Abstract
Biographers of the English Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) describe him as an insatiable reader. From an early age he read classic books (Roberts, 2018: 16). Owing to his incomparable memory, later in life, he could quote many authors by heart in his numerous speeches. It is also said that many decisions in his political life can be traced back to influences from the books he read (Rose, 2015). One of the reasons to pay special attention to historical educators in an issue of this journal is our conviction that the study of past writers on teaching and learning may influence the attitude and decisions of teachers. In the case of Churchill, many books he read were not on politics. And yet it is clearly traceable how the works of, for example, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and G.B. Shaw came back to him later in his political career. In the case of teachers, we assume similar processes may happen. All the books they have read will have influenced, in one way or another, how they perceive the world, and more specifically how they look at interpersonal relationships. What can be said about the influence of the reading of historical educators? And more precisely, does it make sense to use texts and stories from decades or even centuries ago in teacher education?
Reflecting on this question, we can think about two approaches to the educational profession. The first is to see it as a matter of skills needed to adequately and efficiently facilitate the learning of the younger generation. Teachers and teacher educators will generally be convinced of the importance of skills. You need to practice how to prepare a lesson, how to tell a story, how to clearly instruct a class, and, last but not least, in this day and age you need to be able to efficiently use digital tools in your instruction. Many teachers, however, would say that practicing skills does not cover the whole story. Therefore, another approach to education is needed, which puts personal and professional formation in a different light. To give words to that approach, it is helpful to frame education as a practice that is embedded in a tradition. The word tradition relates to the Latin tradere, which means to transmit or to hand over something. To stand in a tradition of teaching means that one is open for what was already found out by predecessors. “Predecessors” is deliberately put in the plural here, to point out that we are related to many people who encountered the same challenges we do. Alasdair MacIntyre, when speaking about tradition in After Virtue, calls this the embeddedness of a practice: “the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us” (MacIntyre, 1984: 222). All contributions in this journal issue reflect this second approach, in which teachers are equipped and invited to position themselves in a tradition.
Applying this idea to Christian teachers, we can say that they join in in an articulated tradition. They have—to use a Biblical image—a cloud of witnesses around them (Hebrews 11). For centuries, numerous voices have been heard in Christian-inspired teaching, each one expressing wisdom from within its own context. This wisdom is “made intelligible,” to use the words of MacIntyre, in written sources. Knowledge of these sources is part of the formation process of Christian teachers. For this reason, studying historical pedagogy was required in many teacher education programs in the past (Campbell and Sherington, 2002). Student teachers learned about how schools developed in Europe from monastery schools, how the enlightenment promoted high expectations of education and how some Christians opposed these high expectations. They were also asked to read primary sources from important thinkers like Saint Augustin, Martin Luther the Reformer, and C.S. Lewis. Offering such elements in teacher education is premised on the assumption that ideals of learning and teaching from the past can be inspiring for a new generation of teachers.
This reasoning so far might sound idealistic. Does it also reflect practices we find in institutions for teacher education? In a recent study, conducted amongst students of Driestar Christian University, an institute for teacher education in Gouda (the Netherlands), we inquired into what kind of influence can be traced from reading texts on the personal and professional formation of teacher students (reported in Kunz and Reijnoudt-Klein, 2021). The study aimed to involve students in Christian pedagogy and theology in general terms, whilst, more specifically, it sought to initiate them into Christian education as a practice that needs an encounter with predecessors, in line with the aforementioned ideas on practices. With focus groups and in-depth interviews, it was mapped out how students use source texts in their personal and professional formation process. In this context, source texts are simply defined as written texts of authors that students met during their studies, not necessarily historical educators. Students chose not only pedagogues but also theologians and novelists. Students were asked about the formational value of these texts. They regularly made notes of reading experiences in learning diaries. Most of the teacher students acknowledged the importance of texts drawn from the (Christian and non-Christian) pedagogical tradition. Nevertheless, they struggled to read these texts with a focus on formation, due to their habit to study texts as a part of the curriculum with a test at the end. As a result, the students were focussed on an intellectual reproduction of the main outline of the text instead of questioning what it meant for them personally.
We introduced the idea of historical figures as potential companions on the journey of learning. Alongside the reading we encouraged the student to become more knowledgeable about the context of the texts (e.g., through reading about the author’s biography). We also pushed students to read entire books rather than fragments (De Muynck, 2019; De Muynck and Kunz, 2021). Reading texts in this way enables students to stimulate their imagination: what would the author have done if he had been in a comparable situation and what can I learn from his behavior for my own professional practice? It turned out that students indeed gain new, sometimes challenging, experiences in their dialog with the companion. To quote just one student: “In daily classroom practice, I used to classify my pupils based on the families they came from. However, when reading in the books of my companion, I felt really uncomfortable, because he stressed all pupils have the right to be seen without any prejudice. For me, my companion put me in front of the mirror.” During the research project, it was also found that students need tools to study the historical pedagogues such as the learning diaries and the conversation about their experiences. Those tools encouraged them to form their views on learning and teaching with the help of the companion.
