CiRCE Leaders

article on evolution in the schools

2005-04-06T09:05:00.000-04:00

From Edweek, on the evolution debate in the schools

Scientists Offer Ground-Level Support for Evolution
By Sean Cavanagh

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/04/06/30evolve.h24.html

college life

2005-03-28T09:44:00.000-05:00

Two excerpts from Boston.com. I think the second is rooted in the first.

REASSESSING CHANGE The Brandeis administration has given in to fierce opposition from professors to a plan that would have made deep cuts in some traditional subjects in order tsave money for new priorities. Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe had proposed giving up the teaching of Ancient Greek, closing the linguistics major and a music doctorate program, and cutting back in physics and Near Eastern and Judaic studies. But a faculty panel said the plan would be seen as ''a radical shift away from the Humanities," and had left professors so demoralized that some wanted to leave.

A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE Does college cause brain damage? That's the question addressed in the current issue of Psychology Today, where writer Steven Kotler examines the neurological effects of poor eating habits, heavy drinking, and late-night cramming sessions on campuses. He cites a Stanford University survey that found 80 percent of undergraduates were sleep-deprived, compromising their memories; a Tufts University study that found most students eat too much saturated fat, found to contribute to cognitive decline; and Harvard's College Alcohol Study, which says 44 percent of students are binge drinkers -- a habit that slowed the growth of new brain cells in rat studies. ''It turns out the place we go to get an education may be one of the worst possible environments in which to retain anything we've learned," Kotler writes

The Last Tempation

2005-03-01T09:08:00.001-05:00

Remember that you are dust,

And to dust you shall return

In all time of tribulation;

in all time of prosperity;

in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment

Good Lord, deliver us

We sinners do beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God;

and that it may please thee to rule and govern thy holy Church Universal in the right way,

We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord

That it may please thee to illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons,

with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word;

and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly,

We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord

Wherefore it behooved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that He himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.

Hebrews 2:17-18

Nobody was ever tempted more painfully than the Lord Jesus. Sometimes we can think that He must have been less tempted than we because He never gave in, so He was stronger. Any weightlifter can tell you what nonsense that is. When He overcame one temptation, another more powerful temptation came along. He had a body. That body had all the normal physical impulses of the human body. It wanted to eat, sleep, and gain strength. It's hard for the more gnostic among us to understand and accept, but his body had a sexual impulse too. The problem, for example, with The Last Temptation of Christ was not that Jesus was tempted to marry Mary Magdalene. It was that he floated around as though he was not subject to the laws of nature. There is no temptation that any of us have ever felt that Jesus did not feel a hundred times more strongly.

I'm sorry the bishops of the Episcopal church can't understand that. May the Lord Christ illumine them.

The Last Tempation

2005-03-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust,

And to dust you shall return

In all time of tribulation;

in all time of prosperity;

in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment

Good Lord, deliver us

We sinners do beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God;

and that it may please thee to rule and govern thy holy Church Universal in the right way,

We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord

That it may please thee to illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons,

with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word;

and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly,

We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord

Bloody Sweat

2005-02-25T10:04:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return

By Thine Agony and Bloody Sweat;
By Thy Cross and Passion;
By Thy precious Death and Burial;
By Thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension;
And by the Coming of the Holy Ghost,
Good Lord, Deliver us.

When the Word became flesh, he assumed every element of true humanity. There is no truly human quality that Christ did not possess. He was, said the fathers, “made like us in every way, yet without sin.”

One group of ancient heretics was called the Docetai or Docetists. Their name derived from the Latin “dokein”: to appear. They taught that Christ did not really suffer or die, but only appeared to. Some believed that Simon of Cyrene died on the cross, a rather adolescent attempt to evade the implications of Divine Manhood that the Muslims picked up in some of their apologetic writings.

The honor of God and of Christ are at stake in such a claim. Christ did not deceive us into thinking He suffered. His body felt His agony and His soul felt the agony of His body as much as ours does when our bodies suffer. The bloody sweat poured from the pores of his body after He told His disciples, “My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death.” His mental and physical and emotional agony joined forces to strain the bloody sweat that became the means of my deliverance.

His body hung on the cross where the impassable God experienced the passion of death and genuine sorrow.

His body died. It was laid in the tomb, ready to be honored by an extravagant sacrifice of spices from Nicodemus.

His body that had died every bit as thoroughly as your body and mine will one day die was resurrected, and that same glorified body, the same glorified body that you and I will one day inherit if we “continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel” ascended into heaven where He intercedes to the Father on our behalf.

And having ascended bodily into heaven and presented Himself as an eternal sacrifice to the Father on our behalf (the Father who was not pleased with sacrifices and offerings that went on endlessly so He prepared a body for His son), He was able to fulfill the promise given to Israel and send His Holy Spirit.

And by that agony and bloody sweat, by that cross and passion, by death and burial, by that resurrection and ascension, and by that Holy Spirit He is able to deliver us!

Isaiah only saw hints, but how apt his words:

As for me, I am poor and needy;
But the Lord takes thought for me
Thou art my help and my deliverer;
Do not tarry, O my God!

Of His fulness

2005-02-24T08:28:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust

And to dust you shall return

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood;
from plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us

From all oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion;
from violence, battle, and murder;
and from dying suddenly and unprepareed,
Good Lord, deliver us

By the mystery of Thy holy Incarnation;
by Thy holy Nativity and submission to the Law
by Thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,
Good Lord, deliver us

In John 1:16 we read "And of His fulness we have all received, and grace for grace." The fulness of Christ, which is what John is refering to, includes vs. 4: "In Him was life and the life was the light of men."

Vs. 12, "As many as received Him, He enabled them to become the children of God," is included as well.

Vs 14: "We beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" is included as well.

Christ, by the mystery of the holy incarnation, delivered to us the fulness of God. If we deny Him his deity, we rob ourselves of His gifts - for He does not give His spirit by measure. When Christ came, he came "full of grace and truth." He fulfilled the law that had come through Moses, and in so doing He set us free from it. The law could separate Jew from Gentile no more, the law could condemn us no more, the law could demand detailed rituals of sacrifice and offerings no more.

The law had fulfilled its purpose in Christ's submission. It had tutored us and in tutoring us it had brought us to Christ. Now, in Christ - into whom we are baptized because He is God the Son - we are made sons. We have been equipped for all the responsibilities of the mature adult and are no longer under the detailed regulations of the law. Now the Spirit of Sonship is upon us and we act out of love of the Father, fulfilling our duties with joy, carrying on the ancient mission of the family with devotion, bearing one another's burdens with the strength Christ has brought us, bearing our own burdens with hopeful perseverence, knowing that we have been baptized into a new life of freedom. We, by the mystery of the incarnation, have been brought into nothing less than the Sonship of Christ.

The Word submitted to the law for us. The Logos was baptized for us. Christ Fasted for us. The Lord Jesus overcame temptation for us.

And of His fulness we have all received.

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever.

Amen.

Illud Omnia

2005-02-23T09:28:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism;
from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and commandment,
Good Lord, deliver us.

In Luke 10:22 Jesus says "All things were delivered to Me by My Father." Athanasius tells us that Arius, Eusebius and other early heretics used this verse to deny the deity of Christ. "If all things were delivered..., there was a time when he had them not."

What theologians sometimes call "Christological heretics" fulfill Luther's proverb of the drunk on a horse. He falls off one side, then tries to get back on, only to find that he falls off the other side. (We need to be humble about this, however, because it is hardly a trait limited to Christological heretics. We are all inclined to extremes in our thinking that create the illusion of simplicity.)

In the case of Christ, one set of people argue that Christ was God but not fully man. They refer to John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, and some of the other extraordinary descriptions of His glory. Another group argues that Christ was man, but not fully God. They refer to passages like the one above. For good reason, theologians find it terribly difficult to settle on the idea that Christ is both God and man. We will always find it difficult to believe that a man standing before us is God - at least if we believe in the one true God.

Arius, often called the arch-heretic or heresiarch, held to the latter position. Christ was a man. The Father adopted Him, as it were, into the trinity because Christ was such a perfect man. But the Son was not equal in stature to the Father. He was a lesser god. He was not eternally begotten of the Father.

Athanasius devoted his life to defending the honor of the Son he loved - that is, not his own son, but the Son of God. He loved the bride too - that is, not his own bride, but the bride of the Son he loved. He knew that the identity of her groom was of enormous importance to the bride. He knew the myth of Cupid and Psyche (retold by CS Lewis in Till We Have Faces) in which Psyche comes to doubt the identity of her beloved Cupid and, losing her faith, loses her husband. Perhaps he understood the universality of that dynamic and applied it to the eternal Groom and His most-glorious of brides.

