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NINE--- TEN--- ELEVEN--- TWELVE (Section 12 includes Bibliography.)

Scroll down to see introduction, letters from NSA and CSS ( Community Schools Service ), and preface.

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Commissioned by the National Spiritual Assembly

of the Bahá’ís of the United Kingdom

and approved for use in all schools and

educational institutions

Developed and Written by Trevor R.J. Finch

1996

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To All Those Who Will Use the Curriculum

Dear Friends,

We commend to you this first National Bahá’í Curriculum as a document which we hope will promote the development of Bahá’í education in the United Kingdom and beyond. It is to serve for the duration of the Four Year Plan, at least, and while it is not exhaustive, it is, nevertheless, comprehensive. It sets out aims and topics for study in a systematic way which we feel would greatly assist those who are engaged in drawing up Bahá’í courses, of whatever kind, for children, youth and, indeed, adults.

It is a major step forward in the process of the maturation of our educational institutions and we hope that, in time, it will stimulate the production of a range of syllabi suited to every region and to each delivery system which serves for the human resource development of our community.

We are grateful to Mr. Finch for producing this document on our behalf; a task for which he is amply qualified. He draws upon an experience, over a period of a quarter of a century, in both Bahá’í and state education, as a trained teacher of Religious Education, and as a curriculum development specialist - a result of his M.A. in Development Education from the University of London Institute of Education.

As well as having served on this National Spiritual Assembly since April 1991, Mr. Finch has served from October 1991 on the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) of the London Borough of Wandsworth. More recently he has been appointed an adviser to the Citizenship Foundation secondary curriculum panel and is a member of the Values Education Council, representing the Faith nationwide.

Every part of the content does not, necessarily, reflect the view of the National Spiritual Assembly, but this document is approved by us for use in the Bahá’í community. We urge you to read it carefully and to allow it to guide you in your work as educators of children and young people, whether as parents, as teachers or as those who facilitate education in other ways.

The National Spiritual Assembly of

the Bahá’ís of the United Kingdom

1996

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Dear Friends,

On behalf of the National Spiritual Assembly, the Community Schools Service commends to you this U.K. National Bahá’ í Curriculum "Waiting Upon the Blessed Beauty".

The National Bahá’í Curriculum has had a long gestation period, but we think you will agree that this community now has a highly professional document of which it can be justly proud. It is written in a lucid and extremely informative style that rewards reading from cover to cover. Our thanks go especially to Trevor Finch but also to those who served on the former Child Education Committee and to the members of this community who have, in one way or another, contributed to the production and distribution of this National Bahá’í Curriculum.

We would ask all the Community Schools to begin its phased introduction from early 1997, leading to full-scale implementation in September 1997. We would hope that all other Bahá’í classes will move as far as they can, on the same time-scale, to align their courses with the National Bahá’í Curriculum .

One of the primary responsibilities of the Community Schools Service is to resource the Curriculum. We are looking first and foremost at getting existing resources much more effectively and widely used. We are looking forward to the development of various syllabuses based on the National Bahá’í Curriculum. The first of these should be available soon.

There will be a major review of the Curriculum towards the end of the Four Year Plan, but it would not be altered until after that has been completed. This decision is intended to ensure that the schools and classes have a stable framework within which to work.

With loving Bahá’í greetings,

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PREFACE

This Curriculum document has been written in order to serve the friends of the United Kingdom Bahá’í community, and any other Bahá’í communities who find in it something of value. It is meant for parents as well as teachers, for parents have care of their children first, for longer and for a greater part of any given week than do their teachers. The primary responsibility for the Bahá’í education of children therefore rests with the former.

It is the author’s hope that this document will, by the grace of God, prove a useful instrument for the furtherance of Bahá’í Education in the United Kingdom and beyond.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Shiva Shirinzadeh-Finch, whose experience as the first middle-class teacher in the first Thomas Breakwell School, in London (1984-86), enabled me to base my structure on real classroom practice. I also thank her for word-processing the manuscript.

I would also like to acknowledge the useful discussion I had with the members of the Child Education Committee (Dec. 1993 - Nov. 1995), particularly Pauline Samson, in response to the curriculum framework put forward for the Curriculum Day in June 1994.

Finally, I would like to express my thanks for the careful reading of the draft document by the members of the National Assembly review panel, Peter Hulme and Barney Leith, and the suggestions they made for certain quotations and alterations.

This work is humbly dedicated to our daughter, Amadea Touba Victoria. God willing, she will be a beneficiary of its successful prosecution, and of any developments from it.

Trevor R.J. Finch

October 1996

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