Kairos seeks to enable the Church to educate her children. Before we can accomplish that we need to have an understanding of what education is and what it is not.
What Education Is
To educate is derived from a Latin verb that means "lead out." We are born in darkness and ignorance. A true educator is someone who leads us out of darkness, who thereby enlightens us. An educator in the deepest sense takes one who is ignorant of the right way to live and leads him to a state of knowledge about the way life should be led. The best educator though doesn't stop at the deposit of knowledge. A true educator leads the student to wisdom. Jesus did this with His disciples.
Christian education is simply the process whereby one who is ignorant of the ways of God comes to live by those ways. This process is inherently relational. We cannot learn how to live life from books and videos alone. Jesus walked through life with His disciples and he revealed His ways through the way He lived in front of them. He corrected their misunderstandings by observing their choices and addressing their shortcomings in person and in real time. In that sense, Christian education is something that is accomplished in person, in direct and intimate relationship between one who knows God's ways and those who with whom He walks who do not yet know them.
To walk in God's ways we must know Him. Knowing God is very much more intimate than is merely knowing about Him.
What Education is Not
Education and indoctrination are two very different tools. Just as education leads out, indoctrination leads in. Indoctrination binds where education frees. Those who have been indoctrinated have been given just those facts and tools to interpret the facts that will bind them to agree with their superiors. Such students are all but incapable of rising above the level of their "teachers." They are raised to live as slaves to their masters.
Those who are educated have been given the tools to explore the truth themselves. They are free to agree or disagree, to use what has been given them for good or for ill. Freedom is the fruit of true education, though, it could go without saying that each person so freed may choose slavery, nonetheless.
Modern institutions that are nominally devoted to the education of the children and young adults in our nation generally are not equipped or designed to educate. They do not lead people out of darkness. Rather, they lead people into deeper and deeper levels of indoctrination. How can that be when we spend more money on these institutions than ever before in human history and our children spend more time in school and more time on homework than ever before?
Leading Us Out of The Darkness
Today's world is filled with darkness. This fact may seem a great irony if we simply look at the technological transformation that has characterized this present world. The invention of the internet and its subsequent adoption as the primary vehicle for disseminating information globally has brought an unthinkable amount of data within reach of billions of people who previously could not have had access to even a tiny fraction of that information. However, education is not a matter of data volume, it is a matter of data interpretation, comprehension, and integration. On that front, the internet poses a shocking temptation to paradoxical ignorance.
The paradoxically ignorant person is one whose mind is full of myriad largely disconnected facts. Such an individual possesses immense knowledge but lacks the means to make use of that knowledge to enrich his life or the lives of others. He is like a man who has collected a vast store of fuel to burn in a furnace but who has never learned to activate the furnace. The fuel is nearly useless to him. He may burn an individual piece of fuel, but has no means for providing sustained warmth. Knowledge drives growth if and only if that data can be interpreted, comprehended, and integrated into life. Those three components, when executed properly, constitute wisdom.
Wisdom is the end to which Christian education should lead. It is no accident that Jesus' apostles were not considered the most highly educated men of their day. As they walked with Jesus, they were led out of the darkness of their age. Whereas, those who were considered the academic and religious elite of their day were committed to the darkness and helped to enforce it!