He also knew that who Christ was qualified what He could do. Bishop Allison, in his book The Cruelty of Heresy, reminds us of a famous principle the church fathers held to that kept them from drifting into fundamental errors about Christ: "What He did not assume, he could not redeem." He had to be fully man or he could not fully redeem man.

They also realized that if He was only man, not a new man, not divine, His sacrifice could never be acceptable. If He were not the the only begotten of the Father, then He had to be born of man, with man's fallen nature. But because He was the only begotten of the Father, born of the virgin Mary, He could assume the fulness of human nature without its corruption, without sin.

In short if Christ was not man, He couldn't save man. If He wasn't fully man, He couldn't fully save man. But if Christ was not God, He couldn't save man either. But as God and man, two natures in one person as the fathers put it and as we should constantly be putting it, He could save eternally, making an eternal sacrifice on our behalf, one that always satisfies the Father and doesn't need to be repeated year after year and month after month and day after despairing day.

Here is a groom whose nobility and might must overwhelm thes senses and heart of any bride. May we learn to love Him more, to know Him more to be what He is and thus be delivered from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism - but also from hardness of heart and contempt.

Amen.

Leit-hart on Hart

2005-02-18T12:22:00.000-05:00

Peter Leithart writes one of the finest blogs I've seen and yesterday's entry presented a model of thinking about a text that is well worth thinking about. Go to http://www.leithart.com/ to read Hart, Beauty of Infinite, a discussion of Christian rhetoric in the post-modern world.

The Age of False Dichotomies

2005-02-18T11:47:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return

From all inordinate and sinful affections; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil,
Good Lord, deliver us

The desk calendar at the Y said, "Better a creative mess than stagnant order."

I thought, "Yes, if you have to choose. But why do we constantly limit ourselves to options that don't work?" It's a mental habit of our age that arises from our excessive love of freedom. We hate borders so much that anything that suggests the idea of a limitation is seen as bondage. Adolescents naturally think this way, but calendar publishers shouldn't. Working within nature, within the limits natural to a sphere of thought or being, sets us free; that is, if freedom has any meaning.

God was very creative in Genesis one. But there was no mess. And the order was not stagnant.

Order is the prerequisite for genuine and effective creativity.

Home schoolers win at Oxford

2005-02-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

Remember Oh man that Thou art dust
And unto dust thou shalt return

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocricy; from envy, hatred, and malice; and from all want of charity,
Good Lord, deliver us

The following link was sent to me by a writing workshop alumna in Texas. It tells the story of a team of home schoolers who went to Oxford and won a debate tournament.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42498

The humble humor of humus and humans

2005-02-16T07:18:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return

From all evil and wickedness; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; and from everlasting damnation,
Good Lord, deliver us

We are the dust of the earth, otherwise known as humus. When we catch on, we develop a sense of humor, which is another word for earthiness. This keeps us humble, which is to say, mindful of the fact that we are made of dust.

But when the Word became flesh, he humbled Himself, taking on dust, and redeemed us by bringing us, with His flesh, into His person, and lifted our sense of humor into a fulfillment of glory. He restored humans from fallen humus to the humble humor of eternal glory!

Kids need purpose

2005-02-15T14:15:00.000-05:00

Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return

Remember not, Lord Christ, our offenses, nor the offenses of our forefathers; neither reward us according to our sins. Spare us, good Lord, spare Thy people, whom Thou has redeemed with Thy most precious blood, and by Thy mercy preserve us forever.
Spare us, good Lord

For the second time in a month I lost a blog entry to the ethernet. I am looking for a new blog service. Any suggestions?

The Indy Star ran an article on how affluent kids are wasting their lives more than ever with some sensible suggestions to prevent it. Take a look through this link:

http://www.indystar.com/articles/0/221725-7910-021.html

Leadership Institute

2005-02-14T15:01:00.000-05:00

Morton Blackwell has influenced the strategic thinking of conservative organizations as much as any other living American. Recently his organization, the Leadership Institute, began emphasizing the need for a conservative voice on the American campus. If you are a conservative college student or know conservative college students who want to be a part of something more than a spit into the wind, these links will interest you.

Please pass the word to conservative students you know. They should contact LI for help in organizing independent conservative student groups on their campus.
http://www.campusleadership.org/contact-us.html
If you would like to help with the cost of organizing and training conservative students on campus, please click here:
https://www.leadershipinstitute.org/secure/contribute/contibute.cfm
Visit CLP’s website for more stories:
http://www.campusleadership.org/

Christo

2005-02-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

Remember, Oh man, that thou art dust
And unto dust thou shalt return

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth
Have mercy upon us

O God the Son, Redeemer of the world
Have mercy upon us

O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful
Have mercy upon us

---

There's a Yiddish joke about this lady who gets on a crowded bus. She sees a girl sitting down and says to her, "If you knew what I had you would give me that seat."

The girl gets up and gives her the seat. Then she, the girl, starts waving a fan in front of her face. The lady says, "If you knew what I had you would give me that fan."

The girl gives her the fan. The bus drives for a while, when the lady says to the driver, "If you knew what I had, you would let me off here."

The bus driver pulls over and lets her off. As she is stepping down, the driver says to her, "So lady, what is it you have?"

"Chutzpah" she replies.

For an elaborate case of the Chutzpahs, take a look at the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, namely "Gates" the joke they've played on New York's Central Park. I love the double irony. For a long time, artists have been dwelling in a realm of insight and importance from which they look down on us, the unrefined and inexperienced, with scorn and disdain.

But the time has arrived when we are on to their game, and we let them play it for our amusement. We'll pay the ticket to watch them perform. And they'll think they're producing art, and we'll know that, in fact, they are! What a shock that will be to them when they realize we realize that they know what they are doing and we like it.

Roger Kimball has an amusing assessment in his blog at http://www.newcriterion.com/weblog/armavirumque.html

go to 2/13/2005.

Plaxo

2005-02-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

If you read this you probably received an invitation from me to update your contact information with Plaxo. I have often considered using this software, but finally took the plunge last week or so. I'm a sceptic when it comes to technology, but when it comes to data bases we need not doubt its immediate beneficence in principle. So far I am pleased with Plaxo. It makes it much easier to stay current on contact information. Now I need to see how it links to Outlook and other software. I'll let you know what I find out.

Rivendell and the Riven Side

2005-02-10T08:49:00.000-05:00

Remember, Oh Man, That Thou art Dust
And Unto Dust Thou Shalt Return

The old hymn drew the picture presented in the ancient Psalms:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in Thee
Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure
Cleanse me from its guilt and power

Jesus, before subjecting Himself to public ministry, was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, and there He fasted for forty days. He did not hate His body. I find it hard to imagine how much He must have loved His body, knowing what He was going to do with it, why He had taken it on. But for forty days He beat His body into submission. Forty days He felt, first the mild hunger pangs of the first day, then the freedom of the third and fourth day, then the weakness of the second week. He felt the tiredness and the desire of the third and fourth week. He grew hungry in a way that few living or dead have felt and in almost every sense that hunger can be felt.
Not only the hunger of the belly, but the hunger of the eyes.
Not only the pangs of the stomache, but also the feeble limbs.
Not only the dryness of the mouth, but also the tightness of the chest.
He submitted to hunger to be prepared for ministry. He was going to become obedient unto death in short order. He practiced by becoming obedient unto hunger. He died every day, so that when it came time to die it was one final coup de grace.

This morning the song above was going through my mind when my wife asked me how to spell Rivendell (she isn't a Tolkien fan). It dawned on me what Tolkien was saying in that name. Here was the last homely house. Here was the last known place of rest before the journey began in earnest. Plans for the saving of the world were drawn up here. Power to continue was found here. And where is here?

Rivendell - the dell where the mountain is riven - where it is split in two.
Just as the riven side of Christ is our place of rest, where the world is saved, where power to overcome sin is found.

May you and I live off His life, poured from His riven side, and find our joy and rest in Him who is our food - the very bread of heaven.

Is it time for Firefox?

2005-02-09T09:54:00.000-05:00

Like every healthy red-blooded American I resent the nastiness of the Darwinian and monopolistic practices of Microsoft and the carelessness with which they developed Internet Explorer. So I did my patriotic duty and downloaded Mozilla Firefox.

