1) BRIEF ESSAY: Select one of the critical issues from the Critical Issues in Education handout (see the Documents section in Blackboard). Address the following four aspects. (1) Explain why this issue is of importance and (2) what you believe to be the best approach for this particular issue. (3) What lens did you use in evaluating the issue? Explain how. Finally, (4) identify how the problem could be addressed from a different philosophical/theoretical lens than the one you used.
*The term "lens" here means one of the traditional philosophies, modern philosophies, or educational theories that we discussed in class.
**Please number the four parts of your answer to indicate clearly that you've covered all four aspects.
Here is the question.
Schools and society are plagued by violence. How should schools deal with violent or potentially violent students?
2) BRIEF ESSAY: Compare your educational ideas with others you heard. (1) In what ways were the ideas similar to your own? (2) How were they different? (3) What philosophies or educational theories that we studied were represented among the educational ideas? Explain how those philosophies/theories were represented.
*Please number the three parts of your answer to indicate clearly that you've covered all three aspects.
3) BRIEF ESSAY: From the educational thinker presentations in class, (1) Which educational thinker's ideas MOST represent your own personal ideas? (2) In what ways are your personal ideas similar to that educational thinker's ideas? Explain why you agree with this thinker. (3) Which educational thinker's ideas LEAST represent your own personal ideas? (4) How are the ideas of that educational thinker different from your own ideas? Explain why you do not agree with this thinker as much as with the others.*Please number the four parts of your answer to indicate clearly that you've covered all four aspects.
EDUCATIONAL THINKER IS: JOHN DEWEY
4) FULL ESSAY: Write a 5-paragraph review of the 2 Nancy Pearcey documents (1) Total Truth book summary and (2) "Repairing the Ruins." You are free to approach this essay a variety of ways. However, it must include a description of Pearcey's main ideas, a critical analysis of those ideas, and an evaluation from your perspective. If it is just a free-form essay with your thoughts, that is fine.
Note: Check your grammar, spelling, and formatting. Use spell-check options in Microsoft Word.
ENCLOSED ARE THE 2 DOCUMENTS
Repairing the Ruins"
From Nancy Pearcey's (2008)
Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity
How, then, do we apply the categories of Creation, Fall, and Redemption to education? Creation tells us that children are created in the image of God, which means they have the great dignity of being creatures with a capacity for love, morality, rationality, artistic creation, and all the other uniquely human capabilities. Education should seek to address all aspects of the human person. We cannot be content with a behaviorist methodology that treats students as complex stimulus-response machines. Nor can we adopt a constructivist methodology that treats students as organisms adapting to their environments, using concepts merely as tools to organize subjective experience. Christianity gives the basis for a higher view of human nature than any alternative worldview that begins with nonpersonal forces operating by chance.
Yet the biblical view of human nature is also solidly realistic. The doctrine of the Fall teaches us that children are, like all of us, prone to sin and in need of moral and intellectual direction. In the aftermath of the Fall, God gave verbal revelation to enable us to order our lives by timeless and universal truths that would otherwise be unavailable to fallen, finite, creatures. Thus Christian educators will not accept the Enlightenment optimism that unaided reason, apart from divine revelation, is capable of achieving a "God's-eye" view of the world. Nor will we accept the Romantic notion that children come to the earth naturally innocent, "trailing clouds of glory." Both of these philosophies deny the reality of the Fall and give birth to progressive methods of education that refrain from teaching students true from false, or right from wrong, but instead expect them to discover their own "truths."
Finally, Redemption means that education should aim at equipping students to take up their vocation in obedience to the Cultural Mandate. Each child should understand that God has given him or her special gifts to make a unique contribution to humanity's task of reversing the effects of the Fall and extending the Lordship of Christ in the world. As the poet John Milton once wrote, the goal of learning "is to repair the ruins of our first parents." To do that, every subject area should be taught from a solidly biblical perspective so that students grasp the interconnections among the disciplines, discovering for themselves that all truth is God's truth. At the same time, we must be alert to the false visions of redemption that shape various theories of education today. Proponents of virtually every ideology seek to gain a foothold in the classroom, because they know that the key to shaping the future is shaping the minds of children. We may have to fend off New Age methods of meditation and guided imagery applied to the classroom (redemption through cultivating a higher consciousness); or the misuse of therapeutic techniques to change students' attitudes to fit some progressive agenda (redemption through psychological adjustment); or programs of political correctness and multiculturalism (redemption through leftist politics). Many educators no longer even define education as helping students learn skills and gain knowledge, but as empowering students to enlist in approved social causes. As American culture moves away from its Christian heritage, the public classroom is becoming a battleground for competing ideologies, so that one of our most important tasks is to teach students how to identify and critique worldviews (pp. 129-130).
Pearcey, N. (2008). Total truth: Liberating Christianity from its cultural captivity. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.