What Do People Believe to Be the Essential Elements in a Christ-Centered Curriculum?

In present times, Christian schools struggle to maintain a distinctive alternative to public education. Recently, many veterans of Christian education have been pointing the way to a more Christ-centered education- one that calls for explicitly Christian ways of teaching and learning. As a result, there has been great deal of rhetoric as to how people should/would define a truly Christ-Centered curriculum (CCC). Yet, many reputable Christian educators would argue that they already have a CCC while others would say that the curriculum is merely a public school curriculum with a Christian coating . In order to bring some resolve to the issue, I thought it would be wise to survey people from around the world to find out what elements they hold to be essential in a CCC. After reviewing current literature, I developed a set of open-ended interview questions- a pilot study. I interviewed a group of people that have been involved in a CCC to flesh out what they deemed essential. From those responses, I then created a more comprehensive and quantifiable survey. This survey was both mailed and posted on the Internet. More than 500 respondents from around the world took 20-30 minutes to fill out the questionnaire. By means of a quantitative data analysis, four major isms emerge- individualism, conformism, authoritarianism, and intellectualism. These isms continue to permeate the curricula and thus hinder them from being truly Christcentered. If we are to truly develop and maintain a CCC, we should adopt a dynamic philosophical model that realizes there is an appropriate time for everything. Furthermore, we should consider adopting the highest ranked perspective statements