Skip to main content

The Week That Was

For most of the past week I attended the Anglican Schools conference in Christchurch. This was a gathering of, largely, the principals and chaplains of Anglican schools, but there were a few also rans, such as myself, along to make up the numbers. What with it being a conference attended by the principals of some of the country's better schools and everything, we staying a a much classier hotel than we would have if it had been any other sort of churchy conference, so I was well fed and had a nice room, but that wasn't the good bit about being there.

What made the four hour drive North more than worth it was two things: the conference speakers and the company I kept. The Anglican Schools office is run, in this country, by the extraordinary and wonderful Ali Ballantyne. Despite being shaken out of her Christchurch office and being forced to run things on a patchwork system she has cobbled together in the garage of her home,  she put together a program that was as good as anything I have been to for years. The chief speaker was Lat Blaylock, a Christian Education theorist from the UK with a profound understanding of the spiritual needs of children and a passion for enabling them to talk about the big questions in life. I came away from the conference with the process I will use in this year's Diocesan Synod to help us address issues of commitment and allocation of resources. I came away also with knowledge of an extraordinary resource I will share later: a collection of spiritual poems written by British children.

I knew many of the people at the conference, although, poor dears, some of them had aged so much they didn't recognise me. It is interesting to see someone after a long separation because the progress in that person's life (or the lack of it) will be dramatically apparent; and in the case of the many with whom I had conversations it was quite inspiring to see where the Spirit had led them and what the Spirit was making of them. Many have devoted most of their working lives to the spiritual nurture and education of young people, and they are pretty darned good at it. Without exception they are becoming whole, grounded, self aware people. I met some others as well, for the first time, largely principals of Anglican schools, and again these were very impressive people. In particular, Gillian Simpson, the Principal of St. Margaret's College in Christchurch, spoke at the conference dinner. She spoke simply but powerfully about surviving the earthquake: about the devastation of her school and the loss of life in her school community; and of the faith and practical support from  her Anglican community which has sustained her. I found her address profoundly moving and inspiring.

Before driving home after the conference I went out to Sumner for lunch with an old friend. I had a sandwich in his devastated house, and looked out over the wreckage of his neighbourhood. I'll write of  that later, also.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Building children up in faith is of course an essential task of any church or Christian school, but along with knowledge of the Bible and the practices of prayer and worship, I sometimes wonder how schools fare when the rest of the curriculum is explicitly or implicitly atheistic. It would be interesting for Anglicans to see how schools like Bethlehem College in Tauranga or Middleton Grange go about this task.
THis interested me as well: the attempt to introduce some philosophical theology (!) to 8-10 year olds in Australia, using a simplified version of William Lane Craig's material:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8985

Craig is probably the foremost philosophical apologist in the English-speaking world, and it's interesting that people like Richard Dawkins decline to debate him. I've often wondered how his material might he adapted to school use and once asked him if this was anticipated.

Brian
15 August 2011 at 21:58
Melissa Bell said…
Hi Brian

Actually there is a forum for Special Character schools to come together and share their vision, curriculum and pedagogy. Through the Association of Integrated Schools we have annual meetings where Principals share all of this, as well as discuss the challenges and opportunities of their Special Character.
20 August 2011 at 16:48
Anonymous said…
Thanks, Melissa - good to hear this. An old acquaintance of mine is the head of Bethlehem College.

Brian
22 August 2011 at 21:46
at the table with annie said…
My children attend a classical Christian school, which does an excellent job of both intellectual excellence and teaching the theological and philosophical underpinnings of our faith. The classical is a return to the medieval mindset and trivium, described in some detail by Dorothy Sayers (of mystery and Inklings fame)in her article "The Lost Tools of Learning." For the past five years I have taught history, which is the backbone of the curriculum, as a volunteer in both my childrens' classes, and the integrated approach of the philosophical ideas, art, music and literature of the area makes the history come ALIVE. It is wonderful to see the children grasp the ideas, memorize the Nicene Creed after learning all this history, and recite the Band of Brothers Speech by Shakespeare will studying Henry V. The curriculm begins in first grade with Ancient Civilizations (Egypt, etc.); then in second grade with Greece and Rome; then third grade Medieval; fourth Early Modern (26-28th centuries) and finally fifth grade Modern. As I taught these children, I went through, though im simple terms, the major philosophical and theological underpinnings of each era, and showed how the art, music and events reflected these. The children understood amazingly well, and Loved it. I think the classical model is tremendously powerful, if applied with common sense and Wisdom.
29 August 2011 at 12:20
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more