Gravissimum educationis vita hominis
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Teaching for Receptivity
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January 4, 2024Introduction
The modern school, from the kindergarten classroom to the graduate lecture hall, suffers no lack of platitudes. From the Baconian axiom that “knowledge is power” to the modern mantra of “college and career readiness,” we have been confronted with such a plenitude of popular aphorisms that we often forget to consider the notion which lies behind these banal sentiments.
Drilling into our students’ minds that “knowledge is power” is, essentially, teaching them that “knowledge is good only insofar as it leads to power,” or, worse yet, that power is a much higher good than knowledge. At any rate, we are teaching them - and likely coming to believe ourselves - that the purpose of knowledge is mere material utility or productivity, crystalized in the goals of “college and career.” Knowledge is not presented as something to be pursued for its own sake; rather, it is now seen as something purely servile. Knowledge, taken thusly, is nothing more than a means to acquire power.
How often have we heard students exclaim in frustration, “When will I ever need to use this in real life?” Such a question reveals that they have lost touch with the very purpose of education. Worse yet, they have most likely inherited this error from their teachers. The modern school, based on Dewey’s factory model and adhering to contemporary scholarship, does not teach this error by accident – this myth is fabricated by design. Schools following such a model - which is to say, most modern educational institutions - only succeed in subverting the very education which they claim to provide.
The modern school is ordered toward making citizens who are both useful and docile to a collectivist state. In a sense, the reason that it promulgates a philosophy of material pragmatism with such efficacy is because it this is one of the few lessons which it does not dilute. As a result, modern education does not liberate students from the darkness of ignorance and opinion, but rather it enslaves them. Pedagogy today is nothing less than a complex conspiracy against all interior, intellectual, and spiritual life.
The Catholic school, however, must be something categorically different. Authentic Catholic education is not different from modern education in degree, but in kind. It is not ordered toward utility, but receptivity. The liberal arts and classics are not merely a “worthy alternative” to modern education. Rather, they are the only means appropriate for attaining the true end of Catholic education, which is diametrically opposed to that of the modern school. For this reason, authentic Catholic education calls for a pedagogy and praxis which is wholly and completely different from what has emerged in the past century.
Christ did not formulate the Sermon on the Mount according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, and St. Paul was not checking boxes when he wrote the Epistles, making sure that each letter met the provincially required learning-outcomes. We are (almost) certain that Socrates never bothered nor asked what fidgets, accommodations, or “learning styles” were necessary to provide differentiated instruction to his interlocutors. To incorporate such methods in a Catholic school is not analogous to “plundering the Egyptians,” but rather to the “Yeast of the Pharisees.” These are the bitter fruits of false first-principles: a little leaven will ruin the whole loaf, and a little materialism will poison the whole interior life.
G.K Chesterton, through the character of Father Brown, quipped that “only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first-principles.” If we are to recover from the crisis of faith and reason in the modern Catholic school, we must begin by shifting our gaze from the second-order to first-order considerations by recovering a true-to-being conception of the nature of education, teaching, and the human person.
In the words of St. Thomas More, “education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed.” This is to say, education is, by nature, an agrarian endeavor. Our goal is not to make our students what we desire them to be per se, but to remove obstacles toward their becoming what they are. It is not a matter of “adding” or “attaching” things to them, but of cultivating the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for perception and reception. These are not skills, but qualitative perfections of the soul.
Factory or Garden?
The art of teaching is, in general, best understood as the art of soul-farming. In opposition to this, John Dewey conceived of schools as factories, where students are passed through like widgets on a conveyor belt, having parts progressively attached until the “ideal democratic citizen” is created. Dewey’s aim was not to liberate individuals, but to solve societal problems by replacing the family with the school and transforming education into a sort of training. While Dewey’s factory model may very well accomplish Dewey’s Marxist end, it fundamentally misses the mark for authentic Catholic education.