So far so good. It is a much more secure program (we found some 9000 spyware files on our home computer). But I have a couple caveats: I can't blog or work on my web site on Mozilla and when I go to my home page the hits counter is always the same. It is saving the last visit a bit too tightly. If anyone knows why it does that and what it means let me know. It's also a little bit slower.

Thus, if you use the internet, you should go to the Mozilla web site and download Firefox, but don't get rid of MS Explorer just yet. Here's the link. It's free.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html

Ash Wednesday

2005-02-09T09:27:00.000-05:00

Today is Ash Wednesday, one of the most important holy days in the church calendar. Last night my family and I rejoiced in the insuperable superabundance of the goodness of God by pigging out on chocolate and candy. What a time of focused gratitude!

Today we enter into the 40 days of fasting that our Lord passed through in preparation for His ministry. We too will fast. From sweets. For 6 days a week. It's the slightest of mortifications, but every time the hand reaches for a sweet, we will be reminded of how much our Lord, who didn't consider equality with His Father something that His hand should reach for and cling to, gave up for us. We will also be reminded that the sweetness of candy and chocolate and cake is a borrowed sweetness - a subsistent sweetness a theologian might call it. It is the sweetness of God embodied in candy as a symbol to us of the true sweetness of His presence.

And we intend to seek His presence over this lenten season.

I'd love to discuss lent with you. Why not stop by the forum and let us know, where appropriate, what mortifications and disciplines you will be practicing over lent? I need instruction and discussion on these ancient practices.

Wanna get learned how to teach?

2005-02-08T10:24:00.000-05:00

David Larrabee of Standford isn't impressed by his own profession. But it's not their fault. It's the system. Read this review of his book The Trouble With Ed Schools. http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2005/01/01/04books-1.h16.html

And ask yourself where you are getting your teachers.

Character Education

2005-02-08T09:05:00.000-05:00

I have proclaimed from the beginning of my ministry that education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. In the public arena, they speak of character education. Education Next has a fascinating article on-line about a group of charter schools called The Hyde Schools. It shows indirectly how much of what Christian schools do is rooted in mistakes made by the public schools in the 50's and 60's. This article gives us a lot to think about. It's called The Moral Imperative. Click on this link to see it:

http://www.educationnext.org/20051/22.html

Education Next is a publication of The Hoover Institute, a more or less conservative, in the democratic sense, think tank based at Standford University. To see what they are about, visit this link:

http://www.hoover.org/research/

It's good they're focusing on character in this age of infinite seduction. Little girls are getting into the alcohol thing at younger and younger ages, according to this article in the KC Star: Fruit Flavored Alcohol Pulls in Teens. http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/10435518.htm?1c

But how do you teach the virtue of temperance in an age where it's been redefined into an extreme?

de separationibus (or something like that)

2005-02-07T13:54:00.000-05:00

Secularists love to use the separation of church and state as their way to bring the church under the subjection of the state. Someday it needs to be realized that the separation of church and state is a religious idea. It comes from the old testament, where the king was forbidden to exercise the priesly craft (Saul lost his dynasty for doing so) and where the priests are prevented from operating as kings. By separating the functions, Israel was able to maintain a higher level of freedom than almost any other ancient civilization. Unfortunately, we have broken down the separation and placed the monarch (the state) over the priests (church).

What a double irony: that separation of church and state is a religious idea (and therefore cannot be practiced by those who believe the state cannot be influenced by religion) on the one hand, and that those who most loudly defend it are those most aggressively overthrowing it.

Interesting ed conference at Columbia

2005-02-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

Columbia U is hosting a conference on contemplative Practice and Education this weekend. If you want to see the sorts of things the most famous American teachers college is emphasizing, take a look at this web site: http://contemplativemind.org/programs/academic/conference/.

It's gratifying to see that they want students to achieve greater mindfulness because, as they say, "As educators, we have the opportunity to integrate these practices [of contemplation] into the classroom and explore how they can help our students develop greater mindfulness as they deal with these challenges [of war, peace, and social justice]."

What's more than a little disappointing is the commitment to a gnostic approach to contemplation. Content is divisive, I have learned, especially Christian content. So our contemplation must be carefully censored. At least, it is well known that this opportunity to integrate contemplation into the classroom is not an opportunity open to people who have a worldview different from either the naturalism that serves as the foundation of public school education or the quasi-gnosticism that is the only legal religion.

I have great confidence in the truth, however. If people learn to contemplate and if they think honestly when they contemplate, they will confront questions that will demand authoritative answers - answers, that is, from authorities beyond themselves. This could lead to one or two students being enlightened.

That sounds more cynical than I mean it to, for I do believe in contemplation and I believe that it has great value even for people who approach it within the radical constraints of the public school setting. But it's those radical constraints that make me cynical. I don't believe you can have successful contemplation practices in a setting that censors what I believe to be the most valuable ideas from the allowable content of contemplation.

I mean the idea of a trinitarian, monotheistic God who created and is redeeming this creation and who, having called the creation good, delights in its content and its membership - the particularities that He holds together by the Word of His power. In fact, He delights in it so much that He became a particular member of it.

That is worth contemplating. Where it is legal to do so.

Here is a quotation from one of the sponsors, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

"Contemplative methods are simple and intuitive. They have been practiced for thousands of years. The benefits are increasingly well documented, especially in health and healing. Yet we have no national culture of reflection and contemplation to support their practice."

This is true. Christians and Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims, atheists and pantheists have all practiced contemplative methods. They are, at one level, simple human activities. But why do we have no "national culture of reflection and contemplation"? Because, as Neuhaus has pointed out, the national culture has undressed its public square. The content of contemplation is excluded from public discussion. Until now, that is. Now we have stumbled across a more contentless content. And that is OK.

It's sadness that brings down the previous paragraphs, not anger or cynicism. Contemplation is one of life's great pleasures and practices. However, I believe it can never fulfill its potential until they are free to contemplate Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

To see more of this center's ideas, visit this site:

http://contemplativemind.org/practices/

I remain fascinated by the excessive objectivity at the assessment end of education and the excessive subjectivity at the practice end. It almost seems comical, like a father trying to reign in a son who is doing everything he can to dodge accountability.

I should clarify something: I'm not knocking this conference, and in fact some of the links are to Christian organizations and some of the participants are apparently Christians. My concern arises over the classroom application of whatever they discuss.

Multiple Intelligences

2005-02-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

Howard Gardner has dominated educational psychology over the last twenty years with his theory of multiple intelligences. This theory, having much to commend it, is very popular in the home school movement and in many public and private schools. Being rooted, however, in a naturalistic approach to the human psyche, his theories are not without flaws. For an insightful review, go to http://www.educationnext.org/20043/18.html. Education Next is a publication of the Hoover Institute and offers some fine analysis of what is happening in American education.

Howard Gardner is a man I admire profoundly and his work The Disciplined Mind is well worth reading. However, his naturalism and his consequent inadequately inquisitive regard for Darwinism take him down avenues that undercut his admirable objectives.

The great question of education will always be "What is man?".

Paradise

2005-01-26T09:11:00.000-05:00

2004 saw the completion of the finest English translation of Dante in a long time - maybe ever. I have always been a fan of Mandelbaum's translation because of its readability and faithfulness to the original. Ciardi is a magnificent poet who used his talent to produce an extraordinary English Dante, but one that is somewhat less faithful to the original than Mandelbaum. Durling and Martinez have been developing a very fine translation with perhaps the best notes and charts of any English Dante. I also like Longfellow and some of the older, more formal works.

But now Anthony Esolen has completed his amazingly readable and beautifully poetic Paradiso. He seems to have had the spirit of the poet in him as he wrote. When it should be harsh, it is harsh. When it should sing, it sings. When it should weep, it weeps. He has entered the heart of Dante and brought his song to us in an English translation that draws our hearts to the vision of the poet. Buy it. In hardback. Modern Library. www.townhall.com might still carry it at a good discount.

Reflections

2005-01-25T10:49:00.000-05:00

What follows are notes I wrote when I was researching and meditating on the book I wrote with Ed Veith: Classical Education. Most of this didn't make it into the book. Some of it I might not even think any more.

There is no tidy and perfect formula that can be called classical education. it is more of a spirit of education and an attitude to life. Calling it classical Christian education helps to define it by demanding that what is kept of the classical tradition is subject to Christian thought. But perhaps more to the point is the fact that in examining classical educational experience and reflection, nothing is left unexplored.

Liberal education is sustained by its lovers. But is it worth the cost?

Christianity raised the seven liberal arts from self-reflection to knowledge of God.

