The Most Dangerous Game

I am offended by many things. I am not sure why, but I’m surprised that what offends me has changed as I age. When I was a young teacher, my idealism and my ego worked together to find fault in anyone who worked less, wasn’t as passionate, or prioritized the status quo over new and promising ideas. My pursuit of what was right for students and learning was often done in spite and at the cost of other adults in the system. Any adults who wouldn’t pursue excellence in practice, who weren’t working to support student agency, engagement, and meaningful feedback (from my perspective), were collateral damage.

Idealism serves a purpose; it propels us toward a new, better, hopeful future. However, if idealism is not tempered by reality, idealism can be crushing and unruly, draining teachers of the energy they need to flourish despite the demands. The need for practices that help balance idealism and reality within our schools is only exacerbated by our present cultural moment of polarization, parent anxiety, and financial instability. Teaching has not always felt this way. What has changed personally and professionally for educators in the past decade? When you consider that question, you immediately are found to be asking: where do I even start? My list would look something like this:

• The modernized curriculum
• A new reporting order
• Living and educating through a pandemic
• A trucker convoy that divided a nation
• The discovery of unmarked graves at numerous residential school sites across Canada
• Political and religious polarization
• Natural disasters too numerous to count and too close to home
• Watching my two children transition from secondary to post-secondary
• The privileged opportunity to use my professional leave to fill a maternity leave, teaching grade 7 during the spring of 2021
  Staggering changes to interest rates, inflation, and real estate trends

Would your list be similar, knowing that the list above does not even consider the many personal challenges faced by every educator in the system? A societal disequilibrium, resulting from many of the changes listed above, has placed Christian education in its most precarious position in decades. I am not talking about funding, masks, vaccine mandates, CRT (critical race theory), political ideology, or any other area of life where internally, we as communities, might tend to disagree. The most dangerous game we are at the risk of playing now is forgetting that disagreement is an integral part of education. Learning does not rush to pick sides, but commits to the pursuit of deeper understanding.

Learning is the act of growing in understanding and relationship to God, self, others, and creation with openness to surprises and change. Through wrestling and reflecting, we are invited to play a role in creating as part of the latent potential, always present in God’s created order. To learn, we need to hypothesize, test our ideas, and listen openly to opposing views with humility that someone else’s view may alter mine.

True Christian education is a communal, interdependent enterprise that should allow us to disagree vehemently on Saturday night. Yet, we can trust each other enough to still participate in communal worship on Sunday morning. As a learning community, the most dangerous game we can play is to engage in the culture wars, abdicating responsibility to educate and trading learning for indoctrination. By rejecting the possibility of nuance, the reality of struggle, differing opinions, and the humble possibility that we are wrong as part of our learning and discernment, we walk a path of misplaced confidence that has resulted in movements like the crusades and residential schools.

For learning institutions to stay true to their mission and vision, choosing cultural dialogue and engagement over culture wars, it is prudent to consider these four ways of being as they plan for the year ahead:

1. Curricular Clarity There is no shortage of cultural movements to get upset about. By providing families with basic information about what is taught in classrooms, families can be assured that the school’s core message is clear so that when stories come home, parents can respond with knowledge and grace rather than anger-infused questioning.
2. Communication Transparency Students say the darndest things. As a way of building trust within the community, schools should have a predetermined method for sharing with parents when something is said in class or in the hallways that some people might find highly offensive. By predetermining how this happens, parents know that when something significantly challenging happens in a classroom as students struggle with and blurt out undeveloped ideas, that they will have an opportunity to engage that topic with their children at home as well.
3. Community Norms and Protocols History shows us that Christians disagree. We need to model disagreeing well so that our students grow up knowing that this is happens in community. Predetermined norms of communication assists community members in participating well in disagreements. By agreeing on norms, communities can avoid personal attacks, by referring to the norms when there is a violation. Another practice is the creation of discussion protocols. The recent history has shown that townhall meetings are not effective for promoting unity when there is discomfort in the community. By creating small group protocols that emphasize each person having a voice, school leaders can ensure that these meetings do not become shouting and clapping matches.
4. Learner and Learning Values By articulating clear communal values about the type of learning we hope for in our community, we can ensure that families are choosing the school for the right reasons. Clear learning values give staff another filter to use in discerning the use of resources, practices, and learning design principles.

My children benefited from English units focused on banned books. As a class, the learning community looked at several books that were banned across the decades. They read the books and discussed the reasons that each book might come to be banned. Then they looked at the cultural moment that may have led to the book being banned, and finished with a discussion or a reflection about whether this book would be banned if it was written today. As parents, we were excited about this unit and appreciated the teacher for being willing to wade into the deep end with these students. Other than the family dinner table, I cannot think of a better place than a secondary English classroom for this discussion to take place. All of creation is God’s, even banned books. If we are to prepare the next generation of Christian leaders well, they need the skills necessary to wrestle well with challenging ideas, knowing that even in disagreement, God is in control and holds each of us.

In learning, exposure to an idea does not mean affirmation of it. Part of developing clarity about what you believe about God, self, others, and creation is determined by wrestling with what you don’t believe. As individuals, families, and communities grapple with what it means to be faithful in this present cultural and creation moment, we hope that learning institutions can reject becoming embroiled in the most dangerous game. Through clarity, communication, norms, and learning values, our interdependent, interdenominational, family-oriented, learning communities can be insulated from a way of being summarized by the now popular phrase “culture war” and its obsession with power and control.

Darren Spyksma
SCSBC Associate Executive Director