EDUCATION 02 – Next generation
Deu 6:1-3 Education of a Nation
“Now these are the commandments … which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that you may … keep all his statutes, you, and your son, and your son’s son, all the days of your life; and that your days may be prolonged … that you may increase mightily in the land.”
- Teaching and obeying God’s commandments in order to live long and grow strong and numerous as a nation. A nation’s stability and strength depends on its ability to pass down values to the next generation.
- God > Moses > you > your son > your son’s son … generational pass down
- We need not only to actively teach our children, but have further generations in mind. We need to teach our children to teach and pro-actively influence grand-children.
- Often families and churches do not succeed at fully passing down values. Most revivals peter out in the 2nd or 3rd generation. ‘Good life’ becomes the goal, rather than a real contribution to this society.
Instructions to parents
Deu 6:6-7 Responsibility to teach
“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them.”
- 6:6 is the command for the parents to obey themselves, 6:7 is the command to parents to teach their children. Unless I am whole-heartedly obedient myself, I have no authority to teach. You cannot teach what you do not live.
- Main responsibility for character formation, values transfer and religious education is with the parents … not the church
- Main responsibility for education is with the parents … not the government
Deu 6:7-9 Teaching when? Teaching how?
“Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.”
- What is commanded is daily, practical teaching in and through normal life situations. Talk about issues and show God’s law and thinking pertaining to them as questions and topics come up.
- This is a command to be in communication with children throughout the day about truth, laws, values, reasons. It is an integrated approach, where tea-ching is reinforced in daily life in the family.
- The goal is not rote learning or memorization or blind obediece, but engaging with real issues, understanding and principled thinking.
- Use visual things, reminders, symbols, memory helps. Create a helpful learning environment for children, with continual exposure and repetition,
- The children’s learning is the most important family project. Everyone is taking part. Children feel the importance of learning and get support.
Deu 11:18-20 Reminders, memory aids
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 20 write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.’
- 11:18 Again: You have to do it yourself first, then you can teach the children
- Integrated approach: teaching is part of daily family life and community life
- Use of memory aids and symbols, posted everywhere, ensuring increased memorization by involving multiple senses and constant repetition.
Feasts and their importance
Exo 13:14-16 Passover feast and fests in general
- During the historic exodus of Israel out of Egypt, God instructs a new feast and ritual to start, and to be celebrated yearly.
- God commands several feasts to be kept yearly. They were grouped into three seasons and required all Israel assembling at the tabernacle. Their description is found in Lev 23.
- The feasts are of three types:
- Feasts that commemorate God’s acts in history, like the festival of pass over or the festival of booths.
- Feasts that are a thanksgiving for regular events; like the festival of first fruits and the harvest festival.
- Feasts that are reminders of God’s truth; like the day of atonement.
- These feasts were exciting events, for adults and even more so for children: Their observance included things like: acted out historical drama, special songs, rituals, special foods, trips to Jerusalem, great congregations, trumpets, sacrifices, family feasts, etc.
- Feasts meant extended time with family, relatives, other children, people of all ages
- These feasts appeal powerfully to children; they are interactive, interesting, colorful, fun, exciting, sobering, exuberant, active, special …
- Feasts involve all the senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, hands-on experience. Feasts are especially helpful for kinestetic learners.
- Therefore feasts provide a stimulating sensory, hands-on environment causing the child to interact, to think, to ask.
- Principles included in this are:
- teach according to the child’s questions, thoughts, interests, needs.
- teach according to the child’s speed and learning method.
- teach learner-centered, learner-driven.
- Another aspect is that feasts and child-induced learning is clearly a fear-free environment. Much of our modern learning in class rooms does not grant that, rather fear is used to make the students behave.
- Illustration: Chemistry teacher, creating a reign of terror in his classroom. If he asked a question, the students would crouch in their places, hoping to not catch any attention, holding their breaths till the answer would be given, mostly by the teacher himself, and then furiously writing it down.
