“A Word From”….this new blog and corresponding section of the FRCS Times will feature many voices of leadership in our school. This will not be a space for program updates or requests for help. It is here that various FRCS leaders will give voice to what inspires them about our mission and vision and to express their hearts as those committed to Christian Education. I [David Cooper] get the honor of offering the first word…enjoy!
Teaching is no place for the complacent. Those that sit smugly in their self-satisfied worlds need not encroach upon the lands of educators. They instead should be running scared from the wild nature of education’s dynamic landscape. The classroom is not a place of lolling heads engaged in the rhetoric of another age. No, it is a place of uncomfortable challenges.
Robert M. Hutchins described the purpose of education as follows:
“Education is not to reform students or amuse them, or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.”
How then does one “unsettle their minds?”
The final key is unique to each individual, but for all it begins by teaching them how to think. For FRCS the “how” is the most critical task. Our goal should not be to simply teach our students what to think as a Christian, but how to think as a Christian. The former only prepares them for the questions of the curious; the latter for the challenges of a contentious world. Prepared in this manner, they can then truly become culture makers for Christ.
