[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello friends i'm elizabeth urbanowicz with foundation worldview and i'm so excited for you to join me today for this session on teaching elementary students to discern wrong world views now if you joined me for our previous session you saw that we explored several essential steps for cultivating a biblical worldview in elementary students we looked at three essential steps first we saw that we need to make sure that we ourselves understand what the biblical worldview teaches about different topics then we saw that we need to directly instruct our students in these worldview concepts and then finally we must then ask worldview questions in every single subject that we teach in this session we will explore one more vital piece in biblical worldview instruction and this piece is training our students to discern the false world view ideas that confront them every day now i began to see this need early on in my teaching career i saw a variety of different situations in my classroom where all of the sudden my eyes were opened up to the fact that the students in my care were just absorbing all of these false ideas from our culture one story that sticks out took place towards the end of a school day i was in the middle of teaching a lesson and the lesson involved smart board slides and our classroom projector went on the fritz so i gave my students instructions for something they needed to do and then i turned around to fiddle with the wires on the projector before i called the tech guy and as i was fiddling with the wires i heard one of my students say guys this is so stressful we totally need to meditate to stay calm and in the time that it took for me to hear that statement stop fiddling with the wires and turn around half of my class was on the floor with their legs crossed their arms out like this their eyes closed saying um um when i recovered from my shock i said okay everybody needs to go back to their seats and we need to talk about this i said boys and girls the type of meditation that you were doing does not come from the christian worldview it comes from eastern religions that teach that we need to empty our minds and detach ourselves from everything well my students had really blank looks on their faces i might as well have been speaking to them in an eastern language this situation and many others like it showed me the vital need for instructing my students in the beliefs of false worldviews now when you think about comparative worldview instruction for elementary students you might be thinking isn't that for high school students and if your school has a high school maybe in the junior or senior class they have a class directly instructing them in comparative world views and classes like that are vital they're so important however if our students are absorbing ideas from the culture in the elementary years and we wait until their high school years to directly instruct them in why these teachings are false we are wasting years and years of valuable time in fact when we wait until the high school years for this type of instruction what the teachers in the high school need to do is they need to be very reformative in their instruction they need to tear down the faulty ways of thinking and the false ideas and assumptions and they need to lay down the correct ways of thinking now we know as elementary educators that critical thinking skills begin to form in the elementary years so we can capitalize on this and right when these critical thinking skills are starting to form we can equip our students to carefully evaluate every idea that they encounter this way our instruction can be formative in nature rather than reformative now when i first thought through exposing the students in my classrooms to the ideas of competing worldviews the claim i kept running up against is well biblical worldview training is enough as long as we train our students to have a biblical worldview they'll be prepared to confront these lies and i started wondering where this pushback came from and i kept coming across an analogy that is very popular in the christian community you may have heard it before the analogy goes like this when federal agents are trained to detect counterfeit they aren't shown every single possible form of counterfeit all they are shown is the true currency over and over and over again therefore when they come across a counterfeit they can detect it like that so the analogy therefore goes if we want to instruct our students in a biblical worldview all we need to do is show them the true currency we don't need to expose them to every single idea that's out there we just train them in the biblical worldview and then once they encounter a false idea they'll be able to pick it up immediately now this analogy is good up to a point we know that we do need to be instructing our students in a biblical worldview more than anything else we need to make sure that we are incorporating scripture into everything that we do however this analogy contains a faulty presupposition this analogy presupposes that federal agents are already thoroughly convinced that there is only one true form of currency and that that form of currency is printed and backed by the government now this is a fair presupposition in that part of the analogy because even counterfeiters believe there's only one true form of currency they just choose not to play by those rules however it's a false assumption to think that the students in our classroom are already thoroughly convinced that there is only one true worldview and that that worldview is the biblical worldview now when our students are in preschool kindergarten first grade that is a pretty fair assumption because we know we could say anything we could tell them that the sky was green and they would believe us however starting around second grade our students begin to think critically and start questioning things and they're not always thoroughly convinced that scripture is true and even if they are one day they won't be i learned this the hard way when i was teaching several years ago i was assigned to speak in the 3rd through 5th grade chapel at the christian school where i taught and i knew that i was going to be speaking in chapel several months before it occurred so i spent time praying through what i would talk about and as i was praying through this the idea that kept coming to my mind was to speak on the reliability of scripture how we know that the bible is true now when this idea first crossed my mind i laughed out loud and i thought what 8 9 or 10 year old has ever wondered whether or not we can trust the bible so i put that idea to the side and kept praying through what i should speak on but i kept coming back to this idea the reliability of scripture so eventually i said okay lord i think it's your holy spirit that's guiding me to speak on this topic i'm not sure and if it if it's not you that's guiding me well then everybody's probably going to leave chapel scratching their heads but at least they'll be no worse for the wear now before i began developing my presentation i developed a three question survey to give out to all of the third fourth and fifth graders about 175 of them at the time i just wanted to know has anyone ever wondered