DOCENDO DISCIMUS

Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith (Intro)

There are introductions to books, and then there are Introductions to books. As I process through it chapter by chapter, I thought I'd pull some quotables from Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation by James K.A. Smith - a wonderfully Reformed look at Christian education.

"What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctly Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job)." (p. 17)

"What if education, including higher education, is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires?...What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions - our visions of 'the good life' - and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? And what if this had as much to do with our bodies as with our minds?" (p. 18)

"What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?" (p. 18)

"If education is about formation, then we need to be attentive to all the formative work that is happening outside the university: in homes and at the mall; in football stadiums and at Fourth of July parades; in worship and at work." (p. 19)

"The core claim of this book is that liturgies - whether 'sacred' or 'secular' - shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love." (P. 25)

"An education, then, is a contellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices...There is no neutral, nonformative education; in short, there is no such thing as a 'secular' education." (p. 26)

"Could we offer a Christian education that is loaded with all sorts of Christian ideas and information - and yet be offering a formation that runs counter to that vision?" (p. 31)

"The end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people." (p. 31)

"Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly - who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love." (p. 33)

"An important part of revisioning Christian education is to see it as a made of counter-formation." (p. 33)

"While Hollister and Starbucks have taken hold of our heart with tangible, material liturgies, Christian schools are 'fighting back' by giving young people Christian ideas...Christian education as formation needs to be a pedagogy of desire." (p. 33)

"The primary goal of Christian education is the formation of a peculiar people - a people who desire the kingdom of God and thus undertake their vocation as an expression of that desire." (p. 34)

My instincts as to what we are to be doing (and why) at Veritas find much affirmation in Smith's writing. Looking forward to chapter 2...

On Accreditation and Statism in Education

I (Craig) have been revisiting a few previously-read books on classical Christian education to apply their counsel to current situations. The process has been helpful for the sake of thinking through some of these aforementioned "opportunities".

For instance, I recently received the following email from one of our Veritas parents:

"My daughter has just finished another semester at Veritas. We know she is getting a very good education, and we are pleased with her performance. She is learning how to study and prepare, to be a success when she attends college. It is never too early to create good study skills and habits.

However, I am curious about the state accreditation status of Veritas Classical. I am sure the process is a long, drawn-out procedure, but to be honest, I am a little nervous. Am I correct in saying, if a student does not attend a state accredited high school, the only way for them to be accepted to a state college or university, is based solely on their ACT scores?

I am also interested in the accreditation status because there is a grant program available for schools. Perhaps you have heard of the Box Tops program. This program has probably existed for 20 years. Many of the foods we use come with Box Tops, and once collected, the boxtops are sent in, and the school receives money. I would be happy to assist with this program, but the school MUST be state accredited to receive the funds. I have saved these coupons for three years and hopefully, one day Veritas, will be able to benefit from them.

I have not heard of any specific details indicating that VCA is indeed making a consorted effort to continue their pursuit of accreditation. Would you please be specific and give me some concrete details about this matter?"

Rather than email back, I thought a conversation might be more helpful, so I picked up the phone and called. We had a pleasant discussion about her concerns and our philosophy concerning accreditation. Indeed, I said, there are no specific details because there are no specific plans to pursue state authorization or endorsement. Curricularly speaking, we actually exceed the state's academic requirements; financially speaking, we don't want money with strings attached.

Simply put, with regard to accreditation, we don't need or want it.

Douglas Wilson, in his books, Repairing the Ruins and The Case for Classical Christian Education, elaborates on what I mean:

"We have been told, both directly and subliminally, that state accreditation is to education what the FDA stamp of approval is to food quality, i.e. the guarantee of rigorous scrutiny by knowledgeable experts. But the reason we are having all this debate over education in the first place is that the whole country pretty much agrees that our state-certified and accredited schools are usually pretty poor.

Nevertheless, parents still have a deep faith that accreditation means something because it ought to mean something. And so they come to inquire about possible enrollment at a private school, and one of their first questions concerns whether or not the school is accredited - even though the reason they have come to apply is that they are thoroughly unhappy with the school they are leaving, which has been accredited for a hundred years."

In revisiting some of Wilson's thoughts, I noticed another of his answers that fleshed out more of my perspective on the question of school choice - a hot topic here in Oklahoma, and the subject of the "Restoring American Exceptionalism" (terrible title) Town Hall I'm attending on Tuesday. After tweeting yesterday that "Restoring American Exceptionalism is not my goal, but I'm for school choice and will be attending Tuesday,' I realized I should probably have clarified what I meant when I used the phrase "school choice".

