When I was training to be a teacher I read a great book called How Children Fail by John Holt. It introduced an idea that I had never previously considered: that children learn to appear to be learners, rather than learn how to acquire the core knowledge we are trying to impart. In other words, they’re tricksy little blighters who frequently get the better of us. The truth is that we fail them.
Yesterday at lunch Barney was telling me how he had ‘done some really hard maths’ at nursery. Now, his nursery does not both with maths – the crowd of four-year-olds have ages to wait for the joys of geometry. Instead they play and make things with tape and glue. But Barney wanted to appear to be engaged in proper activities, he wanted to be able to tell us that he had been doing some proper learning.
And so, I guess, it begins. Yesterday he wasn’t that good at convincing me that he was learning, but he’ll get better. Soon he’ll be able to fake it with the rest of them. He’ll guess at the answer – knowing that the destination matters more than the journey.
And I wonder whether this habit leaves us when we leave education behind us. I wonder… and I think not. From the quick response uttered from a suddenly-ended daydream haze, to the professions of false contrition to the traffic officer, we know how to play the game.
And then there’s God. Perhaps when it comes to matters of faith – and our public expressions of it – we do this most of all. We know the moves, the accents, the word-choice and the code to show the state we’re in. We’re so good at it that we can even muster up a decent amount of shock and awe when one of our leaders gets caught in the act of covering up his integrity-gap.
How strange that we do this with God. Of all those to whom we are subordinate throughout our lives, this Father of ours is the one who we have the least chance of duping. But we can’t seem to help ourselves.
I suppose there’s a comfort in playing this role. At least it’s familiar. But how many journeys are we missing along the way?
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