About this Resource

Educating Toward Wisdom is a resource for school leaders and teachers to build on the current strengths of their school and to bring renewal to various aspects of their school. School leaders need to stimulate ongoing dialogue about what it means to be a Christ-centered learning community in which students, parents, and teachers build a shared vision, develop and implement a dynamic curriculum, provide a learning-centered pedagogy, and value life-connected assessment. Educating Toward Wisdom challenges schools to improve themselves from the inside out. It is not prescriptive but is designed to be adapted in local communities so that schools can become stronger and better learning communities.

A learning community should lead us into caring for ourselves and our fellow human beings, it should help us think and act with intelligence, sensitivity, and courage, and to be faithful to God’s call and claim on our lives. A learning community should educate ourselves and our students in ways that make it probable that we

• become competent swimmers in an ocean of information,
• develop knowledge from being fed mind-nourishing food,
• come to understanding by believing and seeing God’s word of life in all created things,
• search for meaning and find wisdom in hearing, uncovering, and following God’s laws for life.

Educating Toward Wisdom came together in the midst of the journey of Christian education in which members of learning communities often find themselves asking each other, “But where can we fi nd wisdom? Where and how do we reach understanding? (Job 28:12)

Michael Card sings:

The Way of Wisdom starts out
With a step of holy fear
And it makes its way alone
By every good word that you hear
It has to do with passion
And it has to do with pain
It has to do with One
Who has both died and rose again

The Way of Understanding lies
In not how much you know
For the pathway is a Person
That you come to love and so
You can stop pretending