Recently I have been struck by the number of non-thinking Christians. Christianity is not simply a cultural affiliation for those raised in the Western Tradition. It is a distinctive Weltanschaaung with non-trivial implications. The problem with compartmentalized Christians is that their faith and their thinking are seen as two separate affairs which negatively affects both their faith and their thinking. Their faith is naive, and their thinking is deficient. While I agree that the foundational truths of Christianity (i.e. those necessary for salvation) are understandable to 13 year olds, I also believe that faith and reason are not incompatible, and furthermore that worshiping God with our minds is actually a command, and thus not an optional extra.

This is expressed so wonderfully in Bethlehem Seminary’s Core Values:

“If God has inspired a Book as the foundation of the Christian faith, there is a massive impulse unleashed in the world to teach people how to read. And if God ordained for some of that precious, God-breathed Book to be hard to understand, then God also unleashed an impulse to teach people how to think about what they read—how to read hard things and understand them, and how to use the mind in a rigorous way. Therefore, we endeavor in all of our intellectual inquiry to love God with our minds by thinking deeply and humbly about his word and his works.”

Tim Keller provides a great example of this in his discussion on ““Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople” (PDF) where he asks “How do we correlate the data of science with the teaching of Scripture?”  Also watch the debate between Professor Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop Rowan Williams on “The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin.” If Christianity is such a big part of your life, why haven’t you thought about it at least as much as all the other areas?

I wrote an article for this week’s Mail & Guardian with the original title “The Emperor has no clothes on” which subsequently got changed to “Back to the real basics” which is perhaps less obscure but far less sexy. Nevertheless I am quite attached to the analogy from Anderson’s fairy tale and I am committed to using it with reference to the SA education system at some point in the future. The article is available on the M&G website here, and in PDF version here. There is also a nice article from The Mercury “Lack of accountability hitting pupils hard” which quotes some of my research. All in all it was a good week…

• From Faust to Frankenstein - Markets alone should not determine our conception of what is desirable (must read!)
• South Africa: Short-Changing the Youth – the Collapse of an Education System?
• How did Rwanda cut poverty by so much? - Paul Collier responds to some questions
• Interesting article from Global Development (The Guardian) - Latin America’s Poverty Data Masks Great Inequalities 
• NYT article on capriciousness of New York’s school ranking system. 
• Paul Graham’s take on the 5 regrets of the dying - basically he converts it into advice:
  • Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
• Cool NYT article on the “Future of Economics isn’t so Dismal” where the author outlines young ‘Economists to watch” and though it was published in 2007 it is still interesting and has useful insight on making the discipline more practical and relevant.

• “This is not just a problem of the need for more money or doing what we are doing better,” says Berdegué. “The challenge that we all have today is to decide what kind of development we should aim for and what we need to make that happen.”

“A deep stain on Christian history is the African slave trade. Since Christianity was dominant in the nations that bought and sold slaves during that time, the churches must bear responsibility along with their societies for what happened. Even though slavery in some form was virtually universal in every human culture over the centuries, it was Christians who first came to the conclusion that it was wrong. The social historian Rodney Stark writes:

“Although it has been fashionable to deny it, anti-slavery doctrines began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and were accompanied by the eventual disappearance of slavery in all but the fringes of Christian Europe. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World, they did so over strenuous papal opposition, a fact that was conveniently ‘lost’ from history until recently. Finally, the abolition of New World slavery was initiated and achieved by Christian activists.”

Christians began to work for abolition not because of some general understanding of human rights, but because they saw it as violating the will of God. Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching in either the Old Testament or the New. Christian activists such as William Wilberforce in Great Britain, John Woolman in America, and many, many others devoted their entire lives, in the name of Christ, to ending slavery. The slave trade was so tremendously lucrative that there was enormous incentive within the church to justify it. Many church leaders defended the institution. The battle for self-correction was titanic.

When the abolitionists finally had British society poised to abolish slavery in their empire, planters in the colonies foretold that emancipation would cost investors enormous sums and the prices of commodities would skyrocket catastrophically. This did not deter the abolitionists in the House of Commons. They agreed to compensate the planters for all freed slaves, an astounding sum up to half the British government’s annual budget. The Act of Emancipation was pased in 1833, and the costs were so high to the British people that one historian called the British abolition of slavery ‘voluntary econocide.’