- Needless to say, no scientific thought ever happened in that classroom. For science – more than any other subject – requires the freedom to make mistakes without fearing repercussions. Science precisely is the bringing up of various hypotheses, then testing them, then discarding all that don’t work. Fear and control are direct antagonists of any scientific thinking.
Exo 12:3-8 Passover lamb in the family for 4 days
‘On the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, … 5 Your lamb shall be … a year-old male; … 6 You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then … shall slaughter it at twilight. 7 They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8 They shall eat the lamb that same night …’
- This procedure would ensure a bonding between the children of the house and the cute one year-old lamb or goat over the 4 days. When it is finally slaughtered, eaten and the blood smeared on the door posts, this would be quite dramatic and have quite an emotional impact on the child.
- This is a practical, highly involved, dramatic, emotional, memorable lesson for a child
- Again the context of learning is the family, children are not separated out for teaching as in modern school settings.
Exo 13:8-10 Feast of Unleavened Bread
‘You shall tell your child on the day, ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt’. It shall serve for you as a a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead, so that the teaching of the LORD may be on your lips, for with a strong hand the LORD brought you out of Egypt. 10 You shall keep this ordinance at its proper time from year to year.’
- Again: intentional, pro-active pass down to children, emphasized by personal witness in the context of a fun and solemn feast
Deu 12:18 Children’s participation in sacrifices and feasts
- Feasts and here eating together at the tabernacle after the sacrifices are family times, everyone partaking and participating, children and all.
Deu 6:20-25 History and Cause & Effect
- Again: command to parents to teach children from God’s acts in human history (Bible), from God’s hand in the nation’s history (monuments, etc.) and from God’s hand in the family’s or parents’ history (personal witness).
- so that they would know the will and ways of God and so obey
- so that they would know God’s involvement with them, and so fulfill destiny
‘The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive … if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God.’
- Command to teach the children the all-important: ‘if … then’, cause & effect:
- if you love and obey God … then blessing & life
- if you disobey & replace God … then trouble & death
- ‘before the Lord’, not primarily before the teacher, the parent, others.
- Fear of God means obedience. I can’t say I fear God and not obey.
Deu 8:2,5,6 God teaching or disciplining Israel like a father a son
“Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart. … Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you. Therefore keep the commandments …”
- ‘to test you to know what was in your heart’ doesn’t mean that God doesn’t know, but it is I who don’t know myself. So by difficult situations my anger and selfishness is revealed; I need to be shown my need and weakness.
- How far can we test what’s in a child’s mind? We can only test what a child’s out put, but not what is in his mind. We can’t get ‘into people’s head’ and shouldn’t even if we could. Do not pressurize or manipulate. Rather create an atmosphere where a child can share freely.
Family Education
- In Jewish culture the son learned profession from his father, in an all-day, hands-on, work-together approach
- The child watches the father do > they do together > the child does the work as father watches > the child does it alone.
- Modern trend: Very young children are put in school (3 years) and all their learning years in class rooms.
- Counter example: Switzerland. Schooling only from age 7. Most children learn their professions by apprenticeship. Less than 20% of children go to college, but the nation is educated and prosperous.
Learning attitude
Prv 1:8 ‘Hear your father’s instruction and do not reject your mother’s teaching’
- God wants for understanding to increase from generation to generation.
- If I am unwilling to learn from parents, history, older writings, I effectively cut myself off past wisdom and revelation.
- Pride hinders learning. Extreme independence hinders learning.
Jer 6:16 ‘Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’
- Do not ask for the new, modern, progressive, trendy. Ask for what is good.
Deu 8:12-18 ‘When you have eaten your fill … 13 and when … all that you have is multiplied … 14 then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, … 17 Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”’ 18 But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who give you power to get wealth.’
- Pride causes us to forget where we came from and what God has done. Pride leads us to ‘un-learn’ what we once knew. Pride does not value others’ role or contributions, thinking myself the only source.