Der US-amerikanische Philosophe Nicholas Wolterstorff beschreibt in seinem Aufsatz “Teaching for Shalom” – wie auch in anderen Aufsätzen, die im Band “Ecducating for Shalom” (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids 2004) enthalten sind – vier Modelle christlicher Bildung. Er hat sie über mehrere Jahrzehnte selber erlebt:
1. Christian service model: The idea is that the goal of Christian collegiate education is to train students to enter Christian service.
2. Humanist Education: Authentic education is for liberation and emancipation from the closed-in particularities of one’s specific historical and social situation into the wide-open possibilities of humanity’s understandings, imaginings, and desirings as a whole.
3. Education for Maturation or Socialization: The maturationist holds that for schooling should be substituted an arena of childish self-indulgence from which all that might contain impulse and inclination and turn them into deliberate and knowledgeable choice has been purposely removed.
4. Education for Academic Discipline: On this model the goal of education is to introduce students to the academic disciplines, thereby putting them in touch with reality to the extent and in the way that theory does that – doing so, let it be immediately added, in Christian perspective.
Wolterstorff vermisste in allen Modellen den Bezug zu einer gebrochenen Welt.
I began to reflect that in addition to cultivating knowledge in our students, along with abilities, we must also cultivate dispositions, inclinations. … You are not going to change somebody’s political behavior just by putting political theory in front of him or her.
Diesen Bezug zu schaffen, arbeitet er in seinem Modell “Educating for Shalom” aus:
There can be no shalom without justice. Justice is the ground floor of shalom. In shalom each person enjoys justice, enjoys his or her rights. … I propose that the moral wounds of the world also find a place in our curricula, and that we ask how we ought to respond to such wounds.
Wie kann dies umgesetzt werden? Wolterstorff sieht vier Wege:
(A)t least these four phenomena that shape our embodied moral characters: discipline in a broad sense, modeling, casuistry, and face-to-face confrontation with suffering.
