I am about to start work on a teaching credential at an
Evangelical college. Thankfully, they have not asked me to confirm that I have
undergone a personal experience of being saved. Reading through their course
material, I have discovered that they do insist that a teacher must believe
that all students can learn. I am curious as to what that is supposed to mean.
To use an analogy from Christian theology. Does a teacher
have to follow Origen, who believed that everyone, including Satan, could be
"taught?" Can someone be a "Calvinist" and believe in
double prelapsarian predestination that God decided before the world was even
created who is going to pass my class. God's ways are mysterious and outside
our comprehension so we do not know who will pass and who will fail? Our
Calvinist teacher would have to treat every student as if they could pass even
though he believes that most of them will fail. To further the analogy, the
purpose of Calvinist teaching would be to make sure that, when some students
inevitably fail, they will not have an excuse to complain. They were given
every opportunity to succeed and the only reason they did not was because of
their own shortcomings. Perhaps my school follows a John Wesley approach that
teachers should work with the non-elect to bridge that gap to passing. As a
tutor, this was largely the attitude I took as to my role.
My position is that I do not honestly know if every student
can succeed. If a student walks into my class, though, my job is to try to
help. I am not allowed to give up on a student and must be willing to fight for
them. A practical implication of this is that I would not actively lobby the
administration to have a student removed nor would I tell a student that they
should have themselves transferred to a lower class.
