Remembering

During our time on earth we constantly live between memory and vision. Our ability to remember is the most fantastic thing. From the time we are born we constantly categorize everything we encounter so that we will know it at some future time. Babies categorize the world into things to suck or not suck and faces they have come to feel friendly with and faces that are new and scary.

In Christian schools we educate children and young people who live, as we do, between memory and vision. In our minds are all the things we know and all the experiences we have had...our memories. But in the Bible, and in our hearts and minds are the visions of how God wants us to be, how God wants God’s world to be, how God wants our place in this world to be. That is somewhat in the present but very much in the future. And teaching this is what the Christian school is all about.

How do teachers teach this? In ways that are appropriate for different developmental levels. I watched this being taught in a kindergarten class one day. In fact, as I watched I first thought, “Is this teacher crazy?” and then when I caught on to what the teacher was doing I thought, “This is much too difficult a concept for kindergartner’s to comprehend. But you will see that I was wrong.

The children were sitting around the teacher and she had a stack of pictures of wonderful animals. Not the kind we know so well in North America but many of them were found only in your country. She had these pictures nicely glued to backings of colorful construction paper.

She picked up one picture and told the name of the animal and talked about lots of interesting things about that animal. Then she said, “I am going to give this picture to one of you to hold.” She picked a child but before she gave the picture to him she said, “This is my picture of the koala. I made it. It is very beautiful. It is mine. I love it so much. You must take very good care of my picture.” The little boy very seriously said he would and he did as he sat down.

Then she picked up another picture and did the same. At the end of the description of each animal she said (repeat....) (I thought she sounded a bit weird because she as so intense but the children were spellbound by her voice.)

After all the picture had been given out she said, “You know I am going to give you those pictures to keep. But what do you think I was trying to teach you when I talked about the pictures?” One very tiny boy said, “That we have to love these animals and that we have to see that they are beautiful and that we have to take care of them.” (I was surprised that he got all that.)

Then she said, “Why must we do all those things? Why must we love the animals and see how beautiful they are and enjoy them and take good care of them?” And all the children together said, “Because God made them and God said we had to do that.”

Their quick answers were clearly the result of many many lessons carefully taught so that they would come to these aspects of God’s world and what their places must be in that world.

We have Christian schools so that children and young people will come to know God’s world as God’s world. It is a world made for God’s creatures so that we may play in it, and live in it, and admire it, and marvel at it, and love it, and take care of it. We want children and young people to know and to remember how God intended for all the different aspects of this world to be. So together we study textbooks, work experiments, go on field trips, and study Scriptures so that our children and young people may come to know what God’s intention for this world really was.