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!
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