The Human Scale

When life slips
beyond the human scale
We seek for proxies
for corporate wet-nurses.

But everything has changed
and everybody knows it.

More thoughts on stewardship - decision making

One of the key distinctions between the Biblical/natural/classical/humane stewardship model and the modern industrial/management model is the structure of authority. We should recognize that a management revolution swept the world in the 20th century and that we live in its framework. It places demands on us that prudence tells us to meet, even while wisdom shakes her tired head.

Under both the I/M model and the Stewardship model authority is more or less equatable with decision making. However, in the I/M model, decision making is primarily concerned with breadth of decision. In the Stewardship model, we find emphasis on  and knowledge about the depth of the decision as well. Breadth refers to the number of people affected. Depth means how much each person will be affected. 

The reason the I/M model is more concerned about breadth of decision is because it treats every part of the matrix in the abstract. Every member of the organization is a variable that can be controlled to fulfill the ends of the organizational heads - ends which arise from the heads of the heads. The I/M model disregards personhood and place because personhood and place interfere with efficiency. In this sense, the I/M model is fundamentally Gnostic.

Therefore the top of an I/M matrix can make decisions that involve the whole enterprise no matter how large it is. Every part of the enterprise is merely a part of the enterprise that does what it does according to statistical probabilities. Every part is a replacable variable.

In the Stewardship model a great deal more attention is paid to depth of decisions - that is to say, the person making the decision has a depth of relationship (and, therefore, often, authority) with the people who have to live with the decision and he therefore pays much more attention to how those decisions will affect the people who have to live with the decision - as persons who live and work in a place - the same place where the steward lives and works.

The steward cannot disregard the external implications of his decisions. He can't see the worker as expendable and replaceable. He must see him as a person. He knows that his decisions involve his own future. He also must live with the implications. He cannot hide in a distant board room.

This is why small businesses are almost always closer to the stewardship model than large corporations. On the human scale, an enterprise necessarily recognizes the need to treat people well, to respect their humanity, individuality, tastes, hang-ups, strengths and weaknesses, etc. But when the business moves beyond the human scale (which seems to be the implicit goal of almost every start up and is certainly the scale at which the MBA programs train businesses to operate), the individual is swallowed up in the super-sized entity and his personhood is lost. The business stops thinking about him as a person who is owed something simply for being human.

The steward, therefore, makes decisions that take into consideration the implications of those decisions beyond the measures and numbers of the institution. Productivity is and will always remain vital, a sine qua non of business. But the steward knows it isn't enough and it certainly isn't the only thing. It isn't even the ultimate thing.  He won't let one sparrow fall in his household without noticing it.

I can hear one objection: this is a counsel for business failure. And I can easily see why people mght think that. Businesses don't have extra resources to carry dead weight. 

I have a two-fold response - and more folds might come to me as I write. One, have you ever seen the percentage of new businesses that fail in the first 18 months? Might the model have something to do with that? And two, I believe humans respond well to being treated like humans, and they still remain the only way a business can succeed. Three, God has a hand in this too. Four, a business that can't treat humans like humans as opposed to "human resources" is in sin and should repent.

It is not in the nature of a corporation to make sacrifices. Sometimes a steward has to. In a word, the difference between a stewardship and a I/M is love. But this is a particular love for particular people living and working in a particular place. It is not the abstraction of good feelings or sympathy for mankind. The person who insists that he loves mankind but can't stand people loves neither people nor mankind.

A Stewardship look at Psalm 37

As my whole thought process is being transformed by this Biblical model of stewardship, I found myself understanding things from Psalm 37 that had never been clear to me. Some of you have probably thought this way for years and are laughing at the things I am making a big deal over. Bear with me as I proceed through the "enthusiasm of a new convert stage." It's just that this idea of stewardship has been so catalytic in my thinking that a host of mixed up ideas have fallen into order. That is a joy that one ought not to hasten past. It's a foretaste of what will happen to us when we reach heaven and will "know as I also am known."

Psalm 37 tells us to delight in the Lord and when we do He will give us all the desires of our hearts. It tells us that if we commit our way to the Lord and then trust in Him, He will bring it to pass. It tells us that He will make the righteousness of the faithful as clear as the light, so we should be still before Him and wait patiently for Him.

When I got to this verse, I paused and said to the Lord of the Psalms, "But it is so hard to see how you will do this. The whole economic system we are living under is built on greed, hatred of the material world, and ravenously unjust laws." I have been shaken by my consideration of the particularities of how our legal and business systems work. Human values sometimes peak through the way a weed can grow in a desert, but they are not the driving engine of our economy or our legal system.