Augustine spoke of plundering the Egyptians. It must also be remembered that the Israelites used those jewels to make the golden calf.

Christianity is a joyful acceptance of reality. The Greeks also accepted the world of the senses. Both also looked to a higher order of reality--a metaphysical. The match is that both Jew and Greek freely accepted both as real and wonderful.

How do we combine the school of empirical science with the school of the rational trivium? Are they compatible?

Don't spend too much time on historical and political details except as they explain the development of ideas--what intellectual impulses did they release? What did they block? How did they lead to the formation or development or use of the seven liberal arts?

Don't spend too much time on other people's reflections either.

Love towers above all the other disciplines and subsists in a category all her own. She is the only true motivation, the only true power, the only true end of all the disciplines. Indeed, love is God.

The freedom we might have as humans depends on the possibility of knowledge and capacties that are definitive and universal in man. If not, we must get knowledge at least from outside sources and all things are subjected to conditional knowledge. Only those provided with this knowledge can be free - for freedom is contingent on knowledge. This may be the foundational philosophical question vis the possibility of freedom.

Numbered days and straight paths

2005-01-11T11:29:00.000-05:00

My brothers used to threaten me with the old Hollywood line: "Your days are numbered." If only...

In Psalm 91, Moses indicates that we need to learn to number our days. In Hebrews 12 we are told to lift the weary limb and strengthen the feeble spirit and to "make straight the path for your feet."

These are two very comprehensive instructions for planning ahead.

Have you confronted your mortality and accepted the limited number of days you will live and therefore the limited number of desires you can pursue? Have you selected those that matter most? Are you making the path ahead straight? It's a long marathon we are running. You don't want to do it on boulders.

This is a great time to do it - though not as good as December. January to March are the third quarter of life - late in the second trimester of a pregnancy - the doldrums, "this nothing time," the dark night of the soul. But if you spend a week or two numbering your days and making a straight path for your feet, this down time gains new enthusiasm and energy. Have you set any goals for the coming year?

New location

2005-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

I've signed a one year lease on an office in Concord, NC so hopefully this makes the last address change you'll have to remember to keep track of me for a while. New address:

135 Cabarrus Avenue East
Concord, NC 28025

Concord is one of those small-town southern cities that still has a personality. I'm two blocks from the downtown that runs along Union street between First Presbyterian at one end and an old Spanish style church at the other. In between lay shops, law offices, restaurants, antique stores, an ice creamery, and a charming small town street with benches and faux gas lights and parking spaces for cars.

Across from my office is a parking lot. At one end is H&R Block. At the other, a funeral home.

Ben Franklin would be amused.

Houston writing workshop

2005-01-10T13:25:00.000-05:00

Camille Goldstone has arranged for me to conduct a classical composition workshop outside of Houston, TX on January 29. She's been able to keep the cost all the way down to $47.00 for the full day of training plus fellowship. If you are interested, click this link to the CiRCE web site and take a look: www.classicalteachertraining.org. Press to the "workshops" button when you are there.

I hope to be back at the blog more frequently in the days to come. I visited my family up in Green Bay, including my brother and his wife and children, who live in Australia, for Christmas and then moved my office again when I returned. I'm surrounded by boxes, but I haven't given up the ship.

A classical temptation

2004-12-15T08:22:00.000-05:00

Classical educators value knowledge. It would be hard to imagine a school that could be considered classical that doesn't use a core set of texts that students are expected to know, not just to say they have read. Classical schools expect students to learn the math tables and become proficient in math processes. They expect students to know lots of facts about the cosmos in science class. They often require vast lists of data and texts to be memorized. Because classical educators value knowledge.

Every virtue carries within itself its potential vice. There is a temptation that is common to classical man, and it has overtaken many a classical teacher, student, or governing body. That is the temptation to reduce the student to a beast or a machine that is able to reproduce knowledge when given the popular stimulants. To speak in terms of the four causes, it is hard to resist the temptation to view the child as a stimulus-response mechanism - a material and efficient cause alone.

Because we value knowledge we can give in to the idea that reproduction of measurable data points is the measure of the knowledge we teach.

Let me see if I can clarify with an example, even though to give an example will get me in trouble precisely because we classicists are inclined to make this particular mistake. Young children, we are consistently reminded, have a great capacity to remember capacious realms of information. So we use chants and jingles and rythyms and rhymes to help them remember things. This is fine so far as it goes.

The trouble arises when we think the students have learned something that means something t them when they can repeat the words. It is as if they are computers and the facts are bits of data. You repeat the data until the computer is programmed with it. You push the button or click the link and the computer prints out the information. They even tend, as parents and teachers and marketers say, to "love it."

Repetition, rhythms, rhymes, and movements powerfully aid the memory. They are good things because of it. But they don't, in and of themselves, enable a child to understand things. They give the information, but they don't interpret it. The child isn't actually THINKING when he is chanting. In fact, he might be doing something quite opposed to thinking.

That is why so many children who learn Latin jingles or grammar jingles or math jingles can't do Latin, grammar, or math. That it works for some does nothing to alter this fact.

A different activity of the mind is required to understand. But some classical schools go so far as to argue that in the grammar stage children can't understand grammar or math or history. Of course that is true if you mean that they can't understand it at the abstract level of a logic or rhetoric stage student. But I have taught students of every age and helped home school my own five. I have sat around the dinner table with four year old children. I have seen them understand basic ideas.

The two ways we classical educators give in to this temptation are:

Using programmed instruction (these programmed programs are TOTALLY rooted in behaviorism)
Teaching the grammar stage as though the students can only repeat information and cannot understand what they are learning.

Classical and Christian thought teach that we act with purpose following patterns in a manner consistent with the dust of which we are made and the spirit that was breathed into us using intellectual and physical tools to fulfill our purposes. When we only acknowledge the dust of which we are made and the tools we use, we are not implementing the full glory of Christian classical educational theory.

Classical Christian education is the relentless embodiment of the idea - the incarnate Logos being the pattern for all thinking and expression.

Synthesis or Fulfillment: the problem of two knowledges

2004-12-13T08:38:00.000-05:00

William Manchester was a brilliant writer and historian, but in his work "A World Lit Only By Fire" he makes a mistake that characterizes almost everybody's thought about the middle ages since Ockham tried to oversimplify the world with his razor. He argued that medieval Christian philosophers tried to synthesize Christian and Classical Greek and Roman thought.

I suppose there must have been some who tried to do that. Those who did were committing a grievous error, though one that is easy to sympathise with. When the Greek writings came to Europe through the Muslims, they had been affected profoundly by the Muslim philosophers, Averroes among their leaders.

You don't have to read a lot of Muslim writings to come to the conclusion that there is a radical barrier between the glory of their God and the things we can know and do. He isn't just transcendent, he is utterly removed. He is so sovereign as to not have a nature. As a result, Muslim philosophers were never able to reconcile the discoveries of Greek philosophers and scientists with Muslim teaching. Averroes response was to create the theory of two truths. He wanted to be a philosopher and he wanted to survive in the Muslim world. But philosophy and Islam are not compatible - nor is science and Islam, political theorizing and Islam, or a fully developed aesthetic and Islam.

Like every fundamentalism, including Christian fundamentalism when it is really fundamentalism, Islam is in conflict with nature.

When the Greek philosophers reached medieval Europe after the Carolingian Renaissance and through the crusades, they had been interpreted by the Muslims with that dualistic mindset. Muslim philosophers tended to be Muslim heretics - as Averroes was judged to be. Many Christian leaders felt the same thing would happen to Christian thinkers if they read the Greek philosophers too closely, and in some cases it did happen. Siger of Brabant and William of Occam are the prime examples.

Both accepted the idea that there are two knowledges, though Siger was more explicit about it. He argued that there is a knowledge that is gained through rational thought and another that is gained through faith. That these are two ways of knowing is one thing. To say that they know two different truths is delusional. Yet this is the very idea that Christian fundamentalists in the Middle Ages used to, as they thought, defend the faith against Greek philosophy.

But this is horrible. This is a philosophical rejection of Christ. If Manchester is right and the medievel Christians were following the medieval Muslim philosophers by trying to synthesize philosophy with Christian thought, then some ideas and facts sit outside the Christian scope of truth. But if Christ is the Logos that John said He is, if it is in Him that all things will be summed up, if all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Him, then there is no possibility of synthesis. If something is true, it fits within the scope of Christian truth.

For if the Bible teaches anything, it teaches that there is one truth - not a truth of faith and a truth of reason, not a truth of the mind and a truth of the heart, not your truth and my truth - one truth. One Truth.

