21 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I building task. If they do not—and Aalders (1977) is very critical of Christian schools in this regard—they will fall prey either to sterile sectarianism (turning their backs on society) or to featureless worldliness (not adding anything from their Christian perspective; p. 226). The latter outcome refers to a tendency resembling the functional position of the school in modern society as described by Biesta (2022). Aalders (1977) adopted the same idea from Bavinck’s (1921) plea for classical education as a counterweight against the modern, liberal functionality (or approach). In Biblical terms, he compared the school to the city gate of Nain (Luke 7): Neither Nain, meaning lovely, itself nor the world outside of it; rather, the transitional stage from the warm safety of the family to the much wider horizon of culture. Approximating the school along these lines—that is, as a mini-society, a halfway house, a workshop of humanity, a cultural forum or a city gate— clarifies that, for school education in general and for citizenship education more specifically, it matters both how the small entity of the family is composed and what society looks like. Where there is homogeneity across the board (e.g. students all come from Christian families, gather in Christian schools and prepare for predominantly Christian society; as it was in Prideaux’ case), strong socialising tendencies are to be expected. These socialising tendencies can be, to a high degree, implicit and based on what sociologist Peter Berger (1967) defined as plausibility structures. Traditionally, many Christian schools in countries with a specifically Christian history tend to count on this socialising dynamic. The premise of this study is, however, that homogeneity is rapidly fading and that relying solely on socialising tendencies is a strategy that cannot last in the new context (9). Looking closely at the social and natural worlds into which educators invite students today (10), and comparing them with 80 years ago when Prideaux (1940) spoke to teachers about citizenship, some very clear differences can be noted. Scientists seeking to describe these changes tend to use superlatives. For instance, scholars in the field of natural sciences refer to the present era as the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene (McNeill & Engelke, 2014), while social and political scientists since 1940 speak of epochal change in terms of 9 As Chapter 1.2 will point out, this strategy of relying on socialisation may even be contra-productive. 10 The combination of the social and the natural is important especially from a practice-theoretical perspective: ‘It is a mistake to distinguish the social world from its natural environment (…) such that a practice theory would make the social world the domain of autonomously social sciences. Moreover, this mistake is one that practice theory is especially well equipped to overcome’ (Rouse, 2007, p. 536).
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