Scripture and education as narratives
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 720: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 1, 2022
Scripture and education as narratives
One particular form of patterning to which education is subject is narrative. The
widespread resurgence of narrative as a topic of discussion in a variety of fields has impacted
both general educational discussion and discussions of Christian education in particular.
Understanding education as the enactment and provision of a particular narrative about the
world shifts attention away from individual pieces of information or elements of the curriculum
and towards their narrative pattern. Meanwhile, similar developments have been underway in
theology. N.T. Wright succinctly expresses the significance of narrative context for
interpretation, and his point would seem to apply just as well to interpretation of a school
curriculum:
‘It’s going to rain.’ This is a fairly clear statement, but its meaning varies with the context.
The context supplies an implicit narrative, and the force of the statement depends on the
role that it plays within those different potential narratives. If we are about to have a picnic,
the statement forms part of an implicit story which is about to become a minor tragedy
instead of (as we had hoped) a minor comedy. If we are in East Africa, fearing another
drought and consequent crop failure, the statement forms part of an implicit story in which
imminent tragedy will give way to jubilation. If I told you three days ago that it would rain
today, and you disbelieved me, the statement forms part of an implicit story in which my
ability as a meteorologist is about to be vindicated, and your scepticism proves groundless.
If we are Elijah and his servant on Mount Carmel, the sentence invokes a whole theological
story: YHWH is the true god, and Elijah is his prophet. In each case, the single statement
demands to be ‘heard’ within the context of a full implicit plot, a complete implicit
narrative.19
The stories told by curriculum materials are, moreover, contentious. In his Teaching as
Storytelling, discussing a unit of work on the local community. Kieran Egan sketches a possible
approach designed to enable children to see the prosaic detail of everyday life in their
community as ‘one of the greatest achievements of human ingenuity and planning’.20 Egan
suggests as a possible opening to the unit an imagined scenario in which we wake up to find
that our town has been cut off from the outside world by a huge steel wall. This is designed to
provoke discussion of how we would survive without all of the basic services which would be
lost to us in such a situation. The unit could move on to look at such things as threats to our
food supply and the ways in which we defend it (e.g. pesticides), or how we would manage if
our machines broke down and there was no-one with the skill necessary to fix them. The aim is
to make the familiar strange, so that learners no longer see (e.g.) a supermarket as just part of
the environment, but as ‘a small miracle’.21
Having sketched this possible approach. Egan then points out that ‘so far, it is clear that we
are seeing the community as positively valuable without any qualifications. We could organise
the content quite differently to give quite a different view’.22 Thus, instead of telling the heroic
story of the community’s survival against the odds, we could picture the community as a small
creature settled by a river:
As the years went by it grew by drinking the pure water and dirtying it as it passed
through, and by eating away at the surrounding land. It became bigger and fatter and
more monstrous, and grew faster and faster. It sent tentacles (roads) deep into the
countryside to get food from more and more distant places to satisfy its ever-growing
appetite, destroying the natural woods and meadows. Some tentacles ripped up the land
to get minerals and fuels which it ate in its factories, dirtying further the land, air and
water.23
Such educational narratives help to shape our sense of who we are and what is going on in
our world. Given that the Bible also offers a narrative which bids to shape our identity,
exploration of the relationships between biblical narrative and narrative theology on the one
hand and implicit or explicit curricular narratives on the other seems to be invited, and some
Christian educators have undertaken work along these lines.24Narrative, they suggest, engages
more of our selfhood than merely the cognitive, and this makes it a promising vehicle for
Christian education.
This approach raises a number of interesting questions: how do we obey a narrative? (As
Wright puts it: ‘It is one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning and
have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began “Once
upon a time?” ’25 How do we address the concern that narratives all too often ‘dream a world in
accordance with their own wishes or resentments’?26How can one narrative critique or suggest
another—how do we get from the narrative which runs through the pages of the Bible to the
narrative implied in a unit of work on late nineteenth century England or the invention of space
travel? Does a narrative approach at this point hand back to us the question which it sought to
answer, that of how we get from the Bible to contemporary education? These are the kinds of
question which a narrative approach needs to answer.
Metaphor in Scripture and education
Fifthly, teaching as storytelling is, of course, a metaphor. The role of metaphor in our
theorising and acting in general, and in education in particular has been widely discussed in
recent years.27 Here I will restrict myself to three brief observations concerning the importance
of this for the present topic.
First, in recent accounts metaphor has shifted from its empiricist niche as a decorative
element of poetic language to a much more substantial role in shaping our living. To take Lakoff
and Johnson’s well-known example, viewing argument as warfare (winning, losing, defending,
destroying or shooting down arguments) yields different perspectives and behavioural
emphases from a view of argument as dance (co-operation, turn-taking, rhythm, etc.). Our
metaphors are closely inter-related with our practices.
Second, this shift has impacted discussions in the field of education, where particularly
fruitful metaphors can also generate particular emphases in theory and practice. Minds as
computers, learners as plants or buckets, teachers as coaches, schools as market-places or
factories—these and many more metaphors inhabit educational discussion. Once education is
viewed as a market-place, then viewing parents and children as consumers, the curriculum as a
product which we deliver, and factory-like quality control as a central emphasis follow all too
naturally. The process here is not a matter of working from premises to conclusions, of working
out the consequences of consciously formulated beliefs. It is rather a more imaginative
elaboration of parallels between two complexes of meaning, an elaboration which can draw us
unsuspectingly into particular ways of seeing and being.
Third, the Bible is rich in metaphorical language. Given these recent perceptions of a more
pervasive and substantial role for metaphor in shaping our praxis, there would seem to be a
case for asking whether biblical metaphors might shape education precisely as metaphors,
rather than as masked propositions from which inferences can be made. Talk of pastoral care in
schools seems to represent a residual biblical metaphor in educational discourse, that of the
teacher as shepherd. Talk of the school as a garden has not been the sole preserve of the
Romantic tradition deriving from Rousseau—Comenius’ use of the same metaphor can be
plausibly connected with Genesis 1–3, and focuses on our responsibility for cultivating the
garden rather than leaving it to grow ‘naturally’.28 Parker Palmer’s proposal that the dominant
western notion of ‘knowing as power’ should be replaced by an understanding of ‘knowing as
loving’ can be helpfully read as functioning as an alternative root metaphor for our educational
thinking, one which must be delimited by a biblical conception of love if it is to reflect Palmer’s
intent.
Naturally this approach raises a host of questions: what is meant by a ‘biblical metaphor’?
One found in the Bible or one merely consistent with the Bible or something else? Given the
open-ended polyvalence of metaphor, how does this approach relate to notions of biblical
authority? In what ways might biblical metaphors conceal as well as reveal when explored in
relation to learning? What happens if we go beyond individual metaphors and ask how the
structure of complexes of biblical metaphors might map onto educational metaphor? These
and other questions are raised if we focus our attention on metaphor.