The modern school, based on Dewey’s model, treats its students as objects, giving undisputed pride of place to material criteria alone (e.g, “research-based” methods). The emphasis is not on the perfection of human nature, but on bearing immediate, external results, both behavioral and academic. In the behavioral realm, this sort of materialism reduces discipline to animal behaviorism; classroom leadership is reduced into a game of whack-a-mole which is almost as degrading to the students as it is to the teachers perpetrating it.
While it may very well produce the immediate behavioral outcome which is demanded, this sort of servile compliance is not to be confused with the virtues of obedience and temperance. By giving systems of reward and punishment pride-of-place in classroom leadership, and “correcting the behavior, not the student,” we both teach and come to believe ourselves that humans are not moral agents, but that our choices are the mere product of environmental determinism. Rather, we correct and discipline our students for the very reason that they - like all men - possess moral imperfections requiring correction. While our positional authority does require us to protect the common good, we must not forget that the higher good to be attained in admonishing our students is that their own souls and loves become rectified - not merely their behaviors.
This material reductionism is equally devastating to academics, where the success of the students, teachers, schools, and curriculums are often reduced to test scores.
While quantitative assessment is not necessarily without value, it does not merit the pride-of-place it enjoys in the modern school. As education does not consist of skills or abilities, but rather the perfection of interior, immaterial habits, the attempt to measure it directly is fundamentally misguided. While such assessments can, at best, demonstrate whether or not a student has read a certain book or done certain work, it is, by nature, incapable of measuring whether or not he has truly learned anything. Given that tests are often meant to measure the latter, what follows can only be an exercise in misattribution.
Authentic Catholic education does not resemble a factory, but rather a garden, illustrated with divine precision in Christ’s Parable of the Sower. The role of the teacher is not to produce immediate outcomes, nor to act as the efficient cause of any real change in the student. Rather, the teacher’s task is to prepare the soil of the interior landscape to be receptive to the seeds of Truth and Goodness.
Just as a gardener does not create fruit himself, but rather removes obstacles which would prevent plants from doing what plants do (grow and bear fruit), the teacher prepares the soil of the students’ interior landscape so that they can more freely do what mankind was made to do: know, love, and serve Christ. This is not done by equipping them with skills and trivia answers, but by eradicating ideological weeds, tossing aside vicious rocks, and thwarting the birds that would prevent the seeds of truth from taking root.
Perhaps the only (if not, the most) effective means of freeing ourselves and our students from the darkness of ignorance and opinion so that we may encounter reality as it truly is can be found through a study of the liberal arts, pursued liberally. Far from being compiled from an arbitrary, ancient compendium, the liberal arts are nothing less than the interior habits which are both necessary and decisive for personal and intellectual wholeness. Between the trivium (the arts of language, consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (the arts of applied and theoretical mathematics, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), we cultivate the intellectual habits necessary for us to perceive and conceive of reality in a true-to-being fashion.
A helpful way to conceive of the paradigm shift from factory to farm is by changing our verbiage from control or management to leadership. It is appropriate to control or manage things, but very rarely is it virtuous to desire to control or manage human souls. Such an end leads inevitably to vain power struggle, strife, and discord.
The Church teaches that authority must serve the common good as “a moral force based on freedom and responsibility” (CCC 1902, GS 74, 2). We do not coerce or force our students to do anything, except in the most extreme of cases (e.g, grave physical danger); instead, we seek to lead them to choose freely what is good and true. It is by the habitual movement of the will toward the good by free choice, not coercion, that we grow in virtue.
Once we begin to conceive of the task of the teacher as that of a soul-farmer rather than a quality control inspector in a factory production line, we must also proceed to seek out the recovery of methods and arts which are adequate to the agrarian work before us. While modern education, with its outcomes-based model, multiple-intelligences theory, social-emotional psycho-babble, and animal behaviorism amount to little more than intellectual abuse, there are at least two arts which are sine qua non when it comes to breaking our students out of the educational coma induced by modern education: the arts of storytelling and Socratic inquiry.
