Review of Newell's Education

Education: A Student's Guide

Ted Newell

Series edited by David S. Dockery

Pbk, 160pp, £9.99

ISBN 978-1433554933

Publisher's website https://www.crossway.org/books/education-tpb/

Ted Newell, associate professor of education at Crandall University, has produced a brief but excellent guide to education. He examines education in a broad sense from a Christian perspective. Broad, in that he does not limit it to schools but includes universities, seminaries, local churches and more. 

He explores education from a historical perspective from Jesus' approach to progressive education. He does so by examining five paradigms through the lens of four processes ‘which tell and retell the master narrative’: memory, vision, symbols and ethos. This provides an excellent framework for a comparison of the different approaches. The table below is a summary of Newell's analysis.

	Memory (How a community recalls and recasts its history)	Vision (The preferred future)	Symbols	Ethos
Jesus	Reworked	The king returned and kingdom promises fully realised	Remade Israel’s cultural symbols and rituals Exodus and Passover reenacted	His reign activated in the lives of his followers
Hellenistic city-states	The tradition of Jesus, crucified, risen and ascended as Lord of the cosmos and of Roman society	A transformed universe rules by a gracious God	Asserted and enacted in the story of Jesus	Sacrificial ethos: care for neighbours; sexual renunciation; willingness to die in witness for Christ
Cloistered education	The Christian succession at Rome, a tradition modified by classical sources. Most Christians believed that their cultural efforts were contributing to the eventual visible reign of Christ—a postmillennial understanding of social progress culminating in the advent of the heavenly city.	It saw itself bringing in the reign of Christ on earth.	The Celtic cross with its orb centred on the middle indicated the victory of God at Easter and Christ the centre of history	A patchwork of pre-Christian practices increasingly dominated by Christian norms
Empirical education	Though dogma and tradition made the West a violent, superstitious place, empirical science is gradually replacing it with a rational world ruled by science and laws. Religion’s place can only be in private life, where it cannot interfere with public order.	A shining city on a hill of rational men and women living in harmony with each other, fully dominating nature to reduce fear and chance to the barest minimum	The rational metric system of measurement which replaced ad hoc traditional weights and measure; the public school; elections to democratic systems peopled by basically good people; rationalized ways of governing such as bureauctratic procedures.	Scientific management of natural and human resources.
Progressive education	It defied the scientific revolution’s split of the human subject from objective knowledge	Universal liberty, equality, and fraternity (the slogan of the French Revolution); it worked to implement its vision of eliminating causes of human alienation as it understood them	Inclusive practices enshrined in law	An optimism about human potentials that denied or re-labeled stubborn human perversity.

As can be seen for the above Newell provides a clear description and analysis of the different perspectives. He concludes with a look at the ‘Next’ Christian education. Here he examines a number of cases and utilises the insights of John Hull, Wilfred Carr and others in an attempt to ‘reclaim a Christian tradition of education’.

The book concludes with questions for reflection, a brief timeline and a glossary of key terms. It is an excellent addition to Crossway’s ‘A Students Guide’ series.

Table of Contents:

1. The Potential of Christian Education

2. Jesus’s Education

3. Christian Education in Hellenistic City-States

4. Cloistered Education

5. Empirical Education

6. Progressive Education

7. The Next Christian Education