The Christian philosopher doesn't seek to synthesize Christian and extra-Christian truth. He seeks to know the truth. And he knows that the truth must be ordered to and by the Logos or horrible, horrible errors will develop.

Neither synthesis nor antithesis is the solution. The fulmillment, the summing up, of all things in Christ is the only viable end for history and for thought.

The Logos, in short, overthrows every dualism. All that is discovered by anyone is tested by and ordered to and by the touchstone of the Logos. That is the essence of Christian thought.

Conference speakers - 2005

2004-12-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Laura Behrquist has agreed to speak this summer. Laura is a classical educator in California who has provided excellent materials for home schoolers, including Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum and The Harp and the Laurel Wreath. I'm very excited because this means I get to meet her and because I know she will have a great deal to contribute to the discussions at the conference.

Laura Behrquist, James Taylor, Ken Myers, Michael Eatmon, James Daniels, me, and Martin Cothran. I can't believe the people God brings us. Have you made plans yet to be there? July 28-30, 2005. Book it.

Blogging and forum schedule

2004-12-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

I try to write as much as my schedule permits because I think on paper and because people have told me they find it valuable. Because I have a few different places in which I write, I'm setting up a schedule for when I do each. I'll visit the web site forums every Wednesday when I can. I'll do the web site on Tuesdays and Fridays. And I'll blog on Mondays and Thursdays and any other day when time or compulsion permit.

We've got a new shipment of Norms and Nobility and Classical Education. If you haven't read these books, visit the web site and get them!! www.classicalteachertraining.org.

Evolution Wired

2004-12-03T08:51:00.000-05:00

Wired magazine ran an article in its October 2004 issue arguing that Intelligent Design is a very clever religious movement masquerading as science. It pretends, the article suggested, to use methodological materialism to show that evolution couldn't have happened because of the irreducible complexity of the simplest organism. In fact, says the writer, it is a religious position and 10,000 scientists know evolution is true for every one who believes otherwise.

Two brief thoughts and perhaps more later:
1. This article, like every single pro-evolution article I can remember in 30 years of reading about the issue, makes no case for evolution; it simply assumes it to have happened. If anybody knows of a good article or book that argues the case for evolution without arguing from the conclusion and mocking my sincere questions, would you please let me know about it. I don't mind the mocking, because that is what we do when we are insecure. But I want to see the arguments.

2. This article reminded me of the conflict between Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas. Thomas defended the right of Christians to think deeply, to value the created order and to seek to know it, to use reason according to its purpose. He believed there is one truth, which can be known many ways (e.g. poetically, rhetorically, dialectically, and scientifically). Siger of Brabant came along and pretended to agree with Thomas.

Siger also said that we can know truth many different ways - and so far they did agree. But the reason we can know the truth different ways, Siger went on, is because there are different truths. There is the spiritual truth of religion known by faith and there is, on the other hand, the rational truth of the world around us.

This dualism is necessary for pagan religions that have inadequate gods and it is also necessary for the Muslims from which Siger learned his philosophy. But it is an abomination to Christianity. Christ is the Logos. He is the Truth. To suggest that there are multiple worlds is to deny Genesis 1, Hebrews 1, John 1, and the golden thread that harmonizes the whole Bible.

This is precisely why I argue that only Christianity can sustain a true philosophy. Paganism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, pantheism, and every heresy break into some sort of dualism. And dualism prevents the possibility of rational thought rooted in a Logos. We Christians need to defend our right to think a little more aggressively against those who would silence us - especially our insecure and fearful brothers and sisters.

Perfect love casts out fear, and fear is not faith, and whatever is not of faith is sin.

THINK. Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God. Believe also in Him who is Truth.

Dashes

2004-11-24T13:54:00.000-05:00

The dirty rotten secret of education is that kids love ideas and tend to be a good bit less interested in what adults usually mean by practical stuff. That is one of the causes of stress between them.

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People create or join bureaucracies so they can avoid direct contact with the consequences of their decisions, the moral quandaries life puts us all in, and the pain they cause. At the bottom levels, they can always blame the top. At the top, they can blame the structure - or the bottom - or their helplessness.

But no one is to blame. And that is why no bureaucrat has ever solved a humane problem.

That is why it takes a village, but not one based in Washington.
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Religion makes people take themselves too seriously, which is too bad because it is religion that reveals the humor in life. Of course, the funniest people are the Malvolios - but the happiest people are those who learn to laugh at themselves - which is the fundamental lesson of any sensible religion.

To make excelsior your motto, but to laugh at yourself for doing so, but to keep it as your motto, that is the key to happiness and success.

acceptance and striving
good humor and diligence
light-heartedness and intensity
formality and forgiveness

Combine these and you have the complete man.

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We are habituated to disregard human relationships. Consider the manner of our transactions or the way we pass each other without greeting or acknowledging each other.

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The Enlightenment is not primarily a set of ideas but of anxieties. Until we resolve these anxieties we will be stuck in the Enlightenment and its consequences. We were not created to live in this Enlightenment world - in this Age of Anxiety.

The premise of the Enlightenment is that every human impulse is good and can be ordered without reference to anything transcendent.

The goal of the Enlightenment is not to have a people and not to have a place. A people and a place limit and embarrass.

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The common herd can clap. Only an orchestra can play a symphony.

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Practical instruction is rooted in right ideas. The problem with too much modern education is the inadequacy of the ideas that animate (or kill) it.

The practical and the theoretical are not different in kind but in degree - they are marks along a continuum. Practice without theory leads to errors based on what works regardless of the overall health of the organism or culture. Practice without theory looks for the easiest solution to the immediate problem. True theory prevents us from embracing errors that work.

Theory without practice makes us irrelevent and drives us into word games. Theory without practice won't be bothered with the limitations of reality. Theory without practice disincarnates the idea.

The solution is the incarnate logos.

True theory is wisdom. True practice is skill.

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Modes of instruction can make us wise or foolish by helping or interfering with the discovery of causes. That is why Socratic and didactic instruction are powerfully effective. Discretion requires the knowledge of causes.

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To master a science is to be able to speak with genuine authority on that science.

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A sound epistemology (theory of knowledge) must respect the role of all our faculties and give them their due proportion and honor. We have faculties. It may be worth asking whether their purpose is to know.

One of the great problems of knowledge is pre-consciousness.

Conference 2005

2004-11-23T11:20:00.000-05:00

Ken Myers has agreed to speak again! Now how can anyone not come? Get your affairs in order and be there.

"It is the part of the wise man to order and to judge." When you read Thomas Aquinas you continually find statements like this sprinkled through his writings. They unfold whole worlds to us because he is able to see things from such a high level that he can summarize universal insights in a phrase.

I highlighted this one because of our conference theme: Order. We have a gift here at the CiRCE Institute for coming up with topics no focus group would ever suggest. I'm quite certain that the topic of order is almost as boring to most people as the topic of justice. Maybe more so.

I'm also quite certain that if we don't take it seriously so as to learn how to use it as a foundational category of thought, we will never fulfill the purpose of education. So maybe it's bad marketing, but I hope it's honest service.

The wise man is able to do two things our culture doesn't want done: ordering and judging. Both imply limits, priorities, authority, reality. We need to do them.

The teacher needs to order the desks in her classroom. The writer needs to order his thoughts. The composer needs to order his notes. The craftsman needs to order his tools. The teacher needs to order her lessons. And curriculum. And walls. And thoughts. And voice. And students.

The wise man is the one able to order them rightly - to order them according to his purpose and theirs.

The wiser a man is, the higher the order he is able to attain. That is, he is able to order to higher purposes. Simple wisdom enables a person to order his room. A little more enables him to order his shop. A little more enables him to order his schedule. A little more, his army. A little more, his family. A little more, his country. A little more, his soul.

That is why we need masters; wise men who know how to order things at a higher level than we do. The duty of the ruler is to order the relationships among those he rules to fulfill the purpose of the society he rules. Every adult is a ruler at some level.

The founding fathers laid out an order for our country. They poured their wisdom into it. Now we need to sustain that order.

God who rules all things with wisdom and justice is a God of order. He is trinitarian - one and many at once.

The mind functions necessarily in an orderly way - though it resists the limits of order. It only learns from the particular to the universal: from grammar to rhetoric. So there is an order to teaching.

Subjects can only be mastered in an orderly way: foundational ideas at the bottom, higher ideas at the top. There is no point learning algebra if you don't know your tables. There is no point studying science if you can't do math.

