Abstract
Dr. Evan Runner set out a stirring vision of countercultural life in North America under the Lordship of Christ at conferences in Ontario, Canada, in 1959 and 1960. He rejected educational compromise with mainstream society, rejecting any dualism of secular and sacred realms. Runner inspired youth from Dutch Calvinist homes in Canada who took their bearings from Abraham Kuyper, reforming Christian prime minister of the Netherlands, with an unforgettable vision that “all of life is religion.” In subsequent decades, some of Kuyper’s followers sought to express his dissident vision by developing a school system of cultural resisters.
In the years after WWII, immigrant Dutch Calvinists developed a Canada-wide network of their own schools and supportive administrations. But lacking a curriculum and pedagogy that expressed the Kuyperian Reformed vision for holistic Christian witness in society, the Canadian network, like the comparable American one, defaulted toward public schooling models. John E. Hull, a veteran of four decades of curricular and teacher-education projects for separate Christian education, tells the story of this curricular reform movement. Educational reform is not for the faint of heart. His story has gripping highs, terrible lows, and plenty of colorful players.
Hull’s principal narrative is in three parts, corresponding to active phases of Dutch Calvinist curricular reform, 1945–1970, 1970–2000, and 2000–2022. His approach is historical, relegating six “Dig Deeper” topics and his memoir to appendices. Part one of the main section relates how Calvinists in Holland after 1800 defied the liberalizing Enlightenment mindset that prevailed in Holland after Napoleon’s occupation. They struggled for decades for national school reform and schooling that would nurture their children in Christian faith and gained separate schools in 1848. A separate school system required supporting institutions including a Kuyperian university established in 1880. Kuyperians sought Christian expressions in education and cultural life including the spheres of family, state, church, art, agriculture, and the sciences. Post-WW2 Calvinist immigrants to Canada brought a commitment to a dissenting alternative culture, even more than had Calvinist immigrants to the US from the middle 1800s onward. For the new Canadians, Runner fanned the flame in 1959–1960.
By Hull’s second period, 1970–2000, educators realized that curriculum and pedagogy was insufficient to achieve the countercultural vision. Hull’s second period saw a golden age of philosophical scholarship for countercultural Christian expression. Its authors reached an international audience, notably including Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brian Walsh, and Richard Middleton. In this heady milieu, Canadian Calvinist schooling developments included an unusual series of teacher-led curriculum development efforts culminating in an integrated early-years curriculum which achieved international circulation, plus an amazing curriculum writing center pioneered by four female teacher-academics. Realizing that the standard school division of curriculum into distinct subjects afforded little or no scope for students to live their Christian learning, the curriculum writing center sought to develop a series of integrated interdisciplinary curriculum documents for all years. Unfortunately, the center fell apart in a series of missteps in funding, personnel, and naivete about the difficulty of making a curriculum revolution stick in classrooms.
Hull’s third period succeeded in developing a curriculum for transformation that is widely adopted and supported across Canada. Reformers including Harry Fernhout urged that subject or disciplinary specialization worked against life application; the new development crossed disciplines to encourage student discipleship within schooling. Ironically enough, intellectual and practical supports for integrated curriculum and funding for Reformed classrooms came only when one Western Canadian province’s public school system accommodated the province’s separate schools in its system. The transformational curriculum is in different stages of implementation across the Canadian network.
The book’s title might lead readers to expect a general exhortation to hope, like Bob Goudzwaard’s Hope in Troubled Times (Baker Academic, 2007). Instead, Hull’s book is about specific hope for educational ventures, coming from his decades of perseverance and a measure of success. Alternative school education is possible; Hull’s story reveals both how possible and how difficult it is. In telling the curricular reform story, Hull connects for all educators how a philosophy of education must go through tough translations to nuts-and-bolts curriculum writing and pedagogical reform. For any reader who is troubled by the disconnect of high educational aims from educational practice and at Christian schooling’s results on the ground, his book is a tonic. I know no other account of a movement in which theological vision translates into transformative schooling for the next generation. In higher education, a parallel account of a movement for consistent Christian education, though not a hopeful one, is Douglas Sloan’s Faith and Knowledge (Westminster John Knox Press, 1997). Hull’s publisher says with good warrant, “(E)ducators from diverse ideological backgrounds … can learn important lessons … about the implementation of an alternative educational vision, teacher-led curriculum reform and a self-formative pedagogy.” Hull’s book is cause for hope indeed.