Education Cultivates, For Better or For Worse

elspeth

Oct 2

Do you remember the books you were assigned in high school? Over the past few weeks I've taken pains to remember the books my teachers assigned my high school classes. We'll delve further into the impetus for this mental inventory in just a bit. But first, here's a short list of those ones I recall:

Animal Farm
Romeo and Juliet
The Sun Also Rises
Their Eyes Were Watching God
1984
The Scarlet Letter
Lord of the Flies

I'm sure I've forgotten many, but those immediately spring to mind. High school a blur for me. I didn't have the blast of a good time that some kids did (such as my husband), so I there is no motivation to reminisce those years. I was recently impelled to think more about it when my daughter met incredulity after someone noted the copy of Plato she was carrying. It was assigned by her philosophy teacher. This wasn't the first time that had happened so I began to consider parts of her reading list of the past couple of years:

Plato: The Complete Works
The Iliad
The Odyssey
City of God
21 Essential American Short Stories
Red Badge of Courage
Little Women
The Scarlet Letter
The Bible
Animal Farm
Antigone

There is a slight bit of overlap between our two lists. We both read George Orwell and Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance. We also both read Shakespeare, although Romeo and Juliet is not on the list of the many Shakespeare plays our kids have both read and performed in.

However, there are some very notable differences between the books they read in their classical school and the ones I read in my government school experience. The Bible is the most striking and most important divergence, but also City of God, Plato, and Homer. The books on my high school list are a much better selection than the kids who attend government school today, but they are substantially less philosophically dense and spiritually enriching than the books on my kids' list.

As I have read through several of the books with my children as they read them, I have on more than one occasion thought to myself, "I'm having to work very hard to digest and process this. There's no way [my kid] is understanding this." With no book was this concentration more imperative than City of God.

Then I recalled my days as a young child in church. These were the days before there was such a thing as children's church, that magical segregated room where Christian truth is presented at a child's level of reasoning. There were things I understood, and things I didn't. However, the constant exposure to the truth being taught to the adults eventually began to reveal itself more clearly: a flicker of light here, an ember there, until eventually the teachings became coherent and understandable until the light of truth flooded my soul.

One of the reasons we love Christian classical education is because it informs the education from the perspective of the long haul. It confidently trusts that perpetual exposure to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (at appropriate stages and levels) will result in a young adult whose loves have been properly ordered. When loves are properly ordered, it becomes easier to navigate a world in which one is constantly bombarded with the temptation to short term gratification based on flights of fancy rather than love of the truth.

What is education if not the cultivation of the conscience in a particular direction? I've noted before in this space that there is no such thing as a neutral education. To the extent that we ever believed such a thing was so, it has been to our detriment.

I am currently re-reading -again- C.S. Lewis' critique of modern education, The Abolition of Man, as a part of a book discussion with other women whose children are being classically educated. The prophetic perception with which Lewis articulated the missteps of modern education, nearly 80 years ago, is striking. The more we train educators to teach students to shed traditional morality, religious values, and indeed natural law (Lewis refers to the latter as "the Tao"), the less human our culture appears with each successive generation:

"We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all 'rational' or 'spiritual' motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently."

The Abolition of Man

It would do us well to remember that education is, in truth, an exercise in cultivation, not a series of successive years in which information and facts are poured into empty vessels. There are no blank slates, as we are all born with natural sensibilities that need in some cases to be cultivated, in other cases to be discouraged, and in yet other cases to be utterly destroyed.

Which of these an education program cultivates, discourages, or destroys says all we need to know about that particular education program.

I assert that our current western education system cultivates that which should be destroyed, explicitly encourages those things which should be discouraged, and destroys the very things that should be cultivated in order to produce a person who loves his neighbor rather than loving himself, and only himself.

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