Learning itself is ordered. The seven liberal arts are the basement: how deeply it is dug determines how high the rest of the structure can go. There is no point thinking we can understand the natural or moral sciences if we cannot use the seven arts creatively. That is why Plato insisted that no man ignorant of geometry should enter his academy.

Even being is ordered. Start with God or you never start at all. You simply move in circles, seeking a coherence that can only include tiny solar systems and never attain true knowledge - and eventually giving up on coherence. Metaphysics determines moral truth. Moral truth determines physical truth.

Everything is ordered, but all is in disarray. That is why we need the wise man. Because only he is able to order and to judge.

I hope you'll come to our conference and grow in wisdom with the rest of us.

What is man?

2004-11-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

When we think of man as a being who has a body and a soul and that these can be separated, there are many ramifications and Descartes spelled some of them out. Knowledge of the world outside the mind becomes a serious and unresolved problem. The thinker has no choice but to focus his attention on his own subjective states. The relation between knower and known is broken. And horrible cruelties are defended.

For example, if the body and soul are separable, then the baby in the womb may or may not have a soul. If they are, as I believe, inseparable, then the baby is his embodied soul. Before the soul arrives the baby is not yet a human being. He can be eliminated without moral scruples. But if the soul never arrives because it is what the baby is as opposed to something he will possess, then it is utterly wrong to end the life of that soul.

In short, the abortion industry and its defenders and victims, are operating within an ethical framework derived from a philosophical error about the nature of man. You want practical? Life and death is pretty practical. Get your anthropology straight, because if you misunderstand man all that follows is a mess. And to get your anthrophology right, you must get your metaphysics and theology right. Don't tell me philosophy is not practical. Because the philosophers of the Enlightenment dropped the notion of formal and final cause out of fear of God, multitudes of people have been aborted, executed, tortured, schooled, flattered, drained of meaning, confused, and impoverished. Sometimes extreme and overstated language is just plain accurate.

We need the logos to put us back together.

conference update

2004-11-18T09:26:00.000-05:00

I spoke with Bob Ingram and Michael Eatmon yesterday about the conference program. They are the Geneva School leaders who are helping plan the conference. We discussed speakers and the schedule and I came out of it thinking we will probably have the best line-up of speakers we've ever had. Michael Eatmon will be one of them. He's one of the more amazing people I've met - a genius who can teach well, who knows 42 languages or some such ungodly number, and who has more energy than an unleashed atom.

Other speakers include James Daniels, Martin Cothran, and me. We'll be asking others to come back, but I dont want to mention names till they're confirmed. Of course, we'll also have the Paideia Prize recipient, who always has profound wisdom to offer us.

The theme will be Order, because God is a God of order and he took a cosmos that was a formless void and made it into this glorious creation in which we live. He separated what should be separated and He joined together what should be joined together. He brought things into being sequentially and purposefully. He brought into being an orderly and beautiful creation. Then He created human souls in perfect order. He made them to think and love and will in an orderly way. I suspect that nothing could have disordered this human soul if the great temptor had not stepped in and rearranged its perceptions, creating a disorder in the human soul that has spread through the whole cosmos.

This is the ruin that John Milton said education is supposed to repair and that ACCS has named their conference and book after. It is nothing short of a reordering of the soul, an ordering to our purpose as created by God and restored by the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit He purchased for us.

Lose sight of the order of the soul and there is no point trying to teach anything from a Christian perspective. That is the Christian perspective.

So we'll talk about ordering the soul which is done by ordering the classroom, the lesson, the mind, the tastes, the affections, the body, the wardrobe, the composition (written, drawn, or performed), the social order, the activities of the day, week, year, and life, the materials, the office, the structure of the staff, the curriculum, and everything else that has any role to play in the way we live. Everything is to be ordered to this ultimate purpose of ordering the soul to Christ - of glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

You can't make too big a deal of order, but you can make too big a deal of lower forms of order. For example, a person can care so much about the order of his office that he neglects the order of his affections and treats a student unkindly for putting something down in the wrong place.

A proposed colloquy question: Is there laughter in heaven?

Got any more? Post them in the forum.

I'll have more on ADD later today if I get a chance.

ADD Part two: What is man? (part one is below and should be read first)

2004-11-10T13:26:00.000-05:00

I ended the last entry pointing out how important it is that we get the question about what a human being is right. I began to show how we traded in the idea of an embodied soul for the idea of a soul and a body. Nobody had a more decisive influence on this change than Rene Descartes. Descartes believed there was one "substance" underlying matter and another underlying mind or the soul. The material substance could be explained by mathematical and mechanical laws. It could be studied completely by itself and it could be shown to have the same predictability as a machine. God gave this matter an initial push, but after that it followed its own laws.

God exists outside this world of matter and bodies. The spiritual soul exists within the body. But there is a radical separation of the two. The soul can affect the body, indeed the body cannot move without the soul moving it, but the body is a sharply distinct thing and it has little to no effect on the soul.

It's easy enough to see the roots of deism and the clockwork God of the enlightenment in Descartes' ideas. We need to also make note of his effect on evangelical thought. Ever since the Enlightenment, the west has had a tendency toward strong dualisms: Body separated from spirit, God separated from cosmos, mind separated from feelings, spiritual separated from secular, etc.

This becomes critical when we look at the question of human behavior, and particularly, in this reflection, ADD. The secular world explains human behavior by looking to the material and efficient causes. The classical Christian world has a tendency to explain it by looking to the formal and final causes. Neither explanation is sufficient.

Let me explain. Rejecting God and the notion of purpose, the secular world does not believe that human beings do what they do to know and enjoy God. Most of what we do, we do because external stimuli move us to do it (efficient causes) or because of what we are made of (the material cause). The first option is behaviorism and leads to teaching techniques like programmed instruction, a dangerous temptation in the grammar stage.

The second option has many forms. Freud's theories have been popularized as basically studies in material causality. We lust because we are made of tensions and anxieties that express themselves in lust. We do what we do because of what we are made of. In regard to ADD, the argument from the material cause is that a person has a hard time controlling himself, organizing himself, concentrating, etc. because his brain (the physical organ) is missing or has an exess of certain chemicals. The simplistic solution is to prescribe Ritilin and other risky drugs.

To ascribe ADD solely to efficient causes will lead to stimulus-response approaches to behavior modification. To ascribe it solely to chemical imbalances will lead to medicating the child to control his behavior.

But we can also turn to the formal and final causes. What is the idea or pattern that the child is enacting in his behavior. Where has he seen this pattern enacted before? I don't think children are easily able to behave in a given way without having seen it acted out somewhere. The inner impulse needs a form and rarely if ever does it create one of its own.

On the other hand, what is the child's purpose in his ADD behavior? Those who look strictly to the final cause imply that the child chooses to behave a certain way, that his will is sufficient for the decision, and that therefore we are dealing with sin and that is all there is to it.

I'm not even sure that's wrong. I'm just not sure it's right either. We pious types love to explain things by pointing to sin as an explanation, as though that ends the discussion. It's a little like saying math is the way it is because of numbers.

Here, sadly, is where an awful lot of compassion comes home to die. Different people are inclined to different sins, and those sins are rooted in our physiology. We are not souls and bodies, we are embodied souls. I am inclined to certain sins because of my glands and organs. Other people are inclined to other sins. Some people have virtually perfectly balanced brains and organs, so they find submission and peacefulness pretty easy. They don't like people like me who are bundles of nervous energy who want, more than anything, to sleep. I don't like being that way either, but I have no escape. I have to get to know myself and deal with my weaknesses. Others are genetically good and have genetically good kids. But there's no virtue in that kind of goodness. It tends toward Phariseeism.

How does sin work in each individual and what should we do about our tendencies toward certain sins? If I don't eat, I fall into the sin of grumpiness. If I eat too much, I fall into the sin of gluttony. If I eat the wrong things, I tend toward nervousness and anxiety. What should I do to overcome my grumpiness? I could strengthen my will and become superhumanly cheerful. I could fast more and pray more intensely. But, as a rule, God regards that as testing Him. Why should He send His Holy Spirit to look after what He sent baked chicken to do.

Eating and sleeping can be acts of great humility - of submission to the One who made us to eat and sleep.

We are stewards of our bodies, in part because these earthen vessels have a profound effect on our souls. If we don't steward our bodies we will be much more inclined to commit specific sins. In my earlier illustration, I may have pulled off my adversaries wig, in part, at least, because I had not had a good breakfast that day.

All four causes need to be duly considered. And we need to recognize both the body and the soul. And we need to recognize that the two are inseparable. Indeed, Christians believe that their separation is what we call death.

