The Price of Silence

Walk into almost any Sunday School in America and - if all is going according to plan - the students will be mostly silent. They're saying little - and doing less.

Is it any wonder most of our teenagers become sullen and won't talk to us, when they've spent their lives in educational institutions that routinely discourage them from speaking?

This ethic - that a classroom where things run right is one in which the students spend most of their time listening to someone else (usually an adult) tell them things is founded on the philosophy that learning = absorption. I don't buy it. Learning happens by doing, and the best evidence of learning is doing.

For example, at our new church construction site, we'd be pretty disappointed if all the construction workers did was sit around and recite figures from the blueprints. If we didn't eventually see some walls and a foundation, we'd start to wonder about the value of all that knowledge. By the same token, maybe the reason we've done such a poor job of transmitting a spiritual legacy is because our kids are never asked to do anything other than give facile answers to our questions (along the lines of "We should be nice to our brothers and sisters" or "We should read our Bibles every day").

In the 4th-6th grade class, we value activity. We value inquiry. We invite participation. If you ask your kid what they did in class and the answer comes back, "not much" or "I just sat there and listened," we really haven't done our job.

Learning happens when students are engaged, connecting new information to old and really thinking through answers. That's why our class uses a lot of questions. It's one thing to tell students what you believe. It's entirely another to have them explain to you what they believe, and why. It's in the process of aligning their thoughts and ideas with those of scripture that learning happens.

A noise-filled room is not the objective, but it's certainly a byproduct of a classroom that is doing what it should. Silence, on the other hand, is not golden - it's deadly.