Good people are continually displaced and disregarded and prevented from having influence in our corporations, schools, law firms, and political parties. When they succeed they are sucked in and transformed into the image of the entities they succeed in.

We are very possibly the most corrupt human society since Sodom and Gomorrah. My daughter asked me the other day, "Are we really worse than every other society?" In essence, I responded, no. But we have so much power and so much influence. We are a city on a hill, whether we like it or not. And we have replaced our lampstand with the noxious fumes of the smokestack - we have replaced our light with the dark-breathing vapor of our perversions.

To whom much is given, much shall be required. It was Jefferson who said that when he thinks of the responsibilities God has entrusted to the United States, he trembles to realize that He is a just God. We cannot, we must not, imagine for a moment that this first principle of stewardship will somehow be set aside for our nation because we have some special relation to God. If we do, then we are most to be pitied, for we have brought great shame on His name.

So I said to God, in effect, how can it be that in this dark and lost world He will reveal the righteousness of the just.

Then I picked up my Psalter again and read,
"Do not fret yourself over one who prospers,
the one who succeeds in evil schemes.
Refrain from anger, leave rage alone;
do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.
For evildoers shall be cut off,
But those who wait upon the Lord shall possess the Land.
In a little while the wicked shall be no more;
You shall search out their place, but they will not be there."
But the meek shall inherit the land;
They will delight in abundance of peace."

In the past, I would read these verses in a somewhat analytical manner. That is to say, I would read them as an interested party, but that is because I have always loved the Word of God, no matter what it is talking about. "Give me a genealogy, Lord. I just want to hear your voice." But that didn't make the genealogy itself directly interesting to me. That came later.

Even so with some of these thoughts in Psalm 37. But consider: The Lord called Abraham out of one place and to another place. He promised him land. Earth. Over and over again he describes it in earthy terms. "Unto thy seed I will give this land," "the land was not able to bear [Abraham and Lot]," "All the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it," "Arise, walk through the land... for I will give it unto thee," and so on.

You come out of it distinctly impressed with the love of the maker for His creation. He doesn't want abusers and wicked people to inherit this stuff. He wants to give it to people who will love and care for it. So he takes it away from the Canaanites and gives it to Israel, on the grounds of a covenant. The essence of that covenant is that He will be their God and they will be His people and He will give them a land, a place, in which they will be His people.

In the end, there is only one truly worthy of this land, and that is His only begotten Son. This Son will inherit the land. He will also be given the nations for His inheritence.

We cannot lose sight of the value God places on land and place. Of the wicked He says, "You shall search out their place, but they will not be there." I wonder if we haven't become a culture of movers rather than settlers precisely to enact this principle. The wicked will lose their place as punishment, but they will also lose their place because wickedness promotes wanderlust. It doesn't love.

Love loves particular things. It loves the maple tree whose branches shade the whole back yard inside the white fence, it loves the spot on the river where the sun smiles in the morning and is shaded in the afternoon, it loves the azaleas along the fence, its heart goes out to the fallen log on the trail in the wood where the lover so often sat to rest as a young man.

The loving heart doesn't wander. The wicked heart has one song and theme: More, more, more. It cannot rest. It frets, and envies, and reaches. It plots against the righteous and gnashes at them with their teeth.

That is why The Lord laughs at the wicked - because he sees that their day will come. And how will it come?

The wicked draw their sword and bend their bow
to strike down the poor and needy,
to slaughter those who are upright in their ways.

Their sword shall go through their own heart,
And their bow shall be broken.

Meanwhile, the righteous heart has been at rest because

"The little that the righteous has
is better than great riches of the wicked.

For the power of the wicked shall be broken,
but the Lord upholds the righteous."

The righteous heart is a settled and content heart. If we adopt the fretfulness of the world around us, we must beware, for God is clear:

"do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil."

(To really get this point, you might want to read a bit about what fretting literally means)

One important point that may seem an aside, but in fact permeates the scriptures and especially this Psalm: I do not believe we can be considered righteous if we do not love the land that our God made for us - if we do not love the particular place God has put us.

Wherever you are, nourish the soil - physically AND spiritually. If God calls you, by all means move. But only if God calls you. Because if He doesn't call you some place else, your place is your calling.

The Stewardship Model - Part three

Deuteronomy 27:19

Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan,
and widow.

