Let’s Make Our Schools More Thrilling and Beautiful

By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

May 03, 2013

Cruising at thirty thousand feet and intensively absorbed in my work, I was startled by the sudden outburst of fearful crying from a three-year-old girl frantically running down the aisle of the plane. Her brown eyes were wide with fear and her face wet from cascading tears. Somehow she had left her seat without her mother’s notice. Disoriented and scared, she stumbled past row after row of strangers, unable to find her mother in a sea of unfamiliar faces. As a father of three daughters and the “pawpaw” of a little granddaughter, my heart went out to her. Although prudence dictated otherwise, I wanted to leap from my seat and pick her up to comfort her.

My heart also goes out to teachers and school leaders who, like that little girl, find themselves disoriented — perhaps even a little intimidated and frightened — by a strange and constantly changing world. This is a new experience for most educators.

School work has historically been comfortable and predictable. It has been observed that if you took a teacher from the early 1900s and dropped her into most any classroom today, she would hardly skip a beat. She would find a board at the front of the room and neat rows of students waiting for her to speak. There would be some new things — a computer on the teacher’s desk, a copier down the hall — but fundamentally things would look and feel much like they did at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This predictability is giving way to uncertainty created by the relentless currents of cultural, economic, and technological change. Nothing in our schools is untouched. Whereas schools have historically been islands of relative tranquility, teachers and school leaders now feel uncertain about their roles and methods amid changes invading every corner of institutional life. We feel the seismic vibrations of shifting cultural norms beneath us, and we are confronted with the ever-quickening pace of technological innovation that is reshaping the way we work, communicate, and entertain ourselves.

Like the girl on the plane, these cultural and technological changes can cause us to become disoriented, overwhelmed, even frightened. The familiar is giving way to the new and the strange. That which once seemed like bedrock — steady and predictable — now feels like quicksand.

In their book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen summarize how the Internet and mobile technologies are fundamentally reshaping our lives and institutions:

The proliferation of communication technologies has advanced at an unprecedented speed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of people connected to the Internet worldwide increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. In the same period, the number of mobile-phone subscribers rose from 750 million to well over 5 billion. Adoption of these technologies is spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet, and in some parts of the world at an accelerating rate. By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand. If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online… As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society. The struggles we see today in many businesses, large and small, are examples of the dramatic shift for society that lies ahead. Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without. We will increasingly reach, and relate to, people far beyond our own borders and language groups, sharing ideas, doing business, and building genuine relationships.

If you substitute schools for institutions and businesses in the passage above, the implications become immediate: schools that fail to adapt risk becoming obsolete and irrelevant. No one wants that.

There is a sense in which the students sitting in front of us — or, for administrators, the young teachers in front of us — are strangers. They live in two worlds, not just one: the physical world and a virtual world. They know nothing of an educational experience that relied on the teacher, the librarian, and the encyclopedia for information.

Our students are growing up in a world where everyone is, or soon will be, connected with each other. They carry the world’s information in the palm of their hand. If they need extra help, they need not ask the teacher; they can consult a friend, video-chat with an expert, or watch any number of well-constructed tutorials available online. If they need information, they search for it. Teachers are needed for many things, but delivering information is no longer chief among them.

How should we respond as Christian educators? With courage, not fear. With optimism, not pessimism. With excitement, not dread. With a vision for the future, not a nostalgic longing for the past. We should respond with creativity, vigor, and innovation — not with the mechanical and routinized habits that have become comfortable but are increasingly arcane and irrelevant to our students.

Carpe Diem: This is not Pollyannaish happy talk. The ability to seize the day — to courageously and creatively adapt one’s teaching and leadership to the opportunities before us and to the needs of our students, not to our own needs and preferences — is firmly rooted in God’s sovereignty, his commands, and his commission.

God’s Sovereignty: When thinking about change, one of my favorite passages is a brief epitaph to King David: “For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was laid with his fathers” (Acts 13:36). This epitaph reflects the relevant servant leadership of David. David did not serve the previous generation; he served his own.

That is our task: to serve the generation of students God has entrusted to our stewardship. We are not to be subservient to our past, to our habits, to our comfort, or to our preferences. We are to serve the purpose of God in our generation — in our case, the Internet generation, always connected and immersed in a world of ubiquitous technology.

We can serve optimistically and confidently when we learn to rest in God’s sovereignty, recognizing that he has determined when and where we are to serve:

God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”… “For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:24–28).

We do not get to choose when or where we are born, nor the circumstances under which we serve. We do choose how we respond. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf responds to Frodo’s dismay:

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

That is how we should respond to the disruptions and changes around us — with the confidence that God has placed us here, at this time, under these circumstances, so that we might serve his purposes in our generation. It is not for us to decide when and where we serve, only how.

God’s Command: Christians ought to be optimists — positive and excited about life. There is plenty wrong in this world; there always has been and always will be until Christ returns. But Christians of all people are called to optimism, and that optimism should shine as a bright light of encouragement to our students and a watching world. The last thing our students need are hesitant, pessimistic, fearful teachers stuck in the mud of the past.

Optimism is defined as hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something. Should that not describe Christians who place their confidence in Christ — who has redeemed us, gives us eternal life, and will one day give us glorified resurrected bodies? This same Christ will ultimately redeem this world, and at the close of history God will descend from heaven and live with a redeemed humanity on a beautifully restored earth, no longer marred by nor laboring under the devastating effects of sin:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new…” And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day — and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations (Revelation 21).

This bright ending had a bright beginning — a beginning which still guides our lives and work. In Genesis, everything God communicated to man was positive, with the one exception of the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God creates man in his image, makes him an eternal embodied soul, gives him the world, and tells him to go forth, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. God tells man to go forth and build culture. Man was not to remain in his comfort zone — the Garden. He was to venture out and create as an imitator of the Creator whose image he bore.

This is still our primary mission. We are to build, develop, create, innovate, and progress. Sin has not removed nor diminished this calling. It has made it harder, but it has not destroyed it.

Christian teachers and administrators, of all people, should model this perspective, and it should animate our teaching and leadership. We should be the consummate innovators and builders of culture — users of new technology under the Lordship and for the glory of Christ.

God’s Commission: When we think of God’s commission, we think of the Great Commission of Christ — to make disciples of all nations. This is certainly the Great Commission, but it is founded on the First Commission:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day (Genesis 1:28–31).

The Great Commission is the work of reclaiming and redeeming people to progressively and righteously fulfill the First Commission. This truth is reflected in Revelation 21, so that Genesis 1–2 and Revelation 21 stand as the bookends of history. The Great Commission is the restoration of the work begun in the Garden — corrupted, not destroyed, by sin.

The little girl on the plane was scared. After leaving her mother — the place of safety and comfort — she found herself lost and surrounded by strangers. Fortunately, a flight attendant saw what had happened, quickly picked her up, and returned her to her mother. She stopped crying. Everything was all right.

For Christians, everything is all right. It is not necessarily easy or comfortable, but in Christ, everything is all right — even change. Christian educators need not fear the changes around us, nor be preoccupied with condemning what is wrong, though that must be done when necessary.

Instead of condemnation and fear, we should be biased toward positive living with a positive message — the life-and-culture-encompassing gospel. Andy Crouch, in his excellent book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, asks some probing questions we need to answer:

Why are we not known as cultivators — people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done? Why are we not known as creators — people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?

Let us go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit, guided by God’s word, to transform lives and culture. Let us serve God in our generation by being creators of culture and relevant Christian educators. Let us dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before in our schools — something that makes our schools more welcoming, more thrilling, and more beautiful for our students.