I continue this week to highlight elements of our GPCC philosophy of education and practice. Follow this link to the document: Link to PoEP

Three issues any educational philosophy must address are: metaphysics (what is real/reality), epistemology (how do we know anything) and axiology (what is right and good). Don’t worry about the big words because all of us actually think about these issues even if we don’t know the terms for them.

Metaphysics: The philosopher Sartre said, ”Something is there, rather than that nothing is there.” We all recognise that there is a reality to be known, grasped and dealt with. The Christian faith believes in a world that does exist, designed by a personal loving God, which is orderly and able to be explored.

Science cannot provide any answers for us unless we accept it is exploring an essentially orderly universe, that is regulated and able to be explored and understood.  Faith is involved by all who wrestle with reality.  Christians have faith in the real possibility of a Creator God who has ordered the Universe and made it possible for us to know it.

Epistemology: A common human question is, “How can we know anything?”  We recognise that knowledge comes to us through various means such as sense, perception, reason, intuition, language, memory etc.  Epistemological systems assume certain means of attaining knowledge and each construct their view of the world on that basis.

Christians look to God as the source of knowledge through revelation via the creation itself, especially through God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and the person of Jesus Christ – God made plain to us.  Because we believe in a God who reveals Himself, we can confidently explore the world, finding in it evidence of the Creator, and our reason for existence.

Axiology: The preceding positions allow us to hold a position on ethics (how to behave rightly) and aesthetics (what is good and beautiful).  The Christian view holds that the world is not as it should be, it is broken by disobedience to the Creator and so we suffer the consequences.  People behave badly and there is ugliness in the world as well as beauty.

A Christian ethics is not grounded in a belief that we cannot fix ourselves or the world, but in the belief that through the grace of God in Christ, we can have our relationship with God restored and so begin a recovery process toward a wholesome personal and social ethic.

We are drawn to the beautiful and creative because we made in the image of the Creator God. While sin distorts this in us and the world, we can again experience a recovery of this through the work of Christ in restoring us.

The Christian school bases its approach to education on the foundation of these beliefs.

Phillip Nash

Principal