Some of the articles in this issue not only provide a portrait of the historical educator in question but also show how best to bring them into the limelight. Most of the descriptions are inspiring in themselves because of the practical ideas the described thinker developed about educational practice. In most cases, the practice of that thinker proves to be the best breeding ground for original ideas. We chose to define a historical educator as a thinker who has developed original ideas on education during his scholarly or educational work and has brought these ideas on a higher level by elaborating or theorizing on them. The selection of authors who are portrayed chronologically in this issue shows that a historical pedagogue is not necessarily a person who is trained in the university discipline of education. Although most of the contributions are about theologians, two articles focus on a composer and a historian respectively. Perhaps none of the subjects of the articles would very well fit into the frame of contemporary educational science. Something similar applies to expectations regarding diversity in gender and ethnicity. Though, nowadays, globally, two thirds of the teaching workforce is female, only one article describes a woman. Whereas, worldwide white people are a minority (also among Christians), most contributions are about white scholars from the Western world. Hopefully this journal can more and more present an ethnically and culturally diverse range of models to learn from—we hope to receive more future submissions in this direction. The relevance of studying historical educators is not confined to teachers and teacher educators. We would like to suggest that the articles presented in this issue can inform the work of philosophers, theologians and those who teach in churches, just to mention a few. Moreover, historical investigation can be valuable in its own right, even it is not immediately useful, as this kind of research can contribute relevant insights to the conversations of scholars working in education and in a number of related disciplines.
The issue opens with two contributions on church fathers. According to Heather Peterson, Basil of Caesarea’s book To Young Men serves as a mirror for Christian education in the 21st century with a view to the perennial issue of how non-Christian sources can fruitfully be used by Christians. She extracts three principles from Basil that guide the reading of pagan sources by Christian learners and she extrapolates each principle to our own times. One of the principles intriguingly states that Christian faith can be built up by acquainting oneself with pagan literature. On the one hand this is because much can be found there that resonates with basic Christian values. On the other hand, the practice of collaborative reading of these texts nurtures a discerning search for wisdom, thus promoting a virtuous attitude and behavior. In the next article Kyle R. Hughes emphasizes the value of asceticism for practical formation of young people in education. His purpose is to develop an approach to taking concrete practices of asceticism seriously for the lives of young people. In order to do so, he uses two texts by the Church Fathers Chrysostom and Basil. Admittedly, these texts cannot be simply transposed to our time. However, Hughes demonstrates that they still have meaning: today, too, virtue formation is an important task of education. Therefore, at the end of his article, he provides an actualization of “asceticism” for today’s Christian education.
The next article brings us in the Middle Ages. Kyle Rapinchuk reads the writings of Bonaventure as a guiding perspective for Christian education today. He emphasizes the formative role of education, as opposed to the tendency to merely inform. Starting from the writings of Bonaventure, he argues that all knowledge and wisdom comes from God. All truth, according to Bonaventure, has a trace and echo of the triune God. The purpose of education is to be guided back to God. In this context, he argues for a fundamental re-orientation on the Christian message and, in line with James K.A. Smith, for embodied practices to accomplish this. This entails a reinvention of the great tradition (both Christian and non-Christian), in order to form students and enable them to fulfill their task and role in society.
The remainder of this issue takes us into the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Trina Stephens tells an interesting story about the American historian and politician Robert Reid Howison who operated in tense political times. His biography shows how the personal view on society and education is very much triggered by unpredictable circumstances. Moreover, the study on Howison shows that people can become significant educators by reflecting and writing about history and about what they experience instead of by studying literature on education. Susana Sendra Ramos brings us, with her picture of Charlotte Mason, into 19th century England. This influential lady took an anthropological point of entry for her philosophy of education. The teacher has to adjust to the natural desire to know the world. Education nurtures the child with good ideas. By practicing reading habits, the child will also learn to be attentive. Her ideas on education go hand in hand with a view on society. Children should not be educated according to the standard of the social class to which they belong. The broad task of education (physical, mental, moral and religious) has to be carried out by parents and educators in all classes.
In their article on Igor Stravinsky’s remarkable text Poetics of Music, John MacInnis and Mark Peters show instructional tools to make the composer’s text fruitful for the cultural formation of students. Though Stravinsky cannot be regarded as a teacher or a historical pedagogue as such, the article is exemplary for how a classical text can be a source in professional training, in this case of students majoring in music. They learn to approach the author as a discussion partner, who can be asked questions (as if he were alive) and with whom you can disagree. Interestingly the authors invite the students to broaden the dialog to other authors by giving assignments to compare Stravinsky with other thinkers, like Schönberg and Buber. They also invite the students to reflect on the place of modern music in the course of history. When it is assumed that the Holy Spirit works in our culture, what would that mean for the evaluation of modern musical expressions?
In the concluding article Josh Sauerwein describes how he included the reading of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics in a faith integration course. Students had to develop an ethical decision model to be used in a real-life ethical issue. While they were writing a paper on this issue, the story of Bonhoeffer and his time were presented. Bonhoeffer thus was taken as a moral exemplar in decision-making. His ideas on responsibility were used as a mirror to make their reflections, which they could insert in their paper, more profound. As in the previous article on Stravinsky, this contribution exemplifies how a historical figure can be used to deepen and enrich the formation process of students. We hope that the latter applies to all biographical sketches offered in this special issue and that they are inspiring for those educators who intend to give voice to predecessors’ noticeable insights in teaching and learning.