Agenda for Educational Change

Agenda for educational Change
Edited by John Shortt and Trevor Cooling .
Apollos (IVP). £14.99
ISBN 0 85111 449 0

The thrust of this book is that we should have a Christian Curriculum in state schools. To me, the idea of a state school running an explicitly evangelical curriculum, taught by non-Christians to non-Christians is both ludicrous and theologically unacceptable. In all conscience it is morally objectionable.
Selective education as an alternative to state education is also something which is offensive to a democratic, dissenting and radical theological tradition. Schools selecting pupils because of the asserted faith of their parents or the children themselves seems equally contentious and possibly based on dubious theology.
The contributors to this book do not agree with such a position. Instead they are happy to play the most obvious post-modernist games to justify the post-modernist deconstruction of the secular curriculum found presently in state schools. After much talk about presuppositions ... world views ... historical, social and even psychological conditions, hey presto, we get the Christian curriculum in all our schools.
Although there are some contributions which are very sensitive to and supportive of current progressive educational practices (Richard Wilkins's 'What are the basics' is particularly good), what is so strange about this collection of essays is the way the initially-asserted biblicism and crucicentricism are abstracted to voguish and catch-all vagaries. The curriculum suggested is not detailed enough to show exactly what it is, so we gain over the current secular approaches to curriculum mapping by introducing an evangelical Christian perspective. In this I agree with Jeff Astley. This evangelism is a muted affair. Momina Taylor also wants to know more, saying that there are too many things shared by the secularists and the evangelists. There is not enough here to make the distinction clear.
Is there a hidden agenda? The input on religious education in the United States curriculum has been very deep in certain areas. The massive privileged space evangelical Christianity has in the US accommodates a Moral Majority which roots itself in a right-wing politics, populist bigotry with which British evangelical Christianity has so far had no point of contact. To argue that evangelical Christians should now begin to foist their theology into schools seems to demand a cultural shift which might extend a Pat Robinson-style religion into Britain. Is it deliberate to leave the implications of the new curriculum largely hidden? What would the curriculum do with the teaching about abortion, homosexuality, personal freedom, political rights and the like? We should be told but we are not.
In contrast there is a tradition of dissenting Christian belief where church and state are deemed to be separate. It is a tradition forgotten in this book. Have the authors lost confidence in the legitimacy of their own tradition of radical disestablished church going, trusting in the sufficiency of Christianity nourished by Faith and Grace?

Richard Marshall
Head of English in a West London Comprehensive and on the Executive of the London Association of Teachers of English.

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