James K. A. Smith’s fine book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, is deceptive. It’s much more  thought provoking, more engaging than the platitudinous title suggests. It’s really about Christian education. A roll-up-your-sleeves, put-up your-dukes, and go-15-rounds kind of Christian education. Smith is going toe-to-toe with Christian education (and all education) as usual. But you wouldn’t necessarily get that from the title. It is much better than its title.

When using the term “formation,” Smith intends to challenge the long-entrenched notion, embraced even by Christians supposedly committed to baptized versions of  education, that education is about “information” or skills. By contrast, Smith argues that education  is about the formation of Christlike (turn the world upside down types of) Christians.

Smith comes out swinging in the first chapter.

What does liturgy have to do with learning? What does the church have to do with the Christian college?

. . . I have tried to get us thinking about education, or pedagogy, in terms of practices or even rituals. In particular, I’ve been suggesting that education is not primarily a heady project concerned with providing information, rather, education is most fundamentally a matter of formation, a task of shaping and creating a certain kind of people. What makes them a distinctive kind of people is what they love or desire–what they envision as ‘the good life’ or the ideal picture of human flourishing. An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out ’skilled workers’) that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a ‘value-free’ education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. There is no neutral, nonformative education; in short, there is no such thing as a ’secular’ education. (p. 26; emphases added)

Smith is dead on target.

A college education is fundamentally not about producing skilled workers or good little producers and consumers. Even more importantly, Christian colleges are not about producing skilled workers or good little producers and consumers who go to church on Sunday, who pray before producing and consuming,  and who evangelize their fellow producers and consumers. Christian college students and their parents who don’t understand this fundamental point don’t understand even fundamentally what Christian education or classical Christian education is about.

Colleges and all educational institutions are inescapably about creating a people, a way of life. And that, as Smith notes, makes them inescapably “religious.” The great secular lie is that education can be neutral or religiously disconnected as brute-fact data gathering. Formation, religious formation, will still go on. Only the naive or misled won’t notice they’re being formed into good little socialists or pagans or something else. But spiritual, intellectual, cultural formation is happening wherever education is happening.

Conservative evangelical Christians also risk misunderstanding the nature of the formation taking place. On one wing, “doctrinalists,” those who give right doctrine priority over all other aspects of the Christian life, will often confuse education with downloading all the orthodox creeds, confessions, and catechism into our children’s brains, so they won’t forget to dot their “I”s or mis-cross their “T”s. Education in a doctrinalist’s universe means saying the right words, having your doctrines straight, and being worried that somewhere, somehow, someone in your circle doesn’t! It’s okay to be crooked little producers or consumers with the secularists, as long as you get your doctrine straight.

On another wing of conservative Christendom are the “pietists,” who give personal piety priority over all other aspects of the Christian life. Pietists often regard education as so much spiritual wheel-spinning. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere. If it helps you get a job, fine. If it improves your lot in life, fine. But there’s really nothing wrong with having an empty head as long as you have Jesus down in your heart, down in your heart to stay, and you’re out there “soul winning.” Education in a pietist’s universe is really irrelevant or perhaps even dangerous. Too much intellectual effort may take away from personal piety and evangelism.

But as Smith again rightly notes, we are desiring creatures rather than thinking creatures or church going creatures. “What makes us who we are, the kind of people we are, is what we love.” And what we love is our way of life, our religion.

But religion here refers primarily not to a set of beliefs or doctrines, but rather to a way of life. What’s at stake is not primarily ideas but love, which functions on a different register. Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us. This is why I describe the formative ‘civic pedagogies’ of both the church and the mall as liturgies. This is a way of raising the stakes of what’s happening in both. Thinking about such formative pedagogies as liturgies wil help us appreciate that these constittiue an education that is primarily formative rather than merely informative, and that such formation is about matters of ultimate concern.

So, ‘What does this have to do with education?’ I hear someone ask. What does the Christian college have to do with these worship contexts? Are you saying we should quit college and stick to the church? I want to note, up front, that this has two important implications.  . . . First, this model should push us to ask: Just what is a ‘Christian’ education for? What is the aim, or telos, of a Christian education? Second, this should prompt us to rethink a common mantra in Christian schools and colleges, namely, that a Christian education is concerned with providing a Christian worldview. If we think about learning in terms of liturgy–pedagogy as liturgy–then I think we need a rearticulation of the end of Christian education, which will require a reconsideration of worldview-talk as it has come to dominate conceptions of Christian education.

Never was there a more important time to reconsider what a Christian education is for. Even those involved with the rediscovery of the classical model need to reflect more deeply and carefully on what a classical Christian education is for. Questions of curriculum and pedagogy are not sufficient. If the telos of Christian secondary education is merely to go on to get trained at a college or university to be a good little producer or consumer, then the classical model will turn out not to be reformational at all, but the formation of a people for service to the state and the mall.

For those who care deeply about these issues, or who have given little thought to Christian higher education, or who find themselves defending the status quo of our dominant system, then reading Smith’s new book is a must.