Last night some friends took Karen and me out for dinner. During the conversation, the lady with whom we were dining revealed that she has an 87 year old aunt who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and that she is thinking about moving to where this aunt lives so she can care for her in her declining years. I was moved by her willingness to sacrifice so much for her aunt. Then she told me what her acquaintances say to her.

"You will be an old woman when you finish looking after her," is a particularly disturbing line. The point her friends seem to make with some frequency revolves around the idea that to care for her aunt would make a waste of my friend's life. These are her productive years. The children are grown and she and her husband can travel the world, take on new challenges, do something useful.

But surely you won't waste your own life by looking after an unproductive 87 year old woman with Alzheimers. Surely they can do a better job of that in the nursing home.

This is an act of Christian hatred.

What my friend is running up against is a threefold problem of productivity. The value of the aunt has been used up - she is depleted. She is no longer productive. Don't pour your life into her. She can only drain you.

Since the aunt is unproductive, to care for her would be unproductive - a waste. When she dies, those who cared for her will have nothing to show for it. No equity, no awards, no net worth.

And since the aunt is unproductive and caring for her would make my friend unproductive, her friends - Christian friends - are unable to respect her decision.

One hopes their council is driven from an overly sentimentalized concern for my friend. It is not unusual for one woman to anticipate the suffering and loss of another woman and to try to help her see it by trying to persuade her to do something else. This would be meaningless and positively harmful. It would also show a desperate failure to understand the ways of God. But at least it wouldn't be directed by malice.

Even so, the attitude that directs a person to advise a woman to look after herself and her own needs rather than those of the unproductive elderly is the same attitude that promotes abortion and is only one consistent step short of euthanasia.

Consider: How was the family farm destroyed in America?

World War II was a catalyst. Baby boomers leaving the farm for the city on the newly constructed interstates was the substance. But in the end, what destroyed the family farm was the way its value was measured. Prior to WWII the family farm was measured by the health of all its inhabitants, from soil to souls. After WWII, government experts persuaded the farmers to measure their farms for productivity.

Consider 2: How was American education destroyed (and yes, it has been destroyed)?

Even before the farm was destroyed, the schools changed the way they measured the students. Fundamentally, the student was required to produce, and has been measured ever since, despite all the efforts of education reformers, primarily for the quantity and efficiency of his production. What, after all, is an SAT test? What does a grade measure?

This is the industrial model of education. It is ruled by largely irrelevent, generally distracting, and spiritually harmful measures. It reduces tasks to what can be measured numerically - thus it loves worksheets, busywork, and other forms that can give the illusion of production. It's scale is radically disproportionate to the human spirit. It is ruled by the disinterested bureaucracy whose purpose for existence is to sustain its own existence.

In the Christian setting, this industrial model is mitigated by Christian values when Christian values can seep through the metaphor. But the habits of mind remain. The students are often valued according to their marketing usefulness, which means, how they affect the school's statistical averages and how blonde hair and blue eyed they are. The students are measured for the efficiency of their production. The teachers are resources to exploit, deplete, and abandon. The mission statements are vacuous, empty phrases designed to inspire sales but not to transform thinking. The buildings are factories with the machines removed, laborers replaced by children (who can't get jobs because of child-labor laws - the irony is devastating) and lockers placed in the hall, when the school can afford to have its own building.

Such a school, structured on the unbiblical metaphors of the modern mind, will not nurture godly students and transform our age. It will produce people driven by standards of production who will spend their whole lives measuring themselves and others by their productive capacity or by illusory symbols of productivity. It will produce people who will tell their friends that they should not lose their most productive years to caring for an unproductive aunt.

But consider one more thing.

The farmer ploughs engendered fields with grace
Sows the seed
Loves its shoots
Weeds and prunes
Breeds life in the resurrecting soil

The all-regenerating soil
Where he plants
Ever and anon
All the death
That he can find to replenish

Then, finished, he lays himself down
To continue his life's work

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Who is really feeding whom?

There is a mystery in the way death brings life. Industrial minded people never see it.

********************************************************************

So how should a student be measured? First, let's put this idea of measurement in its place. Before a student is measured, he must be loved. To be loved means to be known, to be accepted into a community regardless of his measurables. To be accepted into a community demands a community on the human scale - which isn't very large. Everybody who has authority over a student must know him - well and lovingly. Any school where that isn't the case is too big and cannot avoid industrial habits.

That is why the headmaster must not be an administrator. He must be a steward.

More on how to measure a student later.

The Stewardship Model - Part two

You might as well expect to see lots of parts to this stewardship model discussion. I'm obsessed with it.