And what about ADD? Part one: Causes of human behavior

2004-11-10T09:08:00.000-05:00

I'll come back to the question of philosophy later today or maybe later in the week, but right now I am exercised over this question of ADD and ADHD. To understand this issue it is first necessary to understand that before an object exists or any action is performed, the doer or maker has already, consciously or subconsciously, formed in his mind an idea of what that object or action will be. That idea, in turn, was formed because the maker or doer had some purpose that gave rise to the action or object.

For example, to the left of my computer is a paper holder. It is there because somebody came up with the idea of an object that would hold paper so he could type without having to ruin his neck or use one hand to type and one to hold the paper - i.e. so he could type efficiently. The need came first. The need was the purpose.

Thus we say that necessity is the mother of invention. Because the need or purpose arose, the inventor came up with the idea. The object exists because the maker had formed an idea in his mind of what the object would be and he did so because he had a purpose in his mind that gave rise to the idea of the object. Without idea and purpose there would be no object.

But it is rather obvious that purpose and idea are not enough. No matter how hard I think of the idea and no matter how intense my purpose, my mind will not solve the problem until I embody the idea in some material substance. My paper holder is made of plastic.

But I still have a problem. If I find all the most flexible, malleable plastic in the world, it will not, merely by my thinking the idea and being attentive to the purpose, form itself into the object that I need. Something has to act on the plastic to turn it into a paper holder. To simplify, that "thing" was the efficient machine in which the material of the plastic was molded into the form of the idea in my mind because of the purpose in my mind that drove the maker (let's pretend it was me) to make it.

To summarize, the plastic is molded by a machine into the shape of the idea in my mind, and the idea took the shape it did in my mind because of the purpose or need that I experienced.

The paper holder to my left would not be as it is without all four of those influences:

the purpose in the maker's mind
the idea in the maker's mind
the material of the thing itself
the instrument used by the maker to form the material into the idea

Each of these four things caused the paper holder to be the paper holder that it is.

Everything in the cosmos and everything made or done by man or God shares these four causes. Everything has a purpose, an idea, the material it is made of, and the instrument or means used to make it.

For convenience, thinkers call these four things "the four causes," and they give them very useful names.

The purpose is called "the final cause"
The Idea is caused "the formal cause"
The material is called "the material cause"
The means or instrument is called "the efficient cause"

Mortimer Adler gives us another angle on the four causes by suggesting four basic questions we can ask every time a person makes something:

What is it being made for?
What is it that is being made?
What is it going to be made of?
Who is going to make it?

All human behaviour arises from all four of these causes. In other words, everything we do, we do for a purpose, after having formed an idea of what we will do (usually a very sloppy idea and one we are not often conscious of), we use means to get it done, and we do it.

When we ask the question of ADD, we are asking a whole collection of questions about human behavior. If we are going to understand any human behavior we must understand ALL FOUR of the causes of that behavior. If I, for example, lose my temper and I want to understand why, I need to ask:

What was my goal in losing my temper?
How did I express myself when I lost my temper? Another way to put this is, what was the pattern I followed when I lost my temper?
What did I use to express my loss of temper (fist, mouth, etc.)
Who am I? This is a huge and vital question, as I hope to show you in just a moment.

Unfortunately, none of these questions are all that easy to answer. None are simple. But for the sake of illustration, I am going to suggest some very simple answers to illustrate the point:

My goal in losing my temper was to hurt my adversary for a wrong done - vengeance
I expressed myself by yanking his wig off his head
I used by body, especially my hand, to express my loss of temper
I am - ouch. This question is tough. Let me put it this way: I am an embodied soul, created in the image of God. I am clay with the breath of God giving it life or soul.

As I said, this last point is vital. If I fail to accurately understand what a human is, I cannot understand his behavior. Until the late middle ages it was generally the understanding of western thinkers that man was an embodied soul. Late in the middle ages that idea started to break down. With Descartes, it was broken. No longer did western thinkers see man as an embodied soul. Now he was a being with a soul and a body. Verbally, that sounds like a small difference. In reality it is vast. Sort of like the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.

Should Christians Think About Philosophy?

2004-11-09T16:28:00.000-05:00

Never. They should especially never think about thinking about it by telling people not to think about it.

Just kidding.

I suppose it depends on a few things:

What Christians are we talking about?
Why are they thinking about thinking about it?
Whether it is possible not to.
whether philosophy is part of the all things that are ours and that will be brought together in Christ at the summing up of all things.
Whether the Christian should be doing something else.

If Christ's dominion is to extend to philosophy, it would seem that Christians are the ones who are to achieve that dominion. Another way to put it (because that way can be badly misunderstood and resented) is to say that if Christians have philosophical ideas, which they do by necessity, they need to bring them into subjection to Christ.

The modern philosopher has to object to the foregoing. Philosophy, he is likely to insist, to be philosophy, must function autonomously. To speak of subjecting it to religion is to limit its reach and to turn it into something other than philosophy.

But like a true philosopher I have to go now because my wife just entered the room to tell me it is time. More tomorrow, I hope.

What about philosophy?

2004-11-08T10:20:00.000-05:00

Two excesses must be avoided when we do philosophy: 1. thinking we can do philosophy without considering, including, or acknowledging God, and 2. thinking that including God makes our presuppositions right or makes the enterprise unduly simplistic. God - knowledge of and enjoyment of God - is the end of philosophy, as He is the end of all things.

Classical and Christian?

2004-11-05T08:08:00.000-05:00

In the 25th Screwtape Letter, C.S. Lewis quotes Screwtape telling his nephew Wormwood that "what we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call 'Christianity And." You know--Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring."

No doubt if he were writing today Lewis would change some of the hyphenations. Now we would have Christianity and Home Schooling, Christianity and Republicanism, Christianity and Family Values, Christianity and Classical Education.

I have been in the classical Christian movement for over a decade, and before that I was, like so many who have read Lewis and Schaeffer, a Christian who favored classical learning without knowing there was a theory that explained me. But if there is one thing I don't want, it is to be called a Classical Christian. At least, not if by that what is being said is that I am a Christian who adds to his Christianity classical ideas. If classical Christian is simply a qualifying adjective stating that I am a Christian who regards the communion of saints going back to the apostles and fathers of the church as my guide, then I am a classical Christian. If it means I want to have a Christian side of my life and a classical side, I am not interested.

I am a Christian. My goal is to be only a Christian. If the Christian faith teaches me to read classical literature, then I want to read it. If it tells me not to, then I don't want to read it. That is why I wrote yesterday's blog. Consider this a post-preface.

I believe that the Christian faith does teach us to read the ancient pagans. Not all of us, by any means. Many of us ought not to. But some of us, and certainly those of us who are educators, need to read them. You can't understand poetry if you don't know Homer. You can't understand epistemology if you don't know Aristotle. Or ethics. You can't understand civics if you don't know Greek and Roman history and the writings of Plato, Thucydides, and Cicero. You can't understand education if you don't engage the ideas explored in Plato's dialogues.

Because the church has devalued these masters of their arts, the American church has tended toward ignorance of their fields and imitation of the Freudian, Cartesian, Empiricist, and Romantic heresies of today. The ancient world takes us out of our narrow modernist minds.

My Nicaraguan friend, Greg Millsaps, asked for a place to respond to this blog. Greg, and anybody else interested: visit our forum. This link should take you there: http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?forumID=24914&subForumID=39188

Actually Greg is not Nicaraguan but a missionary in Nicaragua. Good to hear from you Greg!

Responding to the pagan mind

2004-11-04T08:53:00.000-05:00

The ancient, classical pagan mind is much closer to the Christian mind than the modern mind is. The contemporary Christian mind is much closer to the modern mind than it cares to admit - or is able to imagine, much less recognize.

This is no simple black and white dispute. There is not one pure "pagan mind" opposed to one pure "Christian mind," at least not in the world we inhabit. Our Christian minds grow into the Christian mind. They don't get there by reading a book on worldview and agreeing with what it says. They grow through contemplation of Christian truth, obedience to Christ's commands, and acts of love and worship. In short, when it comes to our thinking, acting, and feeling, we are Christian only by degree.

Similarly, pagans have many different views of the cosmos, ethics, God, and human nature, and many of those views approach or even agree with the Christian worldview. There is an ideal Christian mind, toward which Christians are obliged to move. We are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, until we have the mind of Christ. It is questionable whether there is any comparable ideal pagan mind. But there is also not, in actual earthly experience, a mind characterized by pure non-Christian thinking. There is no ideal anti-Christian mind - no mind that totally disagrees.

