Career Changers
By Dr Bryan Cowling
Posted on 30 March 2010
Excerpts from the Address -
Career Changers Open Day at William Clark College, 27th March 2010
Everywhere you go, you see signs inside school grounds proudly proclaiming that the construction site behind the sign is part of Building the Educational Revolution. The phrase is a simple, catchy one, but not as substantial as it might seem. Sure, the vast expenditure by the Federal Government on schools infrastructure has been a stimulus to the economy and a boon to some construction companies. I'm sure teachers, students and parents are and will be appreciative of their new facilities. But these new facilities, after all, are but bricks and mortar, necessary and useful, but they do not constitute a revolution. The parallel program of placing thousands of computers in schools falls into the same category. Yet despite all of that, our approach to schooling remains pretty much the way it was fifty, even a hundred years ago. The subject matter may be slightly different and more up to date, but by and large, the technology of education remains much the same as it has always been. Some would even say that with the reification of external tests, NAPLAN and the like, there is likely to be even greater regulation and uniformity than ever before. Not quite a revolution!
Yet the Prime Minister is correct when he says that the future well-being of Australia in the twenty first century is very dependent on Australia's schools and tertiary education institutions. As the schools go, so goes the nation!
And so it follows that the professional competence, commitment, freshness, creativity and enthusiasm of the nation's teachers and school leaders is fundamental to the learning of the nation. Not that just having teachers means learning takes place!
Meaningful learning only occurs when learning teachers ignite the spark of learning in their students, causing them to want to learn more and more. Education is about lighting fires and sustaining those fires, in individual students but especially in whole classes of students. Such fires turn cold, clinical classrooms into warm, lively, exciting, innovative and engaging learning communities.
For those of us who are Christians, we acknowledge that God is the source of all knowledge, whether it be our knowledge of Him, our knowledge of His creation (and that includes all the physical aspects of the world, the study of society, the study of the earth, the study of the universe, the study of people, the study of technology, science, business, literature, the arts, music, child rearing and basket weaving) and the knowledge of ourselves as people - what it means to be truly human, why it was we were created, how we relate to God and how we relate to one another.
God has communicated himself to us relationally through his Son, and in words through the Bible; he has given us his Spirit who takes the written Word and applies it to our specific situation, transforming our minds, our hearts and our actions.
Education that acknowledges its source and its purpose in God is a powerful, transforming activity.
Whilst many in our society think of schools, much like factories, as filling the minds of young people with lots of information, developing increasingly sophisticated skills and equipping them to contribute to twenty first century society as effective producers and active citizens, we see the purpose of schooling as being much more than this, preparing young people to live now and eternally in God's new creation.
That is, we see our role as Christian educators as working now for God's kingdom on special projects - helping to shape people's lives for eternity. Let's face it, in God's new earth there will be life-long learning courses, there will be lots of relationship building, there will be opportunities for problem solving and creativity. There will be gifted and talented programs for all of us.
Teaching has the potential to make an indelible and everlasting impression on young people.
In thinking about whether you should change direction in life, consider the opportunities which teaching, in whatever school context, provides for you to be a player in transforming lives, ideas and whole institutions through twenty first century schooling. This is where the real education revolution is happening and needs to continue happening.
