1

“Constructivism and Christian Belief.”

Newell, Ted. “Constructivism and Christian Belief.” Presentation at Canadian

Evangelical Theological Association annual meeting, May 27, 2006, York University,
Toronto, Canada.

Is Constructivism Too Subjective?

Constructivism in education is a learning theory, and students in any
education program in North America hear much about it. This article interacts
with constructivism theologically. My thesis is that constructivism alone cannot
be theologically adequate but it locates one of two poles of the educator’s task.
“Constructivism” is a general term for theories that focus attention inward, on
the subject’s appropriation of knowledge, rather than outward, on the objective
world of the subject. If older pedagogy broadly saw education task as introducing
the child to the world of the adult, constructivist education focusses on the child
in a process of constructing an understanding of a world. Constructivism wants
reasoning subjects who not merely repeat knowledge but truly appropriate it –
whether math, language, science, or Christianity. Constructivism subordinates
content to process.
One might associate educational constructivism with project learning in
elementary school or junior high. In church contexts, curriculum purveyors make
claims for active learning, for instance in Sunday school curricula or vacation
Bible school programs. Group has developed the active learning Sunday school,
quite different to the older Standard Publishing or David C. Cook content-
oriented materials. The multiple learning styles of CE consultant Marlene Lefever
are from Howard Gardner, a constructivist source.
Constructivisms in disciplines other than education may readily come to
mind. Psychology has a movement by the same name, “constructivism,” and uses
some of the same theorists, with at least five journals and numerous associations,
networks, etc. Robert Kegan’s well-known work, The Evolving Self, is
constructivist psychology. Thomas Kuhn’s relativist history and philosophy of
science is a kin; sociology of knowledge also has affinity, and we could add
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poststructuralist literary theories. Broadly, these movements build upon the

insight that the noumenal, or things as they are, is unknown and unknowable.
A passion propels constructivist educators: the end of dead learning.
Constructivism’s driving force is the perception that much education is irrelevant
to the learner. The age-old model is repeat or recite: Goodlad characterizes this
education as “a lot of teacher talk and a lot of student listening...; almost
invariably closed and factual questions; little corrective feedback and not
guidance; and predominantly ... configur[ed] around traditional activities--all in
a virtually affectless environment.” 12 Constructivists contrast content-centred
teaching with child centered facilitating, instructivism with constructivism.
Constructivists see genuine education as bottom up instead of top down.
Constructivists want to end schooling’s deadening effect. They say that the newer
approach is based on how people actually learn, as opposed to what we imagine.3
The revolution might be only in pedagogy or a psychology of learning, without
epistemological import.4 But not so. Some theorists claim more than trivial
constructivism. The source of educational irrelevance is wrong-headed
epistemology. Some theorists affirm that the world is just not “there,” able to be
conveyed in verbal, cognitive, lecture form by a talking head. Rather, subjects
construct their worlds.
Perhaps the major living constructivist theorist is Ernst von Glasersfeld,
emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and still active at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Von Glasersfeld’s radical
constructivism states that it is impossible for a subject to know the external
world. He writes,
Radical constructivism… is an unconventional approach to the problem of
knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no
matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking
subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis
of his or her own experience. What we make of experience constitutes the only
world we consciously live in. … [A]ll kinds of experience are essentially
subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may
not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same.”5

1 Holloway
2 Goodlad, J. I. 1984 A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future NY McGraw Hill 242
3 B&B.
4 Rowlands- Carson -4.
5 p.1 - ‘Growing Up Constructivist’, in, ‘Radical Constructivism - A Way of Knowing and Learning’.
http://www.oikos.org/radcon.htm ret May 10, 2006.
 3

