Thought for the week: Jenny Webb’s adaptive learning
‘This was simple, I thought.’
The topic of our Children’s Meeting was ‘Food’. How could I approach this in a Quakerly way, while being accessible to children aged between five and nine? I decided to set a simple quiz with true/false answers. One of the questions was: ‘Wasps make honey: true or false?’ This was simple, I thought. But an adult member of our group knew of a Mexican wasp that does make honey (though not for the same reasons that bees do). This provoked a lot of discussion, not only on wasps and bees, but on who had the ‘right’ answer. One child argued that, since I hadn’t known that wasps made honey when I set the quiz, he had the ‘right’ answer in answering that the statement was false.
This wasn’t the only question that proved controversial. When it came to discussing why it was important to tell the truth, answers ranged from ‘So you don’t get into trouble’, to ‘To be kind to other people’. It turned out that truth, even at this level, was much more complex than I had realised.
How much more complicated it is when we come to talking about truth as one of our testimonies! Janet Scott, in her 1980 Swarthmore Lecture, discussing different models of truth, gives the example of the relationship between the sun and the earth: ‘In one model, the sun goes round the earth, helping us to distinguish direction, east and west and time of day… In the other model we see the earth circling round the sun and part of the vast universe. There is a sense in which this model is more “true”, meaning here perhaps more scientific, but… the former model is more “true” to that experience in which we feel ourselves to be the centre of the universe and see everything as relative to ourselves.’
Janet Scott later uses this as part of her argument that we should be prepared to accept multiple models of God: ‘there is… the Jewish tradition which saw God as active and involved in event, and the Greek metaphysical tradition… attributing to God all perfections in such a way that there was no possibility of God being involved in time and change.’
In Honest to God, John Robinson discusses four different concepts of God, ranging from the benign, parental God ‘up there’, to the belief that God was ‘not projection “out there”… but the very ground of our being’. He quotes Paul Tillich: ‘That depth is what the word “God” means… the depths of your life, the source of your being, or your ultimate concern.’
Robinson concludes his complicated discussion by saying: ‘Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love – about the ultimate ground and meaning of personal relationships.’
Such thoughts were far from my mind when I planned the Children’s Meeting. I had thought that (in addition to playing games and making flapjacks) I would introduce them to the idea of truth. But in the end, it was they who reminded me that our much-cherished testimony raises complicated issues. I learnt from them. And we all had such a good time!
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