Education and Eschatology

As some of you may know, I am a substitute teacher. Along with substitute teaching one of my weekly activities is working with the Junior High group at my church, Action Company. Every now and again, I will substitute in a Junior High class. This past Friday, I subbed for a 6th grade English class. This was only my second time back to the classroom for the 2008-2009 school year. Well, this experience prompted me to start thinking about the needs of Junior High students. I wonder how might a teacher inspire these youths to robust human flourishing? Being a theologian by trade, I have concluded that the place teachers must begin with is eschatology. What do you mean by eschatology is what you are probably wondering? What I am trying to get at is that most of these students have either no vision for the future or one that is severely truncated, seeing as it is most certainly formed by the pop media culture we raise our youth on. This is an utter and complete travesty. What students need to counter the banal narratives they drink in from the T.V., radio, and Internet is a robust eschatology – a deep, real vision of possibilities held by the future. They need to see that there is a future that is possible, which challenges the status quo of their lives. What has been need not be! This is what an eschatological vision offers to these young people. How might we, as educators, begin to offer young people an alternative eschatology? (This is an important question that needs to be wrestled with by all Junior High teachers. I only offer a few suggestions at this point.) I think this can happen in a number of ways. First, we must name the narratives our students are receiving for the scripts that they are. In naming these narratives as scripts, we can then show them that multiple scripts are on offer. The script offered by MTV is not the only one available. Second, we need to be storytellers, purveyors of alternative narratives for young people to embrace and live within. This can take a number of forms. It can be through pedagogical methods, lesson structures, and the texts offered to the students. Third, educators must exhibit the influence of a robust eschatology within their own lives. If we have no alternative eschatology ourselves, then our teaching will certainly be hallow and unconvincing. Educators must speak and live prophetically against the status quo. They must not simply be cogs in the wheels of the dominant culture pushing America along. These are a few suggestions, which deem more conversation.

I want to make one more point about this whole issue of eschatology and youth education. Central to eschatology is imagination. Eschatology beckons us into the future and in doing this opens up new vistas on the future. While eschatology is the end, imagination is the means to the end, the key that opens the door to the future, so to speak. If imagination is intimately related to eschatology then it is young people, those who have not yet had their imaginations domesticated and solidified who have the greatest opportunity to embrace a robust eschatological vision for the future. Thus it seems Junior High is the most opportune and crucial time for offering radical eschatology to persons.