Welcome to our third podcast of the school year. We hope to inspire, instruct and challenge you this year as educators whether you are teaching from home or a campus. Our goal is to equip anyone devoted to discipleship-based Christian education. I also want to remind you that while supplies last we will send you a free copies of my book, Disciplining this Generation for a Digital World, to anyone that sends us an email. I will have the details at the end of the podcast.

The last two weeks we have been speaking about our journey and history as Christian Educators, in our campus school and distributed learning schools. Here is a comment from Mark Daley, whom we are looking too for wisdom as we journey together to understand discipleship based Christian education. He was commenting about my struggle between being goal centered verses the journey mentality: “That brings me to … ‘the goal.’ I know you are an American, a coach and a Pentecostal (smile), and these collectively might hasten you to outcome language; but again, is there a shift that we can initiate to make sure we are not “leaving the language” (and its effect on imaginal motivation) in its already flat secularly imbued esprit. My conviction in the area of transformation is not only to tend toward transforming people’s lives (the ends to which we strive), but transforming as well how people “see” and “know” (our starting points and assumptions). My persuasion is this: “how we see is how we be.” If we see goal, then we be goal-oriented – outcomes bent – even as we talk about being “in” Christ, in whose being (not whose goals, even as they are part of the truth) we live and breathe and move and have our being ... and hope, and call. We do not want our being usurped by doing; goal orientation often does this, even if not intentioned. At least that has been my experience, and for many who reject the modern age, lest they need the “high” of esteem based on what they can achieve.” Thanks Mark, your comments will be helpful as we talk about the futuristic vision we need to have as educators. Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for goals in the future but who we are to be in the future.

Looking back is always helpful to focus the lens and see where God has taken us in this journey. But looking back always seems to prod us to gaze ahead. Little questions begin to float to the surface. “If this was the challenges and victories of the past, what does the future hold?” or “Is God preparing us for some undisclosed future?” In our first podcast I talked about the importance of enjoying the journey God has given us, learning to live each day as it comes and not becoming obsessed with goals and outcomes. I believe that this mindset is becoming more important as we move towards our very uncertain future. But education, by its very nature, is almost always about the future. We instruct and learn knowledge, skills, competency and conduct. We teach and study with a view to put what we learn to use in the next lesson or the next career. Education is about the future. It becomes goal and outcome driven because we are trying to go somewhere with our thinking, our skills, our comprehension, our competency, our consciousness and ultimately our lives. Therefore every educator has to become a futurist. This is true on both a small and large scale. The kindergarten teacher has a futuristic view of where her students will be by the end of their school year. She is trying to prepare her children for Grade 1 and the necessary skills they will need to become successful in this ominous year of the child’s journey. She is preparing her kids for the future, giving them skills in literacy and numeracy, helping them to make sense of their new world. This is probably one of the biggest challenges of the home educator, how much should I try to accomplish this year with my child. What’s a “normal” amount of progress, how do I know when I get there? All questions about the future.

The larger and perhaps the more important scale in which we need to think is not getting our child into the next school year but preparing them for their future when they are no longer under our care. Here is where the classroom teacher will have their biggest challenge, if indeed they have even accepted it. The kindergarten students we teach this year will finish grade 12 in the year 2022. Is she thinking about the skills, knowledge and competencies that her little ones will need then? Probably not, she has her hands full with this group of little ones and is often too close to process to think in grandiose, futuristic directions. Frankly, most of us are in the same place. We all seem to rely on somebody else to tell us what we should be teaching and ultimately preparing our children for. We teach to the government outcomes and exams relying on someone in Victoria to predict the necessary preparation for our student’s future. Most home schoolers are teaching to the outcomes decided by this or that curriculum. ACE, ABEKA, Bob Jones, Sonlight, Apologia all have goals and outcomes. They all are someone’s ideas of what our children should be learning. Indecently, all of those curriculum titles I just mentioned are written in the US. This puts us Canadians, and the rest of the world’s home educators in the hands of what our southern counterparts are telling us what our children should know.

We must go a bit deeper and look at the very pedagogical structures that shape the way we educate. There are minefields of educational philosophies that have developed over the ages in response to the challenge of preparing students for the future. These philosophies were intended to both prepare the student and somehow shape the future. Here are the four common philosophies that have shaped educational think in the last 100 years:

Behaviourism, commonly associated with B.F. Skinner, is derived from the belief that free will is an illusion. According to a pure behaviourist, human beings are shaped entirely by their external environment. Alter a person's environment, and you will alter his or her thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Provide positive reinforcement whenever students perform a desired behaviour, and soon they will learn to perform the behaviour on their own.

Progressivism commonly associated with John Dewey, is the belief that we will construct our best understanding of reality as we relate to and evolve within our world. Education is merely a means to facilitate progressive change. This is the source of many of our modern attempts to move away from any set of rigid outcomes and assessment. We will create our own future as it evolves from our present constructs.

Perennialism, commonly associated with Mortimer Adler, is the theory that teaching should entirely occupy itself with passing on the past wisdom of the ages. It assumes that we got this far on the philosophies and ideas of the past therefore preparation for the future comes in with passing on the wisdom of the past.

Essentialism, commonly associated with William Bagley, is grounded in a conservative philosophy that accepts the social, political, and economic structure of society. It contends that schools should not try to radically reshape society. Rather, essentialists argue, schools should transmit the traditional moral values and intellectual knowledge that students need to become citizens.