Storytelling
It is no mere coincidence that just about every great teacher and orator throughout history has been a master storyteller. In Instructing Beginners in the Faith, St. Augustine writes about the necessity of the catechetical narratio: catechesis through storytelling. St. Augustine goes on to suggest that the catechesis of beginners - adults and children alike - should primarily consist of hearing the stories of salvation history, especially those found in sacred scripture, long before theological doctrine is ever introduced.
If the teacher’s task is to render the students’ interior landscape clear, fertile, and hospitable to truth, stories may well be understood as the fertilizer which allows the seeds of truth to really take root and flourish. Furthermore, great stories are necessary for teaching true literacy. Literacy, even poetry and fables, are all-too-often placed into a material procrustean bed in the modern school.
To be a master storyteller means to master the art of guiding souls into a state of receptivity and true literacy by way of allegory. While the modern school teaches material literacy alone - leaving our students functionally illiterate - the master storyteller leads the students in the cultivation of formal literacy as well. Just as words do not, in themselves, contain the substances to which they point, stories open the gates of the soul and moral imagination to be receptive to truths which are most easily understood - if not, only understood - allegorically.
Socratic Inquiry
The natural complement to storytelling is the art of Socratic inquiry. Asking questions which are truly illuminating has nearly become a lost art. Much like the Sophists, we are often so preoccupied with proving our own intellectual prowess by giving thorough, precise, and convincing didactic answers that we forget to actually teach. Such a practice is not only presumptuous, but actually seems to miss the point entirely.
Socrates’ questions were notably maieutic in nature; he had a certain way of guiding both his interlocutors and his audience in discovering both the implications of their own statements and the truth of the matter at hand. Rather than provide them with answers on a silver platter, he posed questions which turned everyone’s focus toward concerns which were truly decisive.
While the Socratic seminar is not unpopular today, many seminars would likely have Socrates rolling in his grave. It is all too common for teachers merely to lead their students by the nose through a text with canned questions, checking boxes which are arbitrarily proposed to measure apprehension. Participation is often measured by tracking how many times each student spoke up during class.
Do we propose that we have nothing to learn from Plato’s dialogue because we ourselves cannot raise our hand and ask a question? Surely, Socrates was teaching - and his audience was receiving - excellent instruction simply by being silent, attentive observers. Requiring universal verbal participation can only stem from materialism and a false egalitarianism.
On the contrary, in a proper Socratic seminar (led by a “midwife,” rather than a Sophist), the silent, attentive observers are learning no less than the active interlocutors. The goal is not participation for its own sake, but rather for the sake of getting clearer about the truth of things. The false idea that more perspectives are always and everywhere helpful or necessary for truth-seeking is anathema in the true Socratic dialogue. Such a notion may even render it impossible altogether.
Our questions are not ordered toward integrating all perspectives in a sort of covert relativism, but rather toward trimming out falsehood and red-herrings so that we can come to know the truth of things, regardless of what we would like it to be.
Conclusion
All three of these methods converge perfectly and evidently in Christ’s public ministry. He taught in parables and posed questions, all for the sake of rendering his disciples' interior landscapes fertile and receptive to truth, goodness, and, ultimately, salvation. In the same way, in our pursuit of excellence and virtue as teachers, our focus must be on the cultivation of these teaching arts. We must strive to tell stories like Abraham, ask questions like Socrates, and, ultimately, cultivate the soil of our students’ souls like Christ.
While it is certainly a good thing to practice and train in various arts and crafts, liberal education is something qualitatively different. Every art results in the production of an artifact. When it comes to an education in the liberal arts, however, the artifact is not exterior, but interior. The product of a liberal education is a liberated person: One who is set free from the bondage of ignorance and human opinion to know things as they truly are and to love them accordingly.
Mr. Joshua Long is a teacher, musician, and author in the greater Boston area
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