I, like most American adults, have felt an uneasiness about the way we live for a long, long time. I've been trying to get to the bottom of it so I could escape the folly. Beginning with the presupposition that the great teacher will have the solution, I have sought for years to understand where it is we entered this inhuman way of life and how we can get out of it.

I can throw some platitudes at you to settle the issue simply, such as we went astray in the garden of Eden, and sin is the problem. Those are both true, as are a multitude of other truisms we draw from the Bible and drain of their meaning. But it isn't enough to say we need to repent and then not figure out the details of our sins. Repentence is a process we enter in which the layers and layers of folly and mischief are removed from our souls over a very long period of time.

So I want a more thorough answer that is not mere ideas or God-language. I want embodied ideas that show how we can get on the right path.

Psalm 23 famously reminds us that "He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake." We aren't walking that path if we are functioning like the world we live in - as lost a world as ever the world has seen.

A friend of mine lost her job not terribly long ago because, I believe, of office politics played out in false accusations. She had a meeting with her supervisor in which she tried to respond to the issues raised. Whenever she would challenge an accusation, the supervisors response was, "I don't know anything about that."

Yet he released her.

We are all cynics because we have all sat through meetings in which a predetermined position of an organization's leadership was presented to the members of the organization as though there would be serious discussion. We all know that classes are offered to administrators on how to manage a group so as to accept your position. We all know that colleges across the country offer classes by experts on how to manipulate people to buy goods and services they don't need with money they don't have. We all know that life has spun out of our control and that we are not free and independent people, much less states.

We are mocked so frequently that we have become utterly numb to it.

I can think of multiple friends who have lost jobs in the last few years, and it is invariably done in an inhumane manner. We are cynical about work, about politics, about religion, about family life.

And the problem is in our embodied souls and its relations. We have disconnected them and our groping to reunite them without the logos leads us far from the paths of righteousness.

My previous entry reflected on the crisis of productivity. I need to state emphatically that productivity is not the evil. All things being equal, productivity is a good thing. Productivity as the controlling measure is the evil. And that brings me back to the central point:

We are dying by our metaphor.

The Bible presents life to us in terms of stewardship. We live and die by cash. The goal of a business manager, we are told, is to increase the value of the business to its share-holder. But what if pornography increases that value? Well, it won't in the long run, we hopefully argue. But to convince the shareholders is another story.

We have created a system in which the survival of the participants depends on defeating the competition and maximizing cash-flow. The corporation has become aware of its moral obligations in the past 20 years (which really means they have changed them) and they express that moral growth by giving preferences to activists who threaten them with loss or promise them rewards depending on whether they are sensitized to the activists demands.

The corporation, as presently structured, is itself an unnatural entity. We cannot wonder that it spawns and responds to unnatural movements. The corporation exists for itself and its only goal is growth. It knows no limits because it is measured by abstractions and symbols. It's scale is always larger.

The present corporation is only one of many manifestations of our perverse mode of thinking. And we are helpless before it because we do not believe Jesus' assurances in Matthew 6.

The Bible calls us to think about all of life as stewards. The goal of a steward is not to maximize profit for the shareholders. It is to be found faithful. And the steward is found faithful by nurturing and protecting the entire organic unity of which he is steward.

The Biblical word translated "steward" is oikonomos. Perhaps you can tell that this is also the word from which we get economy. That is a telling fact. The word means household manager. But what economist cares about the household?

The Biblical household contains everything included under the authority of the head of the household, whom the steward serves. Wife and children, fields and cattle, livestock and water, soil and servants - all come under the responsibility of the steward.

Some stewards, no doubt, decided they could impress their masters if they increased the productivity of the household. But if they did so without tending to the health of the entire household, including those unproductive elements like old people and land good only for grass, the overall health of the household suffered. And that was the priority of the steward - health, not productivity. The health of the entire household, not only parts.

I'm ready to go so far as to say we don't know what we are doing and would stare blindly if a wise steward told us how to run our households or schools. No, we would get angry.

But we need to repent. We are living wasteful, self-indulgent, meaningless lives and they are wearing us out and destroying our joy.

More later.

The Stewardship Model - Part one

I argued the other day that the metaphors of our era don't work when we think about life and education. A friend stopped by last night and told me that the school where he serves as headmaster is reworking their by-laws so that he will operate as a CEO. This is what I mean when I say that our habits are those of the modern world.

A headmaster is not a CEO. He doesn't need an MBA. He shouldn't be a business administrator. He is a steward.

