234 Chapter 7 think more moderately than young people. This is how he has experienced it himself—as a boy he was fanatical, but later he became more moderate. P3 agrees that life experience has a moderating effect. P4 adds that the more you know, the more you know what you don’t know. P2 is reminded of the Biblical story in which the Lord Jesus calls upon the religious leaders of Israel to stone the adulteress, saying to them ‘Whoever of you is without sin, first cast the stone at her’. In that history, it is the elderly leaders who first, without throwing a stone, blow the retreat. P1 thinks of another factor that could explain the differences in scores for affirmations three and six between the teachers and students. Besides age and, thus, life experience, the influence of one’s social environment could also play a role. Students more commonly come from a monocultural environment. P1 speaks of the refo-bubble in this regard. P5 points out that the MD score shows that there are sometimes also considerable differences between students and teachers. Going into how differently students responded to the last statement, P6 states that students seem to be searching. They are eager to learn (P7), interested and engaged (P8) and looking to meet with each other to exchange experiences (P9). Their experiences with multi-ethnic education apparently raise questions they find relevant, argues P10. To conclude the discussion, one member of the outsider group (P1) stated that the ‘student search’ for what a strong belief in absolute truth means ‘stems from questioning the images that students have formed based on what they have always heard in their own home situations: Do those images match reality?’ Truth is conveyed by people, generally speaking, in a socialising context and, therefore, mixed with unjustified generalisations and biases, especially about other cultural, social and religious groups. When these generalisations and biases are partially or completely broken down by real-life experiences, an interesting but also complex separation between the core of truth as belief in faith and circumstantial ideas is made in the lives of (especially young) students (1). This aspect of the discussion led a member of the in-group (P4 in the preceding quotation) to conclude that ‘in that regard there is a lot at stake for the students—the difference between holding on to the truth and making an ongoing search for truth important’. Elaborating on the impact of this conclusion, P4 concluded that ‘they suddenly learn to understand that they understand very little’. This final elaboration brings the present section to its conclusion. The conversational community found conflicting allegiances in themselves as Christian teachers and, even more so, in students of Christian teacher training, 1 Cognitive dissonance, as at it characterised in the field of psychology.
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