Sacred vs Secular

Imagine for a moment, that Jesus calls his disciples together at the end of his three-year period with them, and gives them the following commission: "Dear brothers, it is now time for you to share what you have learned from me. However, as you share with others be sure that you keep what I taught you separate from your work life. The principles I have shared with you only apply in situations outside your work life. Do not make them fit into this context. The miracles you saw in me can only be done in certain situations outside work life. Keep this in mind when thinking about praying for the sick or the lost. These truths will not work in the marketplace.” It might sound ludicrous, but...

How are we doing as community?

Henri Nouwen says that‘Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.’ People are porcupines – prickly … dangerous…lethal.

But God calls us to community. He achieves his purposes through community. He makes us whole through community.

A Biblical Worldview integrated into education

At The King's School, we regard Christian education as fundamentally different to secular education. Our programme is thus uniquely directed in this way. The idea of the integration of faith and learning is that there should be a deliberate and systematic process of approaching the entire educational enterprise - both curricular and co-curricular- from a Christian perspective. It's aim is to ensure that students, by the time they leave school, will have freely internalized biblical values and a view of knowledge, life and destiny that is Bible-based, Christ-centered, service-oriented, and kingdom-directed.

Five initiators of success practised at The King's School

A recently published book, Habitudes for the Journey by Dr Tim Elmore, has used research involving over a million students to isolate the particular attributes that characterise individuals most likely to graduate university and excel at life. Just like numerous studies in the past, it has shown that memorising schoolwork and taking exams are not the essential predictors of future success. Instead, the researchers have pinpointed the following "Big Five":

The three R's of Spiritual Formation

More than 100 years ago educationists would begin emphasizing the importance of 'the three R's of academics and schooling' - reading, (w)riting and 'rithmetic. Even today these basic fundamentals are recognized as essential elements of good schooling. At The King's School, our academic programme places enormous emphasis on these basic skills, especially in the Foundation Phase, but also in the more senior grades up to Matric.

Yet our school programme is not only about academics.

What universities consider to be the most valuable characteristics in new students

An interesting study was conducted among several universities to find out what they really valued in new students fresh out of the schooling system. As we've seen again and again in the past, high academic achievement, although helpful in a university context, is not always the most valuable predictor of success at a tertiary level. Instead, the universities agreed on a list of ten characteristics that were most helpful to their new intake.

What we must get in Christian schooling - Part 3

There are some things that are vitally important for us to 'get' in Christian schooling. One of these is for us to teach our children that God has created us with purpose and meaning in mind. We are not meant to live our lives in pursuit of personal happiness and comfort. Rather, we should seek to be instruments of God in his mission in the world, the Misseo Dei. If we succeed in this, we will have young people graduating from our school that go out into the world of Architecture, Medicine, Law, Engineering and many others, and transform those sectors by living out God's love, proclaiming his Word and establishing his kingship.

What we must get in Christian schooling - Part 2

There are some things that are vitally important for us to 'get' in Christian schooling. One of these is for us to teach our students that God has relevance, interest and dominion over every subject, every school activity, every moment of every day. Because we tend to compartmentalise our lives and seperate the God part and the 'real living' part of our daily programme, we need to be trained to recapture the integrity and wholeness of God's Lordship.

What we must get in Christian schooling - Part 1

There are some things that are vitally important for us to 'get' in Christian schooling. One of these is for us to know that God is constantly growing us, developing us and changing us. This might not sound like an earth shattering revelation to you, but if you give it some thought, you'll realise how often the devil (and life) draw us away from this basic truth. We easily become convinced that we'll never be able to do something, that we're just not good enough and that we don't have what it takes. Yet God says that he is at work in us and will complete the good work that he has started.

Positioning our kids for future success

Since IQ testing in the middle of the last century, educationists have pondered over the question as to what factors contribute most significantly to students' future success. While IQ was believed to be the major contributor in the early decades, researchers have been overwhelmed with more and more data in recent times showing that factors such as emotional intelligence and executive function are way more important for a student to be successful in later life.