Teaching from a state of rest
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
These words of ancient and living wisdom from Psalm 127 must give us pause.
Our souls seek rest. Anxiety is restlessness and restlessness is a lack of faith. The only place to find true rest is in the Truth. And the Truth is not an abstract concept: He is the Word incarnate, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28). If our teaching does not challenge our students’ suppression of the truth in unrighteousness, we are contributing to their state of anxiety.
We are living in a culture that has given itself over to compulsive workaholism. Teachers especially can feel compelled to work seven days a week, catching up on that pile of marking and planning lessons on a Sunday, just in order to keep on top of the workload for the coming week. Perhaps we even pride ourselves on our ‘strong work ethic’, a phrase used in many TES job adverts. This is not to deny God’s gift of work to us. However, the pre-eminence of God-given rest in our lives can sometimes be forgotten, particularly towards the end of a busy term at school. We are commanded to take Sabbath rest in the fourth commandment. The command to rest must be obeyed with the same urgency as, for example, the commands not to kill or steal. However we do not often think of the fourth commandment in this way.
Sunday, the Lord’s Day, is the first day of the week, not the weekend. It is a holy day (from which we derive the word holiday). The temptation is to think that we’ve earned our day of rest by working so hard during the week. The voice of Patience in Milton’s Sonnet 19 reminds us: ‘God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts’. As the Psalmist says, “it is in vain”. To teach from a state of rest requires steadfastness of heart, peace of mind and the absence of all anxiety. On this day Christ was risen! All subsequent activity flows from Christ’s finished work. We begin our week in a state of rest and from here receive the inspiration, energy and strength to do six days of work. We are totally dependent on God’s providence.
In line with our own restless behaviour, we praise students for hard work, reward effort and even make work itself the reward for hard-working students. We tell our students that school prepares them for ‘the world of work’ and that the chief end of their education is a job. Sometimes, how hard a student has worked at something is valued above the result. They commute in suits to do a 9-to-5 shift in classrooms that are indistinguishable from office spaces. The curriculum is atomised into subjects, topics and short, time-pressured activities. Students get instant gratification by way of marks and feedback. We would be wise to teach the other virtues required to truly understand something: patience, stillness, silence. “Be still and know that I am God”, He says.
Lessons encourage students to strive, to grasp, to compete in a battleground of ideas. At one time the truth was relative to whoever made the best argument (consider the Sophists) whereas now the truth is relative to whoever’s feelings are strongest. In this culture of radical relativism, and radical means ‘rootless’, anxiety takes hold of young people, denying them any rest, so that even in their intellectual endeavours they are wandering in the wilderness. So often in our students’ pursuit of an education, we send them out to toil instead of giving them rest. And because they are restless and labouring, they are not receptive to what is being taught.
Children learn through imitation. If we can model restful teaching, not projecting our own anxieties about deadlines, exam results and targets, our students will begin to see that toiling may be limiting their ability to receive knowledge and understanding. The pedagogic trends of our time: growth mindset, ten thousand of hours of practise and the 1% marginal gains rule exhort students to perpetual, selfish activity. These doctrines contain elements of truth but in the main deny God’s gift of specific talents to individuals.
Tracing the etymology of the word ‘school’ reveals that education has gone wrong somewhere. ‘School’ comes from the Latin scola which comes from the Greek skole which means ‘leisure’. Reviewing our Western cultural heritage reveals that schools were not a place of work but a place of leisure and rest where students were taught the art of contemplation of the divine. However, the vita contemplativa became segregated from, and considered superior to, the vita activa, creating an unhelpful division between the life of the mind and the life of the body. So we need to look back further to ancient Hebrew schools, which were probably mostly home-schools, to find the best example of Theocentric education. There was a dynamic unity between work and worship : to study was to worship God. Torah means ‘instruction’ and Paul’s exhortation to fathers to bring up their children in the paideia and nouthesia of God in Ephesians 6:4 is an echo of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4. We are very far from this today. Nevertheless, the nature of education in all our schools is deeply religious. The question is, which god is being worshipped in your school?
To recover rest in education, we also need to recover a true anthropology. The anthropology governing the modern notion of education defines human beings as merely workers, which is reductive. “What is man?” is a surprisingly troubling question these days. But we need to know what a man is before we are able to offer him an education. If we don’t know what human beings are, we won’t know how to treat them. As Christian teachers, we look upon the students before us in our schoolrooms and we see image bearers of the living God. Given this enduring concept of man as both mortal and immortal, as having capax universi – the capacity to contemplate the cosmos and his place in it – how have we arrived at this extreme definition of man as nothing more than a worker?
We’ve all heard that question about ‘work-life balance’ in PD sessions: do you live to work or do you work to live? It’s a tyrannical question. It is easy to let it mislead us into thinking that work and life are on the scales being measured against one another. But our work as Christian teachers is not separate from or in conflict with our lives: it is our calling and what a God-glorifying vocation it is. Teachers are awarded the great responsibility of giving children a powerful encounter with the truth and exposing lies. And we should do so resting in the promises of God.
Sarah-Jane Bentley
ACT Director