Von Glasersfeld draws from Jean Piaget, whose fifty years of research developed a biological
view of knowing. Knowledge is never of a real world; the real world, the world in itself, is
unknowable, like Immanuel Kant’s noumena. Knowledge is adaptation, useful to survival. Piaget
writes, “My central aim has always been the search for the mechanisms of biological adaptation
and the analysis and epistemological interpretation of that higher form of adaptation which
manifests itself as scientific thought.”6
The affinity of von Glasersfeld with Thomas Kuhn’s reconstruction of science
is clear in this paragraph:
When scientists observe, they categorize their observations by fitting them
into concepts which they have formed on the basis of prior experience. These
concepts are not given. They are the result of imaginative abstractions from a
particular way of seeing or sensing. These ways of seeing or sensing are those
of particular scientists. And when scientists explain, they do it by relating
things to one another - and the relations they use, again, are not given, but are
the result of their own abstracting from the mental operations they carried out
in order to combine what they have seen or sensed.7
“Fitting observations into concepts” is similar to the way Kuhn explained
normal science as fitting facts into a reigning paradigm. Kuhn’s 1962 book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions overturned the idea that science accumulates
more and more data on the way to a accurate picture of reality. Instead of a
gradual accretion, discoveries or "scientific revolutions" herald the dawn of new
paradigms which supersede old facts. Von Glasersfeld’s constructions are like
Kuhn’s paradigms. Similarly, Piaget says that traditional epistemology does not
account for change or development; it is static. His account of scientific knowing
is pragmatic. Real developments in the sciences reveal their norms.8
Piaget also follows the understanding of Kant that ways of knowing are built in to the child.
The mind per Kant is not a blank slate like the empiricists said; basic categories of knowing such
as time and space are innate, and Piaget follows this understanding. As the child moves toward
the most sophisticated adaptation to the environment, structures succeed one another. Piaget’s
structures are less innate than potential. They are constructed. For example, a well-known
experiment by Piaget was to ask children to discern whether the amount of liquid in a wider glass
was the same as in a narrow glass with the liquid is at the same height in both. At the pre-
operational stage, from about age 2 to 6 or 7, children say the liquid is the same. At the
subsequent concrete operational stage, ages six to eleven or so, children recognize that a wider
glass has a bigger volume. Only after age 12 or so is a Formal Operations stage possible when the
child can reason by abstraction. Hence, Piaget called himself a genetic epistemologist. Thinking is
adapting. Education is facilitating new constructions. To Piaget and von Glasersfeld, a fact makes
sense within a pre-existing scheme – a perturbance adds to a construction, or challenges a

6 Piaget, 1977a, p.XI in V G Piaget homage

7 Von Glasersfeld, either Piaget Hom or Radical
8 in a 1968 lecture at Columbia
 4

construction. Knowledge is from actions. “Human knowledge is essentially active.” Education is a

series of transformations.
In tying knowing to evolutionary biology, von Glasersfeld and Piaget line up with the earlier
progressive educator John Dewey. Dewey’s epistemology is pragmatic. He sees that the human
race has learned by adapting to its environment. Adaptations may be superseded for more useful
or successful knowledge at some future point. Truth in the classic sense, that is, ultimate reality, is
unknowable, but humans approximate. Similarly, individuals adapt in a social environment. For
Dewey, the educational implication must be that genuine knowledge and learning arise from
personal and social experience in an environment, not from the subject acquiring a canonical
deposit passed on by lecture.
A relatively recent movement allied with constructivism is brain-based
learning. Like constructivism, brain-based learning affirms the subjective nature
of learning. It is apparently more solid, more quantified, moer empirical, when
compared even to Piaget’s studies of children. Brain-based learning places
constructivism within neuroscience. But brain-based learning does not and
cannot say anything about the truth value of the knowledge achieved, only how it
is acquired. The congruence of the knowledge with reality – the thing in itself --
remains unknown.9
I need to mention three other constructivist voices. Lev Vygotsky differs from
Piaget in seeing learning less an individual process, more social, though the
translation of Piaget’s Etudes sociologique reveal that Piaget was not unaware of
the social aspect.10 The other voice, Paulo Freire, is the liberatory literacy
educator from Brazil, who taught peasants to read and write in record time by
connecting the need to read to their negligible political status. Freire
simultaneously raised their consciousness and motivated literacy. Freire’s lesson
is that learning is not only social but political. Learning gets traction when it is
situated.
My final constructivist proposal, the Women’s Ways of Knowing project,
shows constructivism’s subjectivism most clearly. William Perry, a psychologist
and head of student counselling at Harvard, made a longitudinal study of male
undergraduates to 1970, tracking epistemological development over their four
years. “Epistemology” here is not a theory of knowledge but individual ways of
knowing. Perry found that the males moved through positions he called basic
dualism, multiplicity, relativism subordinate, and relativism. Women’s Ways of
Knowing used Perry’s methodology in a study of women. The team explored the
experiences of 135 women as learners and knowers along with their concepts of
self and relationships. The procedure is clearly Piagetian – empirical data

