Abstract

Those who find the phrase ‘Christian education’ meaningful may nevertheless mean quite different things when they use it. Others have argued that what is good or bad in education has logically nothing to do with Christian faith so that it is strictly meaningless to talk of Christian education. Others claim that Christian or any other faith-based education is necessarily indoctrinatory and therefore fundamentally anti-educational. In contrast with these reductions of meaning or claims of meaninglessness or necessary indoctrination, I propose a holistic form of Christian education that has as its main aim the promotion of shalom and is relational in pedagogical approach and appropriate for plural contexts and not only those of Christian schools or churches.