Much of the current understanding of pedagogy, in Britain especially, is driven by an appeal to method: the pursuit of specified goals in learning a subject will generate specified, quantifiable results and an outcome. Education, inasmuch as it is conceived as a process, will have outcomes which will both act as a measure against which differing students of differing ability can be measured and will thereby sift themselves into social roles and place. At the same time an understanding that what is to be learned is something which must be attended to, rather than grasped, in an attitude of humility and reserve, is being eroded. Modern teaching is too often underpinned by a view that everything is a ‘resource’ which can be endlessly remodelled or manipulated to satisfy immediate needs. Instead of learning as a process of assimilating something greater, and to which the one who learns must be conformed, students are increasingly being taught to see everything as series of ‘problems’ to which mere cleverness and expediency can always find ‘solutions’.
The emphasis on method in learning, and the gradual wearing-away of a model of teaching that has at its heart the apprenticeship of the student to the teacher – discipleship in learning – is yet again evidence of the disappearance of the place of the human in what it is to learn, to study, and to teach. In the face of this Christians have long known that at the heart of discovering who we are to be in God is the practice of discipleship and the witness of the disciples the Lord gathered around him. We encounter the person of Jesus the Christ through the teaching of those disciples who became Apostles, both followers and, as followers, ones who received the commission to go out and proclaim the good news to the whole world. This going out always has at its heart a personal encounter, of those at whose hands we ourselves have received the faith, and through whom we encounter the person of Jesus Christ.
The Church knows therefore, that pedagogy cannot ever be a method, but rather has to have at its heart personal encounter. The one who teaches must himself know what it is to have studied and to have been taught. In pedagogy like this, the specificity of ‘outcomes’ and ‘benchmarks’ might be present, but is only adjunct to the real task: the leading of the student into a path on which the teacher himself has journeyed…In consequence, a genuinely humanising pedagogy can emerge which questions every attempt to instrumentalise learning to outcomes and methods. Such a pedagogy becomes a genuine met’ odos, the following of an open path.
The Society of St. Catherine of Siena The Vocation and Formation of Theologians and the Teaching Office of the Bishop in the British Context
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I have been looking for this sort of document for fully two years. I am simply baffled as to why it and others like it are, for all intents and purposes, hidden. I suggest that it is the job of every congregation to pray and petition their bishop to read them this document from the pulpit once a year and that its pithier phrases be turned into bullet points, learned off by heart, taught to confirmation candidates and chanted through the streets of English cities every Corpus Christi. Every Anglican should find a Roman Catholic and say ‘teach me this discipleship.’
Of course this ‘Vocation and Formation of Theologians…’, along with ‘On the Holy Eucharist’ and the other marvellous documents on display on the Catherine of Siena site, have their weaker moments. But inasmuch as we do not know even of the existence of these church documents, let alone start to wrestle with them, we are all the losers. Aren’t we failing the people of the UK, or wherever, by failing to pass on to them the deposit of faith we have been given on their behalf?
Ditto for the Anglican documents of the Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission published on the Anglican Communion website.