this question before and if so what questions do they have about the bible so the survey had three questions first what grade are you in second have you ever wondered whether or not we can trust the bible and third if so what questions do you have now when i got the survey results back i only counted a yes answer if the student had a legitimate question because i could have planted the idea in their mind now i was thinking probably none of my third graders would ever have wondered this question before maybe a few fourth graders and a handful of fifth graders i was thinking at most ten percent of the third through fifth graders when i got the survey results back i was floored 79 of the third through fifth graders at our school said yes i have wondered whether or not we can trust the bible and they had excellent questions the bible was written a long time ago how do we know that the bible we have today is the bible that was the same way back then you know what if the bible was just written by somebody who was trying to trick us like what if those guys wanted to be in charge so they said god told them something but they didn't really hear anything from god what about the muslims they have a book how do we know that our book is the one that's true and not theirs now these are legitimate questions and questions to which there are very satisfying answers to but i had to take a step back and repent and say lord i am so sorry here you were clearly leading me to speak on the reliability of your word and i thought no one was thinking about this now here i am in my classroom every day passionately teaching the word of god to my students and i never bothered to take a step back and help them see how the biblical narrative lines up with reality in a way that no other worldview does oz guinness has a quote that i love and that just encapsulates what we want for our students he says contrast is the mother of clarity i always wonder at the gospel more when i see the alternatives and that is exactly what we want for our students through contrasting the biblical worldview with other worldviews we want them to see the truth and goodness and beauty of the biblical worldview now when i first saw the need for doing this for actually exposing my students to the ideas of other worldviews i started asking others who were older and wiser than myself how do you do this and now the most common response that i got was well this happens organically it happens in class discussions that come up it happens as we're walking through the halls on the way to pe it happens as we're eating lunch it happens as the students are packing up at the end of the day and i thought well this makes sense if a worldview is all-encompassing then it makes sense that we're going to have these worldview discussions that happen organically but then i thought of another situation i thought of parent-teacher conferences and i thought what if during a parent-teacher conference one of my students parents sits down with me and says mr banowitz tell me about what you're doing in math this year and i responded by saying uh we just love math in this classroom you know what math is so important that it happens all the time organically it happens in the middle of class discussions it happens as we're walking down the hall to pe it happens as the students are packing up at the end of the day well if that was my response i know that one of two things would have happened either that parent would have gone to the administrative team and reported an issue or they would have pulled their child out of my class why well if i left mathematic instruction up to the organic moments the students in my classroom would have huge gaps in their understanding of mathematics they wouldn't be able to move on to the next grade level because there would be really missing chunks in their foundation of math so then i started to think if developing a biblical worldview in my students is the most important thing that i can do in my classroom why would i relegate it to the organic moments and that is when i knew that i had to systematically expose my students to the beliefs of other worldviews and equip them to evaluate the truthfulness of those ideas so now the question is how do we do this how do we actually instruct our students in the tenants of other worldviews and prepare them to evaluate these ideas what we're going to look at now are four essential steps for doing this the first step is we need to equip our students to summarize different worldview beliefs they need to actually understand what different worldviews teach the second step is we need to equip them to compare and contrast these worldview beliefs with the biblical worldview third we need to equip them to evaluate the truthfulness of these different worldview beliefs and finally we need to equip them to defend a position now this can sound all great in theory but what does it look like in practice that's what we'll look at now in our previous session we looked at what the biblical worldview teaches about the concept of morality so let's continue with this theme of morality now the first step we need to do is we need to equip our students to summarize worldview beliefs now as elementary educators we know that summarizing is one of the best comprehension strategies we can use with our students that's because in order to summarize something our students need to be able to actually weigh the value of information and they need to pull out the most important pieces of a text or of an idea or of something they've watched and then put those ideas into their own words now in our previous session we looked at what the biblical worldview teaches about morality and that's the first thing that we need to equip our students to do we need to help them understand what does the biblical worldview teach about the concept of morality once they have a solid understanding of what the biblical worldview teaches then we can begin introducing competing worldview beliefs now when i'm working with students on competing worldviews i usually introduce them to four distinct world views in our society now we don't have time today to go through all competing worldviews so we will focus in on one and this is the world you called new spirituality used to be called new age now it's a little bit different but it's focused on eastern religions and bringing them over to our western culture now new spirituality teaches things that are very different about morality than the christian worldview in the new spiritualist worldview the belief is that every person has part of god or a higher consciousness in them so i have part of god in me you have part of god in you and because we have this part of god in us we are going to inherently know in our hearts what the right thing is to do so my moral obligation is to follow my heart your moral obligation is to follow your heart when we follow our hearts we become better people and we earn good karma so what we want to do is expose our children to this idea and have them pull out the main points some of the differences and similarities with christianity we want them to see the concept of god and how god is within everyone not in the way that it is with christianity and the indwelling of the holy spirit but actually i am part of god and then