All four of these philosophies come out of very specific worldviews and each take a different view of the future. The Behaviorist is trying control the future by shaping the child. The Perennialist is trying to respond for whatever the future will bring by preparing the child. The Progressivist is trying to allow the future unfold by releasing the child and the Essentialist is trying to conserve the present for the future by conforming the child. You may note that both Skinner and Dewey were strong advocates of scientific naturalism. As good disciples of Charles Darwin they both saw us evolving toward a better future. They differ only in how to get to that future. Both Adler and Bagley were more traditional in their embrace of Western culture and took a more traditional view of education. They believed that we had to preserve the past and present in order to maintain a positive future. All four of these views have shaped our modern educational system and to some degree and how we think about education as a whole and thus, ultimately about the future.As Christian educators we are faced with the same questions as our four secular philosophers: How do we prepare our students for the future? What educational philosophy should we teach from? And the larger questions that face Christians as a whole: How much should we be involved with this present world? Should we strive to make the world a better place or should we shun the world and build our own communities? We also have to face our beliefs about the future itself: Is this the end of time as we know it? Should we be preparing our kids for an apocalyptic future?

2022 seems a long way off yet we have to be thinking about this right now as we prepare them for the world they will encounter then.Let me start by reading a couple of paragraphs from the Introduction to my book “Discipling this Generation for a Digital World” about the lack of prophetic insight in the Church today: “Where are all the Prophets? Why is it, particularly in my branch of Christianity, that the prophets are all talking about such immediate issues? Where are the Josephs who dreamed 14 years into the future and saved both those around him (the Egyptians) and his own people (the Israelites)? When was the last time the Church had a Daniel who, through his deep wisdom and study of the scriptures, could see the time of dramatic cultural, political and spiritual change for his own people? Where are the Augustines who had the clarity of thought and wisdom to guide the young Roman Church through its darkest hours of the barbarian invasions in the 5th Century? The last time the Church was hearing a clarion call of the prophets was in the Y2K crisis. You remember those paper tigers. Back in 1999 the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) had a weekly Y2K bug report that kept us up to date as to how things were progressing toward preparations for the infamous “bug.” At the end of every report the journalist would save a good five minutes to talk about what the flaming evangelical doomsayers were saying. They would have a nice chuckle as they pondered who the antichrist was; some were now saying it was Bill Gates, or when the rapture was going to take place. It was embarrassing. It made me want to revive the Old Testament practice of stoning false prophets or, at least, send them some really nasty computer virus.”

When we published this book, 2 and ½ years ago, our intention was to help us think about the essential questions that are facing us today in this present culture. Unfortunately, many of us have been misdirected by an apocalyptic eschatology. We are told from our Church pulpits and our favorite authors that we are living in the very last of the last days on earth. Some of you may be old enough to remember Hal Lindsay’s book and movie, “The Late Great Planet Earth.” I saw this in my teen years. My wife had nightmares as a teen from the movie “Left behind.” I recall when Hal Lindsay told us that 1982 all the planets were aligned which was a sign of the immediate return of the Lord. Some may remember the little book 88 reasons why Jesus will return in 1988. There was the 1992 prediction, the 2000 prediction. The catastrophe of Sept. 11th, 2001 etc. etc. Please don’t get me wrong. I believe that Jesus will return one day. I believe in the rapture and regeneration of the saints at his coming. I believe in the apocalyptic predictions of the book of Revelations and other prophetic scripture. Let’s keep in mind that our dispensationalist approach towards the future is somewhat of a young theology by comparison. Many of our thoughts and ideas about the end times have been developed over the last 170 years.

My biggest issue with this entire way of thinking is we are looking for a reason to escape the world we live in.  Are we excited that we are living in the last of the last days? Scripture seems to indicate that this should cause for concern. The last days are not a pleasant time in the earth. We have plagues, catastrophic events, very evil people and demons walking about, judgments, false prophets and a host of challenges that I don’t feel ready for, much less my children. Let’s add to this that will probably end our opportunity to share Christ with our unsaved family members, our neighbors, and non-Christian friends. On a practical level, I will be a grandfather any day now. This will mean that my grandchild will not have a chance at a family and everything else that we cherish in our peaceful lives. 

Now, I realize that one day, perhaps soon, this entire world will run its course. The only hope it will have is the divine intervention of the coming of the Lord and that He knows best. I love Him and I love that He will take a direct part in the future as foretold by many passages of our Bibles. I just don’t love how bad this world will become before He does intervene. I am perplexed by the role we must play until He comes. I am concerned that we, as evangelicals, will forfeit our place in this world, because we have given up on it too soon. I remember chatting with a student nine years ago about this issue. His family had taken a very strong position on the end times as the year 2000 was looming. He shared his mixed feelings about the imminent return of the Lord. He was sad because he would never be able to get married and have children. He had faced numerous temptations to have sex with his girlfriend because they didn’t want to miss the experience. If we, as Christians, see the future involvement in this present world system as a non-option then this vision will directly affect how we train our children. How different this vision must be if we see the Lord’s intervention as far of in the future. We have a responsibility to raise our children up disciples who will continue to spread the Gospel. We have to influence the next generation of leadership to make this happen. Our children will have to become proficient in our academic skills, our trades skills, our social skills, our artistic skills in order to, first, make a way for their own families and then make a way for their leadership and influence in the culture of the future.  The mandate of Micah 6:8 still stands (The Message), “But he's already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It's quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbour, be compassionate and loyal in your love, And don't take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.”

So the Educator must become a Futurist. Our kindergarten teacher or home school parent must peer 13 years into the future and begin to disciple our young student as a Christian who will not only survive in 2022 but will thrive. She will have to know how to walk as a believer called to influence this world with the Gospel and Kingdom of God. She will have to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to bring up a family in the very complicated world of 2022. He will have to be prepared for the destiny and vocation that God has called him too. If we are still allowed to participate as Christians leaders in 2022 then he needs to be ready to lead and influence his generation. She will need to walk in the wisdom of the Bible and know how to apply this wisdom in the world of 2022.

We will spend the next few podcasts talking about the Educational futurist’s role. We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.