9 Darwin Mind Meaning Plantinga.

10 1965/1994.
 5

collection, a theory of change, a stage theory, and personalized “epistemologies”

as ways of knowing. Normal is in stages defined by empirical data collection.
The theorists here mentioned are surely more diverse than such a summary
rendering indicates. Yet in common they make the starting point of knowing to
be the human subject’s perception. It would be naïve to reduce all the theorists to
one single parameter, but on that single parameter of subjectivity they share
paternity, so to speak.
In summary, we could accept the assessment of Frances Sullivan of Columbia
University, who says, “Constructivism is perhaps less a theory than a collection of
principles underpinned by the idea that individuals construct knowledge through
interaction with objects and people in their own environments.”11
Constructivism is mammoth in education. Duit estimated 2500 constructivist
research articles were published in education journals in 1993.12 Thirteen years
later, Google scholar yields 4330 bibliographic items for 2005-2006.13
Constructivism is the dominant theory, promoted by professional associations,
teachers unions, provincial departments of education, as well as by education
professors.
Object and Subject
The sundering of subject from object in Western thought goes back at least to
Descartes, as is often remarked. Descartes separated mind from body, res
cogitans from res extensa, and in doing so secularized the nature/grace dualism
that the church had acquired from Greek philosophy. In this light, the recovery of
the subject, of self, of identity, so characteristic of postmodern agendas, is against
a still dominant and deeply alienating scientific positivism. The recovery must be
exhilarating. What is called “holistic” might be no more or less than the recovery
of the person in knowing. In education, constructivism represents a protest
against alienating knowledge from outside the self. But the stand-off between
constructivism and instructivism makes apparent a continuing division between
subjective and objective. The subject by himself or herself has no basis to be sure
of objective reality. Objective knowledge seems to have no place for any
subjective factor.

11 Sullivan, Syllabus
12 Rowlands 1999 p.3
13 Scholar.google.com search May 23, 2006.
 6

Science education should be a test case for constructivists, with its objectivist
standard of proof. In science, some constructions of reality clearly are more
adequate than others.14 Take the following as a case study:
In 1903, shortly after Roentgen discovered X-rays, the French physicist Rene
Blondlot claimed to have discovered a feeble ray called the N-ray. His discovery
was confirmed by contemporaries who also produced evidence also. But an
investigator from the journal Nature visited Blondlot’s lab and debunked the
claim.
Usually this snippet of science history is an example of pathological science or
an illustration of the self-correcting ways of science. However, a sociologist of
knowledge, Malcolm Ashmore, suggests that there can be no essential difference
between the reality claims of X-rays, radioactivity, and N-rays, and he wants to
“inject a little healthy skepticism” into standard accounts of N-rays. The science
educator Peter Slezak responded that on Ashmore’s principles, Blondlot should
be given equal time with Roentgen in physics lessons. When ultimate reality is
unknowable, it seems hard to disagree.
Further, with no objective, real-world standard, evaluation of constructivist
learning becomes a problem. The constructivist teacher sees herself as helping
along a process, aiming for appropriation of material rather than surface
answers. Since each learner’s stage is somewhat different, evaluation cannot be
done by testing all students at the same time with a standard test without
undermining the construction process.15
The problem of evaluating learning is exactly the same problem as assessment
of the adequacy of a particular construction. If reality is unknowable, and
dominant knowledge merely a function of power, what authority may judge true
constructions from false ones? This problem is not at all alleviated by objective,
empirical, results in neurology or cognitive science. Ultimate reality is
unknowable. Therefore, no basis to evaluate learning is available; whether the
learning has been educative or mis-educative, no one can say. Subjectivism
indeed situates the learning, a big relief after objectivism, but it does so at the
price of real knowledge. When Freirean constructivist bell hooks reported in her
1994 book teaching to transgress that students have given up on ethics,16 her
report was only an update of what C. S. Lewis foresaw in The Abolition of Man,
published in 1947.17

