This
past Saturday morning, while working at Café on the Park at the Wheaton Public
Library, I saw my freshman English teacher from college. I had recently gone through my old college
files, and I had intentionally looked at my essays and papers from Ms. Hecht’s
English and Composition class. I don’t
have fond memories of her. She was a
nitpicky grader who always kept us a minute after the class was over and
assigned us scores of papers. As I
thumbed through my old papers I was initially nauseous with how bad my writing was,
but as I progressed through a year’s worth of papers I could see growth in my
writing, and my grades climbed slowly from C+'s, B-‘s and B’s to B+’s, A-‘s and even
an A or two. And what I find so interesting
is that my view of Ms. Hecht is so different now that I am teacher who teaches writing. I’m that nitpicky grader! And I’m sure my students get tired from my auspicious
eye that catches every extra space, misplaced comma, split infinitive, and poorly
chosen word. But what I’ve learned from
Ms. Hecht looking back as a teacher, is that I’d rather risk being that
irritatingly picky and potentially unpopular teacher now with the hope that
some will someday thank me in their heart for trying to make them better
writers. So this morning, I reintroduced
myself to Ms. Hecht, who was, unsurprisingly, grading this year’s batch of
English students, and I thanked her for teaching me how to write. And I’m reminded that true education is
committed to long-term growth that many of us teachers will never see. But the seeds are planted, and God sees the
growth and brings about the harvest. Thanks be to God!
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Pope John Paul II on faith and reason
From JP II's 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio:
"I wish to reflect up on this special activity of human reason. I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time, in particular, the search for truth seems often to be neglected. Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history. Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth - the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another. Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost to capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned" (italics mine).
This touches on a previous post where I tried to clarify the philosophical difference between modern public education and classical Christian education. The pope helps us see that an education based on modern philosophical assumptions (truth about ourselves divorced from truth about God; how can we know ourselves truly without knowing our Creator?) is one that is ultimately "at the mercy" of other forces. In Illinois, students have 174 school days per year. Naperville Central High School has eight 50 min. periods a day (one of which is lunch I believe, so seven periods are in the classroom) which equals 5.83 hours a day of classroom time. 174 days a year times 5.83 hours per day equals roughly 1,015 hours of classroom education a year. Multiply that by 4 years of high school and you get 4,060 hours of class time.
So here is the great wager of modern public education: parents have to belief that these 4,060 hours of time in the classroom, where the curriculum is based on modern philosophy that is "one-sided" in its "concern to investigate human subjectivity," and has "forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them," are actually NOT working against their child's education. It's a huge wager, and in my experience it is one that so many good parents are not prepared to make because they've been, for whatever reason, blinded or ignorant of the powerful current at work underneath the surface of modern public education. (Just to be clear, there are many Christian schools that simply ape the public schools in their curriculum and their assumptions. Having a Bible class and weekly chapel doesn't make a school Christian.)
What price would you pay for an education that trains and guides kids to know themselves by lifting their gaze from the beauty of mankind and the world to the Creator of heaven and earth, the very source of that beauty? On paper my school has more reasons to brag than most schools. Our students take AP courses and regularly get 4's and 5's. They take the ACT and get knockout results. (I just received two more scores of 33 and 32, which moves our school average to over 32. Our lowest score is an 18, so don't think that academics comes easily to all our students.) We compete with the best of the best. But all of those accolades must be weighed against the greater goods of education which can never be measured: the ability to organize thought logically and convey it rhetorically, to integrate subjects to see the harmony of truth, to realize that the Christian faith frees the student to pursue knowledge - all knowledge, to be inspired to learn for life, to realize the futility of gaining the world but losing one's soul, and above all to see our purpose on this earth as loving our gracious God and loving our neighbor.
Faith and Reason, the pope says, "are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to know the fullness of truth about themselves." An education that is based only on reason (or only on faith) will continue to work against the fullness of life that God designs for each person. And this is why classical Christian education is so important: by pursuing truth, all truth (transcendent and subjective), it liberates students from "wilting" under the burden of knowledge that they aren't equipped to handle. That is, they will be posed with questions that they are unable to answer, because the assumptions inherent in the curriculum are not able to provide them with the means to do so. What a risky wager!
"I wish to reflect up on this special activity of human reason. I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time, in particular, the search for truth seems often to be neglected. Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history. Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth - the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another. Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost to capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned" (italics mine).
This touches on a previous post where I tried to clarify the philosophical difference between modern public education and classical Christian education. The pope helps us see that an education based on modern philosophical assumptions (truth about ourselves divorced from truth about God; how can we know ourselves truly without knowing our Creator?) is one that is ultimately "at the mercy" of other forces. In Illinois, students have 174 school days per year. Naperville Central High School has eight 50 min. periods a day (one of which is lunch I believe, so seven periods are in the classroom) which equals 5.83 hours a day of classroom time. 174 days a year times 5.83 hours per day equals roughly 1,015 hours of classroom education a year. Multiply that by 4 years of high school and you get 4,060 hours of class time.
