…
what can you say to draw a third
more opulent than your sisters.
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing!
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

Today I shall read Lear. And walk by the river, and search for kingfishers.

My mind is scattering fragments: Lear is rubbing uneasily with Genesis 1.  The tension between Cordelia — who lives closest to truth in her silence — and the idea that the word (Word) is creative; that we are called to share in that creation.

I know that the answer (for lack of a better word) comes in the fact that Lear only perceives the truth when he is stripped of everything and enters the nothingness, only to find there the truth of love.

I know that the answer (for lack of a better word) is that silence and speech are both creative if they hold their root in God’s love.

But the thought is like mercury today.  It is so obvious and familiar that I walk it like bedrock and stomp in frustration at its unyielding. And yet is is so elusive that all I know gets lost there as I try to take up a share in creation.

Lear and Kingfishers.   Till silence yields.