14 Phillips 1997 is on this line.

15 B&B Dana and Davis too in K Tobin 1993.
16 New York: Routledge, 1994.
17 New York: Macmillan, 1947.
 7

Constructivism’s subjectivism means inherently that neither can empirical

results confirm its effectiveness. Project Follow Through in the U.S. traced the
results of nine teaching models on 75,000 children from 170 communities over
twenty-eight years from 1968 to 1995. Seven of the models were learner-centered,
cognitive or conceptual education -- Tucson Early Education Model, Banks Street
Model, Florida Parent Education Model, etc., while the Direct Instruction and
Behavioral Analysis models were teacher-centered, skill, behavioral, and
outcome-based. The two teacher-centred models outperformed the constructivist
models on all dependent variables, as Matthews reports. Five of the seven
learner-centered models did more poorly than the control groups that had no
treatment. And, on self-esteem and higher-order cognitive skills -- particularly
valued by constructivists -- the teacher-centered models outperformed on those
outcomes.18 The literacy scholar Jeanne Chall reviewed twenty-five years of
educational results for teacher-centred versus constructivist approaches and
found similar results, adding that constructivism may disadvantage lower socio-
economic scale children who are unable to engage in desired behaviors.19 I tried
to shock my classes on constructivist theory with these findings but students told
me that the tests were not testing the deeper comprehension that constructivism
aims for. Their resistance is reflected in the scarcity of citations of Project Follow
Through in the literature. Constructivism, as Stanford philosopher of education
D. C. Phillips observes, is an educational folk religion, an ideology.20 Only the
individual would know for him or herself that the educational experience was of
value. But an unverifiable outcome will never be acceptable to objective-minded
governments who report to peer entities like the OECD on education for
economic productivity, and who eventually answer to voters. The pragmatic
three-R’s and standardized tests are much more appealing.
Can a social variation of constructivism overcome the subject-object split? Its
procedure for arriving at knowledge differs from the Kantian innate possession or
even Piaget’s developmental view, but social constructivism still cannot escape
being a purely human construction. No social construction can claim the
authority of big-R reality; subjectivism in knowledge and ethics is inescapable.
The split cannot be overcome by sheer numbers. Absent revelation, the criterion
of capital-T truth is absent and we cannot be sure that education is not
miseducation.

18 William J. Matthews, “Constructivism in the Classroom: Epistemology, History, and Empirical Evidence,” Teacher
Education Quarterly, Summer 2003, n.p. Retrieved from findarticles.com on June 13, 2005.
19 Matthews, “Constructivism in the Classroom,” n.p.
20 D. C. Phillips, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism,” Educational Researcher, Vol. 24,
No. 7, p. 5.
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Christian Belief
The constructivist Piaget, like the idealist Kant, is surely right that there is no
given fact. Against positivists of all kinds, yes, reality must be apprehended
subjectively. Humans apprehend truth subjectively. As finite beings set in limited
time and limited space, subjectivity for us is inevitable.21 Some kinds of
knowledge might even be generated by something like adaptation. Praxis, the
knowledge for craft and virtue, seems to work similarly.
However, affirming the subjective appropriation of reality is not to say that
humans never have access to big-R reality.
A truly Christian epistemology will not be sundered by the Cartesian split.
Von Glaserfeld complains that epistemologies, even Einstein, too frequently take
refuge in metaphysics, a refuge he refuses. To his mind, metaphysics is equivalent
to intellectual suicide, a sort of deus ex machina in philosophy, as incredible there
as in the theatre. In conversion to God however, Christians experience the
healing of the alienation of body and spirit, of self against scientific positivism
and so on, incipiently the divisions of mind, body, and spirit. We can claim the
ontological God as the basis of what we know, indeed, by confession we must do
so. We recognize no neutral knowledge; we reconfigure all of it. As Paul says to
the Corinthians, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up
against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it
obedient to Christ” (2 Cor 10:5, NIV). God's Word turns out to establish
knowledge generally. As Psalm 119 confesses, "The entrance of your words gives
light." Christianity is able to posit both subject and object, human on one side
and God and world on the other because God exists. With God, subject and object
are held together. Besides spiritual resources, Christians have intellectual
resources for a really holistic education.
Christians say that the noumenal is knowable. A degree of knowledge of the
thing-in-itself is given to us by revelation. The claim is not that the noumenal is
entirely comprehended; it is that the noumenal is sufficiently comprehended.
God has exhaustive knowledge but human knowledge via relevation is sufficient
and perspicuous. Knowledge by revelation is not exhaustive or comprehensive.
That the knowledge belongs to God first and derivatively to human beings by
revelation yields what might be called a theology of fact. Two plus two equals
four, and the fact is accessible to anyone. But the significance of the fact is also
accessible: the inviolable order 2+2 witnesses that God made an ordered
universe. Two plus two never equals five. Two plus two therefore is witness to the

