One of my children recently decided not to take Geography at GCSE.
His decision wasn't really about Geography. In fact, he enjoyed much of the subject. What troubled him was something deeper: the story about the world he felt he was being invited to inhabit. As he reflected on lessons about globalisation, environmental challenges and international development, he found himself increasingly overwhelmed by the sense that the future was being presented as bleak and fragile and where injustice was always passing unchecked. This was making him unbearably anxious.
As our conversations continued, he began to notice similar themes elsewhere in school life. For example, relationships education often seemed framed around risk and harm, road safety messaging focused on the possibility of death and serious injury, mental health discussions often centred on anxiety and vulnerability and trips into town were accompanied by warnings about exploitation and County Lines.
None of these issues were invented. They are genuine concerns and his school is right to address them. Yet, taken together, they appeared to be telling a bigger story:
- The world is dangerous.
- People are vulnerable.
- The future is uncertain and bleak.
- School is the place that might keep you safe.
Whether this was the intended message, it was the narrative he had none-the-less absorbed.
For me, it raised fascinating questions around the philosophy of education and about who determines the narrative that pupils ingest.
Education today often seems to centre on the transmission of knowledge and skills. But who gets to decide which knowledge and skills and why? And schools clearly do much more than this knowledge and skills transmission. They shape habits, assumptions, aspirations and ways of seeing the world. They help young people answer questions such as:
- What kind of world is this?
- What makes a good life?
- What should be feared?
- What should be hoped for?
- How should we relate to one another?
In other words, schools are not simply educating. They are forming.
The language schools use reveals this clearly. Schools aim to develop ‘resilient learners’, ‘courageous advocates’, ‘responsible citizens’, ‘changemakers’, ‘leaders of the future’ and ‘global citizens’. These are not statements about what pupils know. They are statements about who pupils are becoming.
The myth of neutral education
So, who gets to decide what pupils are being formed into? Trevor Cooling’s work Doing God in Education (Theos, 2010)1 makes a compelling case that education is never value-free. Every curriculum, every behaviour policy, every pastoral approach and every vision statement is built upon assumptions about what matters, what constitutes flourishing and what kind of people we hope young people will become. Education is always shaped by somebody's understanding of reality and the good life.
The idea that schools can simply provide neutral information, untouched by values, is difficult to sustain. They choose which stories are taught. They choose which issues are emphasised. They choose which risks are highlighted. They choose the virtues that are celebrated. All of this, and more, communicates a vision of what it means to be human. This means that the real debate is not between formation and neutrality. Rather, it is between different visions of formation.
When formation becomes visible
What fascinated me most about my son's observation was what happened next as I shared it with his Headteacher. Rather than becoming defensive, he became curious. As we talked, he recognised that no member of staff had deliberately set out to construct a narrative of fear or to leave pupils in a pit of anxiety. Each decision had been reasonable in isolation. Safeguarding messages were important. Environmental issues mattered. Relationship education addressed genuine concerns. Human Geography had been taught using extreme examples to make the lessons more memorable. And yet, when combined, these messages may have been communicating something neither intended nor examined.
The Headteacher subsequently began exploring the values and assumptions being communicated across the life of the school. Not simply the values printed on posters or written into strategic plans, but the deeper narrative emerging from hundreds of everyday choices. He started asking whether school life was creating pupils who were hopeful for or fearful of the future.
For me, our conversation reinforced something important: that the most powerful formation can happen unintentionally. Schools do not normally sit down and decide to teach children that the world is frightening. Yet pupils were absorbing such messages all the same.
Why Christianity enters the conversation
In Dominion, the secular historian, Tom Holland, argues that many of the values modern Western societies regard as self-evident, like human equality, individual dignity, concern for the vulnerable, equality before the law and the moral significance of compassion, are not universal assumptions that emerged naturally. Instead, they have been shaped by centuries of Christian influence.
Holland does not argue that Christianity is necessarily true, nor that people should become Christians – he merely observes that the Judeo-Christian worldview has had a profound impact on the shaping of western liberal society. So much so, that many modern people continue to hold moral instincts that are deeply rooted in a Christian understanding of the world, even when they no longer recognise their origins. As he puts it, Western culture remains saturated with Christian assumptions, often hidden in plain sight.
Whether one accepts all of Holland's conclusions or not, his work reinforces Trevor Cooling's challenge: if education is never value-free, and if many of the values modern schools prize emerged from a Christian inheritance, why is the Christian story so often treated as an optional extra (or worse) rather than as a legitimate contributor to discussions about formation?
Formation in a diverse society
Christianity deserves a place in the conversation around formation. Not because it provides the only perspective worth hearing, but because it offers a coherent and hopeful account of what it means to be human. It speaks of dignity and brokenness, responsibility and forgiveness, suffering and hope. Above all, it offers a story in which the future is not ultimately defined by fear, decline or fragility, but by the possibility of redemption and restoration.
Recognising this does not mean schools should seek to coerce belief. They must not. Pupils from every faith background, and those of none, should be able to engage with ideas freely and with integrity. But openness in a diverse society does not require the exclusion of formative stories. Instead, it invites us to examine them honestly, to understand the assumptions they carry, and to consider what vision of humanity they encourage young people to inhabit.
My son recognised a story of anxiety and fragility. His Headteacher recognised that the story had emerged unintentionally. Neither of them was really debating Geography, safeguarding or relationships education. They were grappling with a much deeper question:
What vision of reality is our school helping young people inhabit?
Perhaps that is ultimately the question that sits beneath every conversation about curriculum, culture, character and spiritual development.
At CPAS, we are increasingly helping churches and schools explore the relationship between formation, spiritual development and the Christian story. If these issues resonate with you, you can find further articles, training opportunities and practical resources at www.cpas.org.uk/schools