For me, "school choice" has little to do with charter schools and vouchers, but simply local (read: parental) control and no government (city, state, or federal) involved. Again, Wilson writes in The Case for Classical Christian Education:

"At the root, the problem with charter schools and vouchers is not difficult to understand. I've written elsewhere that the theological case against such programs should actually be grounded in the prohibition against stealing. When the government taxes us in order to perform the duties assigned to the civil government by God, Christians clearly can have no consistent ethical objection (Romans 13:1-7). But if the government adopts responsibilities that God never assigned and begins massive redistribution of wealth accordingly, this creates an ethical problem...

...Parents who want charter schools and vouchers are asking, in effect, for others to pay higher taxes to fund their children's education - and the whole thing becomes simply 'food stamps for the brain.' A citizenry may be taxed in order to fund those activities that God requires of the civil magistrate, but secularist education is not one of these activities...If conservative Christian parents join this parade by seeking a piece of the action, we are demonstrating that we do not understand how our nation has drifted into its current idolatrous statism. As I put it elsewhere, 'until we learn to fight statism by refusing to accept benefits, our hypocrisy will be evident.'"

While I don't agree with everything Wilson says or writes, it's been helpful revisiting his (and others') books that address these ideas in a way that goes beyond (for now) my instincts and common sense. Much to ponder and process as we continue to shape the future of education.

Naming Our Idols (Reading)

As has been my (Craig's) tradition for the past five or so years, I recently posted my year-end booklist at Second Drafts. I'll save you the rehash here, but suffice it to say, it was not a good year. A couple things came to mind after the fact that I thought might play well here at Docendo Discimus, so here we go.

First, I need to remember Solomon's words: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). This year was not a particularly good season for reading for a lot of legitimate reasons, but rather than feeling sorry for myself and nursing my wounded pride (more on that in a minute), I need to let it go. Spending the first half of February interviewing for a new role that, between March and June, would then require our family to pack, move, unpack, and begin to figure out our new lives in Oklahoma took a toll (especially on top of teaching and coaching along the way). It wasn't sin; it was just a season that I didn't read a lot of books.

But let's talk about sin. Reading can be an idol for me. Walk into my study and you'll see my trophy cases; check out any end table in our house and you'll see my Asherah poles of books to read. Sure, I post my annual reading list to help others who might be looking for a book, but as I've never had a pure motive in my life, I confess I want people to see not only what I read, but also that I read. I'm not saying I'm proud of that; I'm just saying my motives are mixed (as they are with just about everything I think, say, or do - welcome to my humanity).

Emotionally speaking, and as much as it has therapeutic properties, reading can be a drug - one sold over the counter (or the Internet) and peddled by a variety of dealers (family, friends, teachers, librarians, etc.). Sometimes I need a little literary hit and can get worked up and seriously grumpy if I don't get it. These reading "shakes" may seem as foreign to a non-reader as craving alcohol is to a non-alcoholic, but I swear it's real (my wife and daughters do, too). My name is Craig, and I have a reading problem.

What else complicates all this? Since I seem to have less and less time for picking up a good book, picking up a good book becomes all the more important. The problem? Reading can be like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get. Another reality is that, in the name of reading ever-broadly, my wants can overwhelm my needs. Do I want to read the popular biography of a modern visionary whose time partially overlapped my own (Steve Jobs) or a 2000+ year-old set of histories of foreign lands and peoples of which I've rarely heard (Herodotus' Histories)? I can choose the candy as quickly as anyone...and this year it seems I did.

A friend of mine once told me in a discussion on reading that, physically speaking, one can live a long time on junk food, but eventually the body needs a change of diet to a more balanced meal to run optimally. The same is true literarily, and why I feel the way I do about the lack of meat, potatoes, and veggies in my reading diet this past year.

Why lament any of this? Because by offering to God what I feel to be a failure in need of redemption, there's a lesson for others, I think. Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with one of our Veritas dads. As often happens in these parental conversations about education, I picked up on his insecurity in talking with me by way of questions and comments like, "I haven't read/studied like you" and "I'm no scholar like you," etc.

These words, of course, played to my pride, but letting them do so only evoked a hollow feeling of fraud in my heart. Yes, I've read, but there's so much to read that I haven't. Yes, I've studied, but what of my studies have I already forgotten? Yes, I want to be a scholar (and want to be thought of as a scholar), but I'm not. I'm a guy in a role with a title that can lead parents, teachers, and students to think (or hope) I am or might be.

All these mental gymnastics were going on in my head during our conversation and I immediately tried to explain some of it to my friend. I'm not sure he fully understood or believed me, but the important thing was my attempt to disbelieve what I knew to be a lie. I wish I could convince all our parents, staff, and students of how much I still have to read, study, and learn as their classical Christian Head of School. Too many of them may think too highly of me in this area, so perhaps this year's posted reading list will pull back the curtain and reveal more of who's really trying to run Oz.