21 Bill Edgar
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non-randomness of the universe, to the Christian theistic God. Christians can

agree that facts are loaded and that brute facts are rare. After all, if the cosmos
declares the glory of God, as Psalm 19 or Romans 1 explain, then a neutral fact is
not possible. The significance of two plus two is clearer in the light of Biblical
revelation but is not absent even in general revelation. Facts are found in a loaded
world. Yes, there is no given fact, but no, interpretation is not purely subjective.
There is a supreme knower. Any Christian, any theist perhaps, must believe in the
possibility of objective truth. To a Christian, knowing must be more than
adaptation. Humans do not have to make up their world.
To see whole, constructivist perception needs to know itself as not neutral.
Perception arises in a worldview. Constructivism is a way of seeing. As in Kuhn,
the paradigm determines what counts as evidence, what is important.
Pure constructivism is at odds too with a Christian anthropology. As those
studied by the Women’s Ways team recounted their personal realities, did they
do so without making too-human responses to the situations in which they found
themselves? Were they free of resentment, anger, greed? Do the stories they told
the team perhaps justify themselves, and in a Christian frame would their
accounts have other labels -- more challenging, but ultimately more liberating
labels? Here I am speaking of the effect of depravity on human knowing. The
noetic effect of the fall is a misconstrual of our world, as Romans 1:19-23 tells so
clearly. A more accurate construction of reality, Christians believe, requires
reality’s transcendental norm, that is, the Word of God. The subjective requires
objective correction for a true account.
Notice the absence of controls in Women’s Ways. Of course the same is just as
true of William Perry’s originating study. There is no ultimate reality. There is no
“normal,” because normal is unknowable. There is only what is, on the level of
the present world order. Of course the researchers’ feminist lenses influenced
what was registered from their interviewees, so a bias, even a metaphysics, is in
the data.22 But subjectivism alone must leave meaning behind, except meaning
for me.
For Christians, human beings as the image of God provides a true norm for
the subject. As Gabriel Moran points out, the metaphor of development requires
an endpoint, a telos, an image toward which the developing is tending.23
Development into what? is a most relevant question for education generally.
Modernity’s ideal human being has an autonomy that is uninterfered-with.
Autonomy is freedom from external constraint; that is, conceived negatively.