My thoughts are evolving rapidly on this issue, but I want to write them here so I can submit them to the review of my peers and others who are concerned for classical Christian education.

The basic notion is this: as moderns we have a mind that lives and dies by a false metaphor, and our schools are failing because of it.

Since Descarte our lives have been increasingly dominated by a truncated economic model. Descartes wanted what he called certain and precise knowledge. To get that he wanted us to measure everything, so he reduced everything to measurable units. Or at least he tried to. Since his day mathematicians and economists have attempted to reduce all of life to the size of their rulers.

This is why Edmund Burke feared accountants who ruled and Stonewall Jackson was willing to go to war to keep the northern banks and industry from overthrowing his home.

In an attempt to have precise knowledge of things that cannot be precisely measured, we have made gods of things that enable us to think we have this precise knowledge. In the truncated economic realm, this god is money. In education, it is test scores and grades.

Both money and grades are abstractions and neither is or can be honest. By abstractions, I mean that they have no value in themselves. They only have the value abscribed to them by a convention of the people using them. But because their lies are so powerful, they take on a life of their own. That is why God warned us to beware of the deceitfulness of riches. This is much more concrete and profound than we might first think.

We measure our economy in production terms. We speak of a gross domestic product. But we don't measure a net domestic product. Production carries the illusion of being easy to measure. Depletion takes place somewhere else and is rarely if ever measurable in present money terms. So we don't talk about it.

During the first quarter of 2004, I read, our GDP was a very impressive 4.9%. But does anybody know what it cost to get that 4.9% productivity?

Low interest rates of course. And what could be wrong with low interest rates.

Here is the problem: when production is measured without measuring all the costs of production, production becomes an end in itself. We must increase productivity. So we get factories to produce more, we get farms to produce more, we get everybody to produce more. Heck, we might even knock some things down so we can put them back up.

But consider this whole problem from the point of view of the farm, where I think it is easiest to see. When you increase the productivity of a farm (which is and always has been the foundation of any humane economy), you risk depleting the life right out of it.

Since the 40's our government has promoted maximizing the productivity of farms. What results can we see? A lot of very mediocre food. Hardly any farmers. Massive agribusinesses. Overcrowded cities. Declining small towns. A populace that has no idea how to fulfill the first great commission - that of Genesis 1: "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion..." And a mindset that values people and things by their capacity to produce.

An interesting aside: do you notice that the old translations tell us we are to replenish the earth and the new ones tell us to fill it? The word can be translated either way. It isn't a semantic question. It is a question of perception. The old translators lived closer to this earth and understood the difference between replenishing and filling. They interpreted wisely.

We don't replenish, we use. We deplete. We use up. Because to replenish would (do you see this?) interfere with our productivity. Our farms are depleted. There are fewer people on them. There is less taste in the food. Worse, there is less nutrition in the food. (No problem: capitalism solves all problems. We'll produce supplements!) Because there is less nutrition in the soil. Because after so many years of being mined, the soul is depleted. It is weak. It is not healthy. Nor are the families that used to commune on and around it.

How is that measured in our domestic product.

The problem of the soil will not go away. We are called on by the Lord to replenish the earth. Worshipping productivity because it gives us the illusion of measurability is an idolatry that has already demanded a high price of us. It has given us a mind that is self-destructive.

Even in our relationships we treat others as hills to be mined. We survey the field. We explore for resources. We identify what we want. We excavate. We exploit and sometimes rape. We withdraw what we want. Then we go on to the next hill. Often we call this process dating. Sometimes we even call it friendship. More often we think of it as making friends and influencing people.

As a result, we are depleted. If you exploit and mine one another, be careful lest you be depleted by one another.

This idolatry will demand still more of our children. We will not be saved from the consequences of this broken covenant by capitalism or socialism, by raptures or dreams. We can only be delivered from our unfaithfulness by faithfulness. For it is required of a steward, not that he be found productive, but that he be found FAITHFUL.

I've depleted myself, so I can't write any more now, but I'll pick this up Monday or Tuesday and make the connection between the folly of a cash based economy and a grade based school. I'll also move toward describing the stewardship model - the only Biblical model of how to run a school.

If not factory schools, what?

The contemporary mind is habituated to industrial, military, and bureacratic modes of thinking. Consider this innocuous line from a Staples ad I received today:

"Here's the bottom line when evaluating technology. Will it make your work easier?"

Are they quite serious? Is the market really driven by that inane motive?

