From the Principal Week Three Term One 2014

Term 1 Week 3

18 February 2014

Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends

Thanks for coming along on Tuesday to the Picnic, for your part in developing the creative expression in your children (lots of our learners are now starting instrumental and singing lessons), and for your great support of camp (it is terrific to have, at this stage, about 20 parents coming with us, and it is wonderful to have a supportive community in which our learners can be challenged and supported).

What does a good education look like?

People often think of education as the ‘getting of’ ideas, information and skills so that they can have a good career or job in the future.

However, at Mahurangi Christian School, we have a community of families, teachers and learners who believe that a good education is so much more than that.

James K. A. Smith uses an interesting phrase that resonates with me. He says that education is “about the formation of hearts and desires.” He challenges us to “begin by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the gut”, or the heart.

“What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?

“What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

“Education is most fundamentally a matter of formation, a task of shaping and creating a certain kind of people. What makes them a distinctive kind of people is what they love or desire - what they envisage as the ‘the good life’ or the ideal picture of human flourishing. An education then is a constellation of practices, rituals and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart.”

“Our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love.”

“Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs in your head in order to guarantee proper behaviour; rather it is a matter of being the kind of person who loves  rightly - who loves God and neighbour and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love.

Thanks James K. A Smith, for articulating so well what we are seeking to become as a school community at Mahurangi Christian School.

Loving God, Loving Ourselves, Loving Others, Loving Learning, Loving God’s World. That is so much more important than knowing about these things or behaving according to certain rules.

On the journey with your family

Helen Pearson