219 Subjectifying Education and the Art of Living Together 6 meaningless, although it will be part of the vision the Lord holds for the world, in which His kingdom is coming. With respect to the vision of the messianic kingdom, one senior student present during the sixth meeting observed that it all ‘begins with the spiritual righteousness of the Man who is Christ’. Another student added that Isaiah depicts Him as ‘a King of justice’. One member of the outsider group noticed that, according to Isaiah 32: 3, ‘justice has directly to do with seeing, hearing, heeding and not looking away’ from people who suffer injustice. Another member added that ‘Christ’s righteousness sometimes seems to be quite the opposite of social righteousness, yet this section actually emphasises that the two belong together’. Meditating on Isaiah 35, the conversational community connected the motivation arising from the vision as a subjectifying element. When high diversity is accompanied by high complexity in the sense of polarisation, fragmentation, social backlogs, inequality of chance and specific hardships in certain urban contexts, teachers may feel impotent. They are not able to give children what they need to flourish—and they frequently encounter in the educational system elements that are not helpful. A member of the outsider group described Isaiah 35 as ‘a comforting and at the same time relaxing text’ because it shows that real progress, development and flourishing do ‘not depend on our efforts’. A member of the insider group related the text to Proverbs 3: 5 and 6, stating that ‘we need the wisdom of the Lord to rely on His strength and not too much on our intellect, as otherwise we would be discouraged’. The messianic kingdom vision of the Christian faith thus provides an inspirational source for responding to the challenges of living together in a fragmented society without discouragement or overstrain. 6.3 CONCRETE ELABORATIONS FOR DCU’S CURRICULUM After studying the results of the baseline survey (Chapter 5.2) and evaluating them with senior DCU students (6.1), it became clear to the conversational community that the traditional strength of DCU’s curriculum was more closely related to its qualification (specifically its knowledge base) and its socialisation (because of its strong ties to the Reformed Christian community in the Netherlands) than to its subjectification. The curriculum paid a lot of attention to personhood formation; however, in practice, the relation between the person and wider society was studied in a highly cognitive manner and the holistic experiences seemed to not be very well integrated into the bigger whole of learning to deal with real societal diversity. Thus, the conversational community tried to apply the lines of critical faithfulness and critical openness
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