we want to see that did them to see the difference between following your hearts versus following an objective moral standard now when we're working with our students you may be thinking the students in my classroom i don't know if they could summarize that in words and that's okay we know as educators another great way to summarize is through pictures so if we're working with younger students we can read them information about a different worldview and have them draw a summary picture to represent what they learned and this in some ways can be even more powerful than writing a word summary we know that this is what's called a non-linguistic representation so having our students summarize through pictures is also powerful now after we've had students summarize the beliefs of different worldviews that's when we want to have them dive in to compare and contrast these beliefs with the biblical worldview now as educators we know comparing and contrasting is a powerful learning strategy that's because in order to be able to compare and contrast two ideas our students need to have a solid understanding of what these two things are then they need to be able to break these things down to their different parts and pick out what parts are similar and what parts are different now when we're looking at these two different world views we don't see too much that's similar with the teachings of right and wrong the one thing that we do see is both christianity and new spirituality teach that humans should do the right thing there's a should or an ought there that both worldviews teach however there's many differences for example christianity teaches that right and wrong are truths that are outside of us where new spirituality teaches that right and wrong are feelings that are going to change from person to person christianity teaches us that we should follow the rules to reflect god because these rules moral rights reflect his character where the motivation in new spirituality is to earn good karma the christian worldview also teaches us that we cannot live a perfect moral life that's why jesus came to rescue us from our sin but new spirituality is very different we don't see a rescuer in new spirituality in new spirituality as long as we're following our hearts we are our own savior now once we've equipped our students to compare and contrast different worldview beliefs then we want to have them evaluate which teachings line up with reality or which teachings actually show how things are in our world and which teachings don't now sometimes for us as adults this can be confusing mainly because we have a tendency to overthink things but with kids this is usually super easy the first year i started teaching a comparative worldview class before i even got to this evaluation or evaluating ideas part the kids in my class were evaluating the different ideas they came across one little boy in my class as soon as he learned about the new spiritualist concept of right and wrong he raised his hand he said uh excuse me miss you i am super confused i said what are you confused about and he was like well okay so if i'm supposed to follow my heart to know what's right let's say my heart tells me that it's right for me to get a playstation but my dad's heart tells him it's not right for me to get a playstation then who's right so i said oh interesting so are you telling me that our hearts are gonna tell us different things about right and wrong and he said uh yeah like all the time so then i said well tell me in this situation if you thought it was right to get a playstation and your dad didn't think it was right who's actually gonna win out and he was like my dad i said well why he's like well because he's the biggest and the strongest and he's the one that has the money and i said oh so you mean that if we just have to follow our hearts the person who's the biggest and the strongest and the most powerful they're the person whose heart we all have to follow and he said yeah i guess so our students can very easily see where worldview ideas line up with reality and where they don't now the fourth thing that we want to do is we want to equip our students to defend a position to actually ask them which worldview presents an idea about right and wrong that best aligns with truth and then have them take a side and come up with evidence to defend their position now when we do this it's also important that we allow our students to defend a non-biblical position if that's what they believe this is important because we want to make sure that if our students don't believe the biblical worldview is true that we know about it when we still have the opportunity to guide them through these different questions and to walk through life with them and then the great thing about the biblical worldview is it's true it actually lines up with reality so if our students try to defend a position that's not the biblical position they're going to keep bumping up into reality now when i started instructing my students in comparative worldview education one of the unexpected outcomes was that my students actually took hold of their own education they started implementing these worldview principles without any prompting for me one year a fourth grade teacher came down to my classroom and she said how do you get your students to think so critically through every subject and i asked her what happened and it turned out that year she was leading her class through a novel study that took place in nazi germany and she was talking with her class about hitler's final solution and his hatred for the jews and two boys from my class the previous year piped up and one boy said you know it's probably not so much that hitler hated the jews but it probably has to do with his view of a human and the other boy said yeah if he thinks humans are just bodies not souls and that we got here accidentally it makes sense that he would just be helping evolution along and the teacher said she stared at them for a minute and then said yes that's correct and it was so exciting to see how when students were trained to evaluate every idea they encounter they can implement this kind of critical thinking on their own now before we end our time together let's review the four essential steps that we discussed first we need to equip our students to summarize worldview beliefs next we need to prepare them to compare and contrast worldview beliefs then we need to equip them to evaluate the truthfulness of these different beliefs and finally equip them to take a position and defend it now comparative worldview education may be a new idea for many of us if you are looking for more direct guidance in this i suggest you go to my website foundationworldview.com when you're there you can look up blogs about the beliefs of different worldviews you can also check out the comparative worldview curriculum that we have for elementary students and finally you can look at the different professional development opportunities that we have thank you so much for joining me today for this session as we leave my prayer for you is that as you enter this new school year you will equip your students to confront the false ideas that face them every day and understand the unchanging truth of the biblical worldview [Applause] [Music] you