The term worldview, the usefulness of which I acknowledge, has enabled Christians to escape the secularist religion of a fundamentalism that sees the Bible as the only book we read for fear we will have to live in the world around us.
When people speak of the Christian worldview, surely at some point they must confront the issue of nature and the school. Nothing is more harmful to a child’s faith tahn to live in a structure that embodies Naturalism without anyone explaining that a compromise has taken place.
Constructivism is the denial of knowable truth, and it is rooted in anti-Christian philosophies. If we embody it in our schools (and I’m not sure we can be accredited without doing so), then we need to be open about it with our students.
We need to say something like, “We don’t pattern our curriculum on the way you learn or on the structure of reality. Instead we pattern it on the requirements the state imposes on us. We have to submit to Caesar and we have judged that we have to go as far as we have in order to do what we can to be faithful. But please don’t think for a minute that reality really looks like this.”
To the extent possible, we need to resist the utilitarian Naturalism that permeates our own minds, especially in the structure and content of the curriculum, the modes of instruction, the tools of assessment, and the means of governance.
This isn’t easy, but at least it makes a Christian classical education possible.