22 Baum, Theologian social sciences CTS.

23 Religious Education Development.
 10

Constructivism thus suits autonomy; not only do humans acquire knowledge

autonomously, without God, as Kant affirmed, but now the world constructed is
our design. But in actually losing the world, modern negative freedom has lost
the environment within which to be free. Constructivist freedom is anomic
freedom, literally an-archic. Constructivism develops reason but at the expense of
leaving no sure world upon which to reason. Pure constructivism is as if the
educational method is in place but the content or the material has become
unknown. But positive freedom, that freedom to love and serve God and
neighbour that was lost in the Eden disaster -- freedom for -- contrasts with
modern freedom. The image of God in humanity, the Christ who loved God fully,
is an educator's legitimate telos. Again, subjectivity needs objectivity.
“Come Together”?
Harvie Conn was a Canadian who served as a missionary in Korea before
teaching missions at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia for three decades.
Hearing the demand of newly decolonized churches for their own theology, Conn
formulated a Reformed theological method that recognized the need to situate
theology in language and culture, while affirming also a movement of
decontextualization to balance any contextualization by the objective Word. Conn
recognized how Western credal constructions are set in history and culture. To
move beyond the delivery of a disembodied word -- doctrine straight up --
missions had to pay attention to its context, but then subject its insights again to
Biblical critique. Both subjectivity and objective reality appear in Conn’s process.
Significantly, the evangelical C.E. writer Robert W. Pazmino advocates a similar
position. After reading liberation theology in Latin America in the early 1980s, he
advocates not a propositional Reformed basis but a reforming foundation for
C.E.24
Similar to the protest against objective Western theology, the constructivist
polemic for deeper learning than spouted facts has significance for church-
related education. Helge Kragh cautions that it is important not to throw the
constructivist baby out with the bathwater.25 Our educational method is too often
one-sided objective realism: as Joe Friday of Dragnet used to say, just the facts,
ma’am, just the facts. Teachers feel they must convey the content of the course,
be it Senior High Sunday School curriculum or Introduction to New Testament.
Unless the assigned segment of the field is completely laid out, we are not

24 Latin American Journey; also Foundations of Christian Education p.75 or so.

25"Social Constructivism, the Gospel of Science, and the Teaching of Physics," in Constructivism in Science Education: A
Philosophical Examination, ed. Michael R. Matthews. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers,1998, p.
Richard Grandy’s import is same
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properly teaching. But the result of not sufficiently accounting for the subject in
his or her context is a gap between what we think we are doing and what the
students experience: more series on series of facts than life transformation.
Attention to how persons learn is an imperative for all educators including
Christian educators.
How would a reconciled subject/object look in teaching? It might look like
this. We will not construct all knowledge as if from zero. If teaching physics,
would we construct a partical accelerator and study particles directly? Would we
arrange a moon launch? Of course, no. But we will carefully construct some
knowledge in a course. We construct key aspects, perhaps introductory, perhaps
more advanced aspects. We construct not merely by telling an application but by
facilitating students’ applications. We do not depend on the Spirit to do all our
application for us. We see contextualization not as optional but as basic to our
task. We strive to see how Trinitarian theology matters for life, for, say, the idea
of the person in psychology, for persons we supervise at work. We might have to
reorder material and give space to some Christian anthropology as we teach. As
necessary, we give the objective goods -- but not all classroom hours. We seek
application both in assignments and in class time. We may or may not not ever
require academic objective-knowledge papers. We keep before us the way that
objective must meet subjective, subject must meet reality. We are aware of our
context so that that we discard the static idea of an academic field with fixed
boundaries in favor of some new, dynamic, metaphor encompassing the ever-
changing subjectivity of our students, some metaphor like the Doppelganger
effect where the observer is already within the observation. The flat field of
knowledge must rise up to meet human beings in culture. Our courses evolve to
meet the students where they have moved.
Theology is sometimes conceived as upstream from the practice of ministry;
the pure water flows down. Those who say that praxis needs to be taken into
theologizing -- Edward Farley, Rebecca Chopp, and others -- have still to register.
26 But practice can present anomalies, and the anomalies call for theoretical

clarification. The result can be an expansion of the theoretical base. We may

come to understand better the relation of pure theology to practical theology
understood. If we see that we understand something when we see why it matters,
then theology’s task would be finished when the cycle is seen all the way out in
the preaching, teaching, witnessing, serving life of the church. Education can
become a prime source for theological questioning and validation.

26 Chopp
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The constructivist polemic against the lecture method has to tell against
Christians teaching religion or theology. Christians know about the need for
information fully grasped because we know how information can be transformed
by conversion. Surely, the desire for knowledge oriented toward worship,
doxological knowledge, or worshippers in reality, provided the motive for
university education at the inception. 27 If subject and object could be married,
education’s objective side would find its complement.
A version of this paper was presented at Canadian Evangelical Theological
Association annual meeting in the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities,
York University, Toronto, May 27, 2006.

27