So here is the great wager of modern public education: parents have to belief that these 4,060 hours of time in the classroom, where the curriculum is based on modern philosophy that is "one-sided" in its "concern to investigate human subjectivity," and has "forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth that transcends them," are actually NOT working against their child's education. It's a huge wager, and in my experience it is one that so many good parents are not prepared to make because they've been, for whatever reason, blinded or ignorant of the powerful current at work underneath the surface of modern public education. (Just to be clear, there are many Christian schools that simply ape the public schools in their curriculum and their assumptions. Having a Bible class and weekly chapel doesn't make a school Christian.)
What price would you pay for an education that trains and guides kids to know themselves by lifting their gaze from the beauty of mankind and the world to the Creator of heaven and earth, the very source of that beauty? On paper my school has more reasons to brag than most schools. Our students take AP courses and regularly get 4's and 5's. They take the ACT and get knockout results. (I just received two more scores of 33 and 32, which moves our school average to over 32. Our lowest score is an 18, so don't think that academics comes easily to all our students.) We compete with the best of the best. But all of those accolades must be weighed against the greater goods of education which can never be measured: the ability to organize thought logically and convey it rhetorically, to integrate subjects to see the harmony of truth, to realize that the Christian faith frees the student to pursue knowledge - all knowledge, to be inspired to learn for life, to realize the futility of gaining the world but losing one's soul, and above all to see our purpose on this earth as loving our gracious God and loving our neighbor.
Faith and Reason, the pope says, "are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth - in a word, to know himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to know the fullness of truth about themselves." An education that is based only on reason (or only on faith) will continue to work against the fullness of life that God designs for each person. And this is why classical Christian education is so important: by pursuing truth, all truth (transcendent and subjective), it liberates students from "wilting" under the burden of knowledge that they aren't equipped to handle. That is, they will be posed with questions that they are unable to answer, because the assumptions inherent in the curriculum are not able to provide them with the means to do so. What a risky wager!
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
the gratuity of beauty
The other day I was on the phone as I arrived at school, and I waited in my car in the parking lot until the conversation was over. All of the sudden a gold finch (the state bird of Washington!) landed on a shrub just outside my car. I was so happy. They are somewhat rare here in Illinois, but as one who hails from the Evergreen State, I was overjoyed at the sight. It was a gift, a beautiful gift!
I'm currently reading David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, and one of his recurring criticisms of philosophy, especially its practice apart from theology, is its inability to see existence as utter gift, sheer gratuity. We can explain what something is, but we cannot explain that it is. What is more breathtaking and beautiful than the Trinity, in which the giving and receiving of love happen eternally and perfectly? And for us who receive the gratuity of being, that is, every human being who has been called out nothingness into existence, an existence designed for communion with the Trinity (The Father begets the Son eternally in love, and the Son accepts this eternal gift of fellowship and in his reception of the gift gives it back to the Father, and the Spirit is the gift of love that is exchanged, who also simultaneously gives and receives this divine love because he too has his own personhood within the unity of God), what better response could we offer as recipients of this gift than thanks and praise? What a criticism of philosophy without theology: a pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and even God, yet lacking in thanks and praise.
My wife's Opa (et lux perpetua luceat e[um]) was notorious for bringing fresh flowers home to his wife, her Oma. Flowers are fleeting "like the grass," but their beauty is unmistakable and completely gratuitous. To spend money on something that has already begun to die when we buy it sounds absurd, and yet what a noble purchase. To feed one's soul with gratuitous beauty is to participate in the liturgy of heavens: "Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!" "We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign." (Rev. 7.12; 11.17)
I conclude with a quote from one of the best theologians of the past century, Hans Urs von Balthasar:
Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
I'm currently reading David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, and one of his recurring criticisms of philosophy, especially its practice apart from theology, is its inability to see existence as utter gift, sheer gratuity. We can explain what something is, but we cannot explain that it is. What is more breathtaking and beautiful than the Trinity, in which the giving and receiving of love happen eternally and perfectly? And for us who receive the gratuity of being, that is, every human being who has been called out nothingness into existence, an existence designed for communion with the Trinity (The Father begets the Son eternally in love, and the Son accepts this eternal gift of fellowship and in his reception of the gift gives it back to the Father, and the Spirit is the gift of love that is exchanged, who also simultaneously gives and receives this divine love because he too has his own personhood within the unity of God), what better response could we offer as recipients of this gift than thanks and praise? What a criticism of philosophy without theology: a pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and even God, yet lacking in thanks and praise.
My wife's Opa (et lux perpetua luceat e[um]) was notorious for bringing fresh flowers home to his wife, her Oma. Flowers are fleeting "like the grass," but their beauty is unmistakable and completely gratuitous. To spend money on something that has already begun to die when we buy it sounds absurd, and yet what a noble purchase. To feed one's soul with gratuitous beauty is to participate in the liturgy of heavens: "Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!" "We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign." (Rev. 7.12; 11.17)
I conclude with a quote from one of the best theologians of the past century, Hans Urs von Balthasar:
Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name, as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
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