In the meantime, there are good books to be read with more redeemed motives. Maybe I won't post a booklist next year; maybe I won't even keep track of what I read at all. As silly as I feel for making an idol out of something so seemingly benign as reading, taking what God created as good and using it otherwise has always been my problem.

For the record, I read that in the best Book...or rather, it read that in the worst of me.

Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference

I (Craig) just finished Mark Edmundson's book, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, a rambling yet rousing tribute to his high school teacher, Franklin Lears. While Edmundson's memoir takes place in his Massachussetts public school, he writes as someone more than familiar with classical philosophy, literature, and even some pedagogy. Some quotes:

"There is something archetypal about the world of high school, something allegoric. The kids have formalized roles. The teachers have nicknames that fix their place in the meager cosmos. Even the building is full of highly charged locales - the place where this or that clique hangs out, the corridor where the fight took place, the detention room where Big Fran, the submaster, had to call the police. There is something eternally burning about this world; it lives in the mind ten, twenty, thirty years after the fact, as though it had been concocted and instilled by a small-time Dante, who had himself once been injured by it and wanted it preserved eternally as a reminder." (35)

"In every early encounter between a teacher and a student there are multiple beings present, multiple ghosts, many of them not beneficient. Great teachers react differently to this fact of pedagogical life. Some of them never show their hand. They always turn the question back on the student. They never declare themselves. This is the way of Socrates, as it is of the expert therapist (Socrates is, among many other things, the first deep analyst of the psyche, the spirit), who functions as a mirror, always showing the patient her own reflection back.

But there is another way of proceeding too, and it can be no less transforming. That is to expose oneself fully as a teacher, to be receptive to everything, every resentment, fantasy, affection, and hatred the student brings forward. And once those passions are alive, once they are in play, then let the student use them as energy for intellectual inquiry and thence for change. Such teachers are human incadescences - they have ideas, then the ideas have them; they promulgate theories, they burn brilliantly with them, and they are always, always right. They create disciples, smaller versions of themselve. They found schools. Freud was such a teacher. So was Plato. So, in his way, was Jesus." (78-79)

"In general, teachers do not want to be 'responsible' for students' screwing up their lives because they give themselves over uninhibitedly to Whitman and try to live as the old queer anarch would, or to Dickinson, who created her own God and her own cosmology and lived with them. Many teachers, I suspect, don't trust kids to sift these matters for themselves. Nor do they even really trust other adults to do it. The idea of a society full of people running amok, using the poets and artists to remake their own minds, individually and with only their own judgments and disasters and disappointments as inhibiting walls, can make teachers crazy." (239)

"It was words instead of body blows that [Lears] traded in. The powers that he had by virtue of knowing how to talk and write, commanding irony when he needed it, being able, when pushed, to impale an adversary on the point of a phrase - this power became manifest to me. And I thought back through some of the worst moments of my life, and I began to see how differently a few of them might have turned out if I could only have spoken half well rather than pitched a fit or thrown punches. Even in the face of violence, a sure mind, I began to believe, might bring you through." (250-251)

"Good teachers have many motivations, but I suspect that loneliness if often one of them. You need a small group, a circle, to talk to; unable to find it in a larger world, you try to create it in the smaller sphere of a classroom." (266)

An interesting read that got better as it went along (give it at least 50 pages to appreciate Edmundson's writing style), Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference makes for a nice wind-down at the end of the day.

Lost in Transition

David Brooks writes in The New York Times this week about an all-too-depressing reality: the lack of critical thinking employed by American young people. Quoting from Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, the new book from notable Notre Dame sociologist, Christian Smith, Brooks argues:

"In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart."

He's right in his analysis. Some more excerpts:

"It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues."

“'Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,'” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. 'I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,' is how one interviewee put it."

"Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America."

"For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism. Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment. Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called The Death of Character. Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described."

The point is that students are not being taught what moral categories are, let alone trained how to use them to organize moral (or immoral, or amoral) ideas, behaviors, and philosophies. It's like trying to sort the mail without slotted boxes...or finding something on the Internet without a search engine...or charting a travel route with only an address but no map on which to plot it. The result is personal confusion, misdirection, and (ultimately) hurt - not to mention a society crumbling due to its inability to discern right from wrong because we are unable to name or describe either.

Many argue that education is the solution, but the claim needs more specificity to be even partially true. In reality, education that helps students recognize and contextualize ideas, behaviors, and philosophies is only part of the solution (and even then it is the foundation - not the pinnacle - of moral formation).

More on this on Friday.