A Teacher’s Perspective

                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!

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!

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.

freedom, truth, and education

From Stratford Caldecott's, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education:

"The modern mistake about freedom...is that freedom has nothing to do with truth.  We imagine that the more choices we have, the freer we are.  In reality, a multitude of choices makes us no freer than we were before unless we have the freedom (that is, the power, the ability) to choose between the right action and the wrong action.  Thus the truth about good and evil is intimately bound up with our freedom.  It is the quality not the quantity of our choices that counts.  A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all.  Aquinas writes: 'Liberty or free will does not essentially consist in the power of choosing between good and evil.  All that is required is the power to choose, without being forced by necessity, one particular good rather than another.  To possess the power to choose evil is a sign not of perfection but of weakness.'"

Freedom and truth go hand in hand.  "A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all."  An education that severs truth from freedom and celebrates the quantity of choices over quality is going to deform students.  Every form of education is based on some set of values, that is, it is implicitly or explicitly based on an understanding (whether well thought out or half-baked) of what people should be like.  An education that is relativistic or skeptical about truth is a deeply moral education.  I wish every parent would ask their principals and teachers, "What does it mean to be free, and how will your class or school help my child be freer?"

"Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Romans 6.16)

The philosophical difference between classical Christian education and public education.

At the classical Christian school where I work, we are constantly looking for new ways to increase enrollment in healthy ways.  We do this by maintaining those students who currently attend, and bringing in new families.  Over the past 2 or 3 years we've improved our retention of families, but one of the challenges we face is getting new families to see the surpassing worth of an education that is not utilitarian and that also costs money.  The current market that my school struggles to reach is the public school families.  There are a few classical schools in the greater western suburbs of Chicago, but our primary "competition" is not these other schools but the public schools. There are hordes of great Christian families who do not think that private education is worth the money or is better than the public schools.  (Caveat: my wife teaches in the public school, I attended public school, I have friends who teach in public schools, ergo, I'm not anti-public schools!)  These aren't irrelevant things to discuss when it comes to talking about public vs. private, but the reason why so many great Christian families don't send their kids to schools like mine is because there is a deeper philosophical shift that has happened that needs to be recognized and exposed.  Don't let words like "philosophical" stop you from reading the rest of this short post.  Let me explain.

Think of the word Truth.  It is a concept that encompasses all of what we accept as being right or correct about anything.  We believe that Truth includes the facts about all things.  Imagine a school that decided to take out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Some students might be happy, but many parents and teachers would (or at least should) object to paring down education in this way because it removes a branch of knowledge from a child's education.  Secularization in the West has been going on for hundreds of years (the belief that religion should be avoided because of its divisive effects came about not too long after the Reformation and the wars of religion that followed), and one of the effects of this is that religion has been relegated to the private sphere not the public sphere.  (I've used the term "private" school, and perhaps we should stop using that phrase because it seems to affirm the public and private divide.  Shouldn't all schools be "public" insofar as they exist for the common good of those in the community?)  This has been disastrous for education because it has hindered not only our ability to address morality (see David Hicks, Norms and Nobility for a slightly outdated but not insignificant account of the necessity of moral formation within education) but it has also eliminated the importance of religious knowledge within the broad scope of what we can know.

In the late 1850s, John Henry Newman wrote a book called Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, a book which now goes by the title The Idea of a University and includes some later material.  In this marvelous book, Newman, who was asked to found a Catholic University in Ireland, set out to explain the very purpose of a university.  He explains how theology is a branch of knowledge, and if you take it out then it's similar to taking out Calculus, literature, physical education, or any other subject that belongs to a good education.  Newman believes that theology, which is the study of God's revelation to humankind, ought to be placed in the context of a university in order to balance out the other disciplines.  It belongs in a university because it is here where what he calls the "rivalry of the other studies" occurs.  The liberal arts are a checks and balance among the subjects so that the student learns the "scope and nature" of things that can be known.  Public school education eliminates religion from its curriculum (I'm not saying it needs a class on Christianity, Buddhism, etc., but it would easy to ask a student what her religious community would say on any number of topics that come up in class discussion or literature class), and in doing so offers students a less than full course of knowledge.  I think that this truncated curriculum is lamentable, and it ultimately leads to another serious problem.

What happens to even some of the best Christian students when you hinder clear moral formation and religious knowledge from their education?  To put it simply, some make it through public education with their faith intact and some don't.  We've all seen great Christian families raise kids in the fear and knowledge of God only to have a child resist the faith.  None of us know how our kids will turn out.  But what if our country's public education with its removal of morality and religious knowledge contributes to the secularization of our Christian students and families?  Wouldn't paying for an education that took Christianity and learning seriously be a risk worth taking when it comes to the well-being of your child?  This sounds like a guilt trip, and I don't mean it to be one.  But education is so important, and the cost of not thinking it through could be detrimental.  I bless the families that don't continue at our school.  I love some of them dearly and mourn their departure.  I don't think less of them.  But I've seen some of these dear people leave for the public school for reasons that hurt them in the future.  In the past year I've had two former students email me with serious concerns about their faith.  I was able to talk to one student in person, but the other was out of state and email had to suffice.  If only we could have struggled together for the faith.

I don't have any stats to demonstrate that Christians who attend public school lose their faith more frequently but I do know that the pressure against being a Christian is intense, and many parents and students aren't ready or able to withstand it.  My sisters and I made it through with our faith intact.  My parents and my church were crucial in this process.  And I'm sure that there are students who attended classical Christian schools who have since lost their faith.  I'm not putting forth classical Christian education as a panacea.  But I wish that more parents realized the way that public education participates in secularization and seriously considered a school like mine where my team of teachers live out everyday that fantastic medieval mantra of faith seeking understanding.