I want to reinforce my premise before I go any further.
Some blog readers may be aware of a book entitled “The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs” by Elliot Eisner. Eisner says in any three schools there are actually 3 curriculums: the Explicit Curriculum, the Implicit Curriculum and the Null Curriculum. What schools are actually teaching are 3 things, even they say they are only teaching one. The explicit curriculum is when you go to a given school and the principal gives you the handbook and says this what we are about; this is what we do here. The implicit curriculum is the working assumptions that you can’t find anywhere written on a piece of paper, but are nevertheless prevalent all through the community in terms of how the school really functions. But that’s not all that a school teaches, the whole of what a school teaches includes what Eisner calls the null curriculum. This is what nobody is teaching, nobody is talking about and nobody is even thinking about, but it’s being taught by the fact that it’s not there. Eisner believes you have to look at all three to really judge a school.
Consider an example. You go to a certain school to learn about it and you see in their purpose materials that they say they teach the times table. This is the explicit curriculum. If you actually go in the classroom, what you find is that they believe in rote memorization. This is nowhere codified, but is clearly a working assumption since it is the method used in every Mathematics class you choose to visit. What’s the null curriculum? As an example, it may be grammar. You can look far and wide, and no one teaches grammar and apparently no one cares about it. The null curriculum message is that grammar doesn’t matter. It is taught by virtue of its absence.
So the question I am asking is this: if General Convention 2009 is a school, what is its null curriculum–KSH?
I’d have to say the Gospel (in the catholic and orthodox sense). Very little discussion of God other than ‘vox populi, vox Dei’ sorts of things. Which would be heart breaking if I were still an Episcopalian. As it is, it is still very sad.
Evangelism – as in persuading people of the truth of the Christian faith and drawing them to accept Christ as Lord. Perhaps I missed it – but so far no discussion at all that I have seen.
Very good, driver8 in #2, that was my first one. I would be interested in other thoughts from blog readers. I am confident there are many I am missing–it is not easy to see these well.
There seems to be no addressing of the devastating losses suffered in TEC over the last 6 years – both in terms of the alarming decline in ASA and giving, and in terms of departed dioceses and parishes. There is no questioning or analysis of how TEC’s leadership has handled the crisis.
I am not sure if I am expressing this correctly. I think that the null curriculum message that is being taught at GenCon 2009 is that orthodoxy does not matter. Kendall, you said that “it is taught by virtue of its absence”. Everything I have read or heard about GenCon supports this. Here and there is an expression of sadness, neutral comment, glee sense that orthodoxy is irrelevant, but that is very much a minority expression. Some miss the thrust and play of the sword the growing ability to defeat the orthodox (I read comments to that effect from some of the liberal bloggers)
I think that the great danger for the liberal wing of TEC, that perhaps they have not considered, is in the pews and amongst the clergy. This ‘null curriculum message’ is going to cause many more orthodox to realize that this is no longer their church and more and more of them will feel the need to leave.
— Personal transformation, repentance, holiness, sanctification
— the cost of discipleship, Philippians 2 preferring others’ interests above our own
Phil 2:3-4
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Also one blogger (I forget who, I read a lot of blog entries this a.m. to catch up after 3 days offline) perceptively noted, there is no sense coming across publicly of folks actively seeking the Lord and waiting for His counsel or power. Just folks going about their own agendas, convinced that their way is right.
Grammar is being taught by its absence? This is a clever, but nonsensical phrase and I do hope others can see this. Its very cleverness makes it hard to see through, but Eisner is to be scored soundly for such meretricious language. A school has only two curricula, the explicit curriculum and the implicit curriculum. The expicit curriculum is to be found in the evaluation materials given to the evaluating treams that ceritfy schools. The implicit curriculum contains, among other things, the belief that grammar is unimportant. Of greaterimportance is the implicit curriculum dealing with character, e.g., that self discipline and self restraint are or are not crucial to intellectual development. Many public schools have made the “non-practice” of self discipline a pervasive environment that students embibe as it were by breathing the air. I might cite as well the separation of effort and reward, e.g., that practice seen most clearly in grade inflation.
But the is no “null curriculum.” This is the sort of jargon that professional education writers use to give a specious rhetorical ingenuity to their efforts to create a new spin on the obvious.
Larry
To be specific, there seem to be no resolutions at this GC dealing with abortion and TEC membership in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (pro-abortion group). In GC06 there were several resolutions (all were killed and never made it to full votes) urging TEC to support life. This GC, nothing that I could find – although several dioceses have passed their own resolutions disowning the Executive Council action in ’06 that committed the entire TEC to the RCRC. Interesting that this issue has been definitively decided at the national level as no longer worthy of discussion.
Larry, the point of the null curriculum is precisely that which you say Eisner has missed: the utter lack of any mention of grammar teaches that grammar is considered unimportant, and that any expressed interest in grammar would be frowned upon as a waste of time, hurtful, non-inclusive, divisive, schismatic. Now does the null curriculum idea seem relevant to TEO?