Rodney Stark notes how historians have been desperately trying to figure out why the abolitionists were willing to sacrifice so much to end slavery. He quote the historian Howard Temperley, who says that the history of abolition is puzzling because most historians believe all political behaviour is self-interested. Yet despite the fact that hundreds of scholars over the last fifty years have looked for ways to explain it, Temperley says, ‘no one has succeeded in showing who campaigned for the end of the slave trade…stood to gain in any tangible way…or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country‘. Slavery was abolished because it was wrong, and the Christians were the leaders in saying so. Christianity’s self-correcting apparatus, its critique of religiously supported acts of injustice, had asserted itself.”

From Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God“

ED: I am not sure I have really an opinion on this, or that I should. I think the goals should be set by the political process, by what a society at some point wish is important. I may have my own view on what is important in life, but I am not a philosopher, and I don’t feel it is my job to tell people what they should think is important. I think the job of an economist should be to help individuals or societies (via their policy makers) reach these goals, once they have been set. 

“Belgium intends to conclude a pact with the providers of education and the trade unions on the teacher career. China seeks to vigorously improve the pre-service education for teachers and expand early childhood education for all children. Denmark wants to make elevating the status of the teaching profession a top national priority and underlines that educational pathways from age 0 to 18 need to strike a careful balance between social and subject-matter skills. Estonia aspires to a comprehensive reform of pre-service, in-service and co-operative professional development, following the model of the most advanced education systems. Finland seeks to develop new collaborative models for school development and teacher education development, a better alignment between curricula goals and educational assessment, and improved pedagogical use of social medial. Germany will bring the German Ministers and union leaders together to move the dialogue among the social partners beyond rhetoric. Hungary seeks to better align and reinforce the context, process, feedback and relationships among key players, aiming for genuine collaboration among stakeholders. Japan will further advance its holistic reform of preparation, recruitment and professional development. Korea wants to strengthen collaboration between school leadership and local communities. The Netherlands will introduce peer reviews for school leaders and teachers as the primary instrument for quality assurance. New Zealand will further develop a systemic approach to making successful practice common practice. Norway intends to work on career paths for teachers that can be combined with distributed and collaborative leadership and focus on how to implement national reforms all the way into the classroom. Poland will place the premium on preparing teachers for 21^st century skills. Singapore seeks to further advance its whole system approach to education reform to achieve impact and sustainability. Sweden wants to do more to attract top students into the teaching profession and to create incentives to reward high performing teachers throughout their careers. Switzerland will seek new ways to create careers for teachers and to integrate other professionals into teaching. The United Kingdom seeks to promote an atmosphere and the conditions for teachers to be actively trusted and respected. The United States seeks to build a coherent and systemic process for engaging all actors in comprehensive large scale change, challenging every assumption, big or small. Of course, none of these pronouncements imply a formal commitment on the part of governments or unions, but they underline the intention of Ministers and Union leaders to move the education agenda forward. The 2013 Summit will tell how fast these visions turn into reality.”

-Andreas Schleicher (AKA the grand master of international education) here

See excerpt below from Lewin and Little below (NOT Romney)

“Some have argued that low price private schools make a significant contribution to increased access to education by the poor but the evidence for this is often partial and incomplete and fails to demonstrate that such schools generate additional school places rather than provide a choice for those who would otherwise go to government school. It is also clear that those households with little or no cash income are unlikely to be able to afford the costs of the fees necessary to support unsubsidized private schooling…However the analysis shows that it is only households in the top two quintiles of income where the probability of attending private schools begins to increase. Private schools do indeed offer a choice for the relatively wealthy but have little or no impact on the access to education of the poor. The development of private schools has resulted in richer households opting out of the government schools removing the possibility of influential community voices being heard who have a stake in government schooling. It appears that these developments are neither pro-poor nor equitable and that it is clear that the state remains the provider of last resort” (Lewin & Little, 2011: 335).