We suffer from a crisis rooted in our metaphor and this matters enormously because there are two things that determine the quality of our lives: the questions we ask and the metaphors we use to answer them.

Our metaphor is cash based and it drives us to exagerrate the importance of many secondary concerns. Next, it leads to the creation of a society in which those secondary concerns become primary concerns by virtue of the demands and pressures they create.

I speak, for example, of the secondary concern of cash. Or efficiency. Or productivity.

If you are reacting and thinking, "How can he call those secondary concerns?" you either don't understand what I mean (which I'll try to clarify) or your thoughts are a serious distortion of reality.

First, let me explain what I mean. We, because of our dominant metaphor, use the phrase "bottom line" when we are speaking of the bank balance. But cash is an arbitrary and relative standard of measurement. In fact, it is one of many arbitrary standards that dominate our thinking and make relativists of us all. Remember, I am talking about a habit of thought here, not a rational conclusion. Today, man is no longer argued to be the measure of all things, cash is.

But cash is an abstraction that gets its value from man, so we are still stuck in this sophistic mode of thought that does place man as the standard.

Cash is not the measure of all things. It is not even an honest measure of the value of a good or service. It is certainly not the measure of a person's "net worth." Cash can be a measure (among others) of the health of an institution. And cash needs to be measured. It is a genuine concern.

But it is a secondary concern. It is like a person's temperature. It can tell you if there is a problem, but it can't, by itself, tell you what the problem is. And when the goal of a person's health regimen is to maintain his body at a steady temperature, he's guaranteed to fail eventually.

In the same way, productivity and efficiency are not ultimate measures. They certainly have a place, but one's life cannot be ruled by them. They are secondary.

So are security, comfort, and clothing.

I'm not sure it could be put any clearer than Jesus made it in Matthew 6: "Seek first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."

What forcefully strikes me about the way Jesus talks is that He never, so far as I can recall, uses the metaphors we live by. Granted he was pre-enlightenment (though it seems to me He could have come after the enlightenment if He wanted to), but all His imagery is derived from what we might call man's relation to nature - from natural processes. It is as if the spiritual world is recognized by its creator as analogous to the natural world. But that same spiritual world is not regarded by its maker as analogous to the industrial world we live in.

And of course He is right.

A fundamental premise of certain dominant streams enlightenment thought is that nature must be overcome. Have you ever heard the phrase, "The conquest of nature"? You wouldn't have before the enlightenment. But conquering nature is one of the primary objectives of our political economy. For example, women must not be constrained by their bodies, sexual preferences must not be ruled by what Paul describes as natural, and nature must "give up her secrets" no matter what form of rape or exploitation we must practice to discover them.

In short, with our industrial mindset, nature is either enemy or slave. If it submits, it is a resource from which we can draw our productive power. If not, we must hate and fear it.

God never meant it to be so.

We are to plough in hope, to sow to the spirit, to prepare the soil for the seed of the Word, to bring in the sheaves rejoicing, to prune and be pruned, to bear the fruit of the Spirit, to administer the whole household as stewards (oikonomos - economists) with an eye to the long-term health of every member of the household - not just the useful or productive, to be good shepherds and not hirelings, to go out and find the one lost sheep...

We are also vessels and tent-makers. But these are produced by the loving hands of craftsmen, not the indifferent "human resources" belonging to an even more indifferent corporation.

The natural world, the world of shepherding, farming, hills, rivers, dells, valleys, mountains, rain, tornadoes, clouds, and stars, the natural world is analogous to the spiritual world. It is also analogous to the social world and the psychological world.

If we lose sight of this world of nature, our arts suffer and when our arts suffer, our habits of mind become impoverished. We run our lives on wholly inadequate metaphors.

That is what has happened to American education.

We frequently hear our schools described as factory schools. They are organized for efficiency and production with the pattterns of the factory permeating their operations. There is a distressing amount of accuracy contained in this metaphor, though within a school a healthy soul often has more room to rebel than in a factory. Certainly both factory and school are ruled by the bureaucrat, by "the man behind the desk" as Wendell Berry calls him.

But when private schools reject the model of the bureaucratic school, what do they turn to? Are they instantly freed from the industrial and accounting habits of mind that dominate our age? Rarely. And when they are they often swing to the other extreme of child worship and Romanticism.

I want to argue for a radical reconsideration of how we structure our schools and the way we assess their success. I want to argue for a more Biblical Stewardship Model to replace what I will call, for the sake of a brief title, the industrial model.

Later today or tomorrow I will try to develop what I mean and begin to show what it would look like.