Further reflection on teaching, fundamentalism, and China
My fourteen years of formal teaching was a precious experience. There were many aspects to this. But, I’ll just relate two experiences which made their mark on my spiritual journey.
In an A-level mechanics class I was teaching in the early eighties, was a student who was a Jehovah’s Witness. After a few weeks, this pleasant young man decided to leave school and his studies because his religion had taught him that we were living in the ‘End Times’ and his life would be better used to go house to house to warn people about their impending doom - unless they adhered to the beliefs that he had. That was about forty years ago, and I don’t know what he might believe now.
A few years later I was one of a small group of UK teachers visiting China (before the big changes happened), invited to compare what motivated young people in China with the motivations of young people in the UK. One evening we had dinner with several local communist party officials. They raised the subject of Marx’s comment of religion being ‘The Opium of The People’.
I didn’t mention my student, but I could understand their concern about the disengaging effect of some religious beliefs on social challenges. However, they were interested in the fact that, on the contrary, my Christian beliefs played a part in motivating me towards bringing change to what is wrong in society.
This visit to China had come about because on several occasions, when a formal teacher, I had invited groups of students to our home for discussion evenings with interesting people who they would never normally meet. On one occasion, I had invited two senior diplomats from the Chinese Embassy to meet with seventeen of the senior students from the school, and speak on the topic of why they felt it was ‘Necessary to have Communism in China in the first place, and how it had worked out in practice, – the strengths and the weaknesses!’ A healthy discussion ensued.
It was a really worthwhile experience for my students, but also the Chinese diplomats to meet in this way. Neither had had such an experience before. It was this which led to my invitation to China mentioned above.
These occasions were before the massive changes that have happened in China since then. But, at that time one motivation I detected in the young people we met there was:
‘Serve the people.’
Such experiences have all fed into my ponderings about what motivates people into the belief systems they/we hold, and actions they/we take; religious or otherwise.