As a result, pagans sometimes get things right. And, and this is critical to understand, Christians sometimes get things wrong. And the more Christians conform to the mind of the age in which they live, the more they get wrong. And Christians in America are not characterized by substantial differences in their thought patterns from non-Christians. We have different ideas about some things, though even here we can pretend there are black and white differences that don't exist. Abortion and gay marriage, for example, are opposed by a very large number of people who make no claim to be Christians. Meanwhile, we need to care more for the poor than we did in the 20th century.

In short, being Christian doesn't make us right about everything and being pagan or non-Christian doesn't make somebody wrong about everything.

Which is rather obvious when it is stated that way, but when we talk about education there is still a tendency for evangelical Christians to want to make a super sized black line between Christian and non-Christian thought. For example, we get our text books only from Christian publishing companies, while not asking whether the idea of a text book is in fact a Christian idea or whether Christian publishing companies are just imitating "the world."

To make matters seem still more complicated, when we compare the gospel of the New Testament with ancient pagan learning, we find that the gospel does not negate the pagan impulses; it purifies and fulfills them. The Greco-Roman pagan sought after three things: glory, honor, and immortality. Paul writes to the Romans and, rather then condemning them for this quest, he tells them that if they "seek for glory and honor and immortality" God will render to them eternal life. In II Thessalonians 1:12 Paul explains why he prays for the Thessalonians: "In order that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you." What a precious truth, what a great and glorious idea, that the greatest Name of names, that the most precious Love of loves, that the second person of the Holy and unapproachable trinity, can be glorified in us.

But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to say, "and you in Him." We speak of glorifying God, and indeed that is our chief end and highest call. But sometimes we are too pious to recognize that God also is working to glorify us. And that glorification happens in Him, where everything wonderful happens, where all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found, where we have been chosen, where (and only where) we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, where we have redemption, and forgiveness, and where He brought about the working of His almighty power by resurrecting Christ from the dead and resurrecting us IN HIM! It is in Him that we are sealed by his Holy Spirit, where we receive our inheritance, and where all things will be summed up. And it is in Him that Paul tells us that God intends to glorify us. No wonder he sang of grace and its achievements.

This primal human desire for glory, rooted in the fact that God made us for honor and that we have lost it, is not negated by the gospel. It is purified, redirected, and fulfilled. I must confess that in my Christian background I never was taught this precious truth in a way that sang to me. It wasn't until I saw the connection between Paul's writings and those of the people to whom he was witnessing, that is to say, the ancient pagans, that I came to understand. I say without shame or embarrasment that reading the pagans has helped me understand the writings of the New Testament.

Why? Because I am a modern Christian. I have all the habits of the modern Christian. I look for what the modern Christian looks for. My mind is much too modern. But Paul was writing to converts from ancient paganism. And the ancient pagan mind is much closer to the Christian mind than the modern, post-enlightenment mind.

But I know that many Christians are uncomfortable with some of what I have written. I understand that. I once threw out all my non-Christian books. It may be that some Christians ought not to read the best of the ancient pagans. But the Christian church as a whole will slide into an anti-intellectual quagmire if they adopt that approach as the generalized expectation or as the implicit requirement for godliness.

Christians and pagans have degrees of agreement. It requires judgment to assess the degrees of agreement. That makes people who want a sharp black and white world very uncomfortable. They fear relativism, which is very different from what I am talking about. And who can blame them, when you consider the stakes. That is why the metaphor of the counterfeit dollar bill is so popular.

Perhaps you know the one I mean. To train a bank teller to identify counterfeit dollars, banks don't have him mess around with counterfeit dollar bills, but only with real ones. The problem is that there is no pure dollar bill of a Christian mind that is uninfluenced by the world we inhabit. One might suggest then that the Bible is the pure dollar bill, and we ought therefore only to read the Bible. The problem with that argument is not the dollar bill, but the untrained senses. I am effected by the world I live in. When I come to the Bible, it is I who comes to the Bible. That's a problem. I have appetites, desires, habits, expectations, presuppositions. These prevent my intake of the scriptures from being perfectly pure.

"But the Bible purifies when I meditate on it." Yes, and it makes us more like it. Yes, and if you ever hear me argue that we should not be constantly in the word and prayer, bury me and tell me I'm no serious Christian. Here is what I have found. I meditate on the Bible and it informs, instructs, and transforms me. Usually slowly; often deeply. It has made me into a person who needs His people, the church. And that church is much more than the local, flawed church I attend on Sundays. It's a church with a long life extending back to and beyond Pentecost. It is an eternal church. And it is a church that, in my experience, has become more comprehensible through the readings of the things they read, studying the world they lived in, understanding the minds they cultivated.

All of that has driven me back to the study of history and literature - two things the Christian mind has always cherished. It is in Christ that all things will be summed up, not just "Christian things" whatever that might mean.

I carry on so long on this issue because I am truly concerned for the well being of the church in America. My concern is that because of its fear of ancient pagan literature which arose from its more reasonable fear of modern secular thought, and which, in my opinion, does not need to be feared by Christians anywhere near as much as modern Christian literature, the evangelical church largely lost its ability to judge things in a mature way. It lost its witness to the 20th century world because it lost its mind - the one with which we are commanded to love God completely. Hebrews 5:14 tells us that "solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil."

I find that evangelical Christians who claim to read only the Bible are those most dependent on their pastors and interpreters and are therefore most inclined to cultic tendencies. How can it be otherwise, since they tend to adopt an unBiblical dualism.

Because of their greatness, because of their antiquity, and because no well-grounded Christain child is at risk of worshipping Zeus, the ancient pagan writers offer a powerful playground for our children and ourselves to practice training their senses (the author is clearly referring to the internal senses identified by Aristotle) to discern good and evil. On the other hand, most modern Christian writing and music undercuts the cultivation of that discernment.

For the sake of Christ's precious bride, read Homer.

Beginning thoughts on integrating the curriculum

2004-11-03T10:44:00.000-05:00

A properly integrated curriculum coordinates all the activities of a school, lifts the learning of all its students, and gives purpose and direction to every teacher. These are no small benefits. But how is a curriculum properly intergrated?

I believe it is easy to make mistakes in this area because it is so easy to make mistakes whenever we think about education. But I'm out of time, so I'll try to develop this tomorrow.

What's a teacher do?

2004-10-07T09:56:00.000-04:00

Last week in worldview class I asked my students to write a metaphor for education. Their fruit was quite weighty and, for the most part, encouraging. They have a much higher view of education - or at least schooling - than I did when I was their age.

Marco provided a metaphor that particularly challenged me. He said education is "a wicked watchman who uses heavy books to crush our hearts' desires."

The agonizing reality is that Marco is right about so many peoples' experiences. He's a very bright kid, able to figure things out, disliking being told what to think, forming a strong identity. A good student for a teacher that wants his students to grow according to their natures. But he is an astute observer, and he has seen that what schools often do is not to teach students, but to weigh them down with the pretense of learning - to play this vile and horribly unnecessary game our culture requires teenagers to go through - and in so doing to crush their hearts' desires. And that in the guise of some of the most precious gifts from God to man. It's blasphemous.

Live by the scope and sequence and your students will die by the scope and sequence - or they will become sycophants.

Which is even worse.

This Year's Mission

2004-10-04T11:10:00.000-04:00

You are aware, if you read my blog often, that I believe education has been taken over, consumed, and destroyed by anxiety. Anxiety has become institutionalized in every element of American education. Anxiety tries to cure itself by taking control, only to find that it is attempting to control things that aren't meant to be controlled.

Anxiety trusts nobody's judgment. It insists on universal standards and reproducible processes. It is obsessed with predictable outcomes. But because it never achieves the outcomes it predicts, it creates more anxiety.

My mission this year is to free as many schools and teachers from the bondage of anxiety as I can. But I carry no illusions: anxiety is a formidable demon. It has achieved the unspeakable: it has converted the ultimate leisure activity, the very purpose for leisure, into yet another form of servile labour. We are obsessed with productivity because if we can produce something we can prove that we have done something. But that isn't what education is about. It is about thinking about ideas - not making things. It is about pursuing wisdom and virtue, not a job or a degree. It is about seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not material worries. It is not measurable and cannot be assessed by productivity.

The main weapons Anxiety has used have been the colleges, the teachers' colleges, and the government. Colleges decide who will get past their doors. Having once served a noble function, the colleges have convinced us that it is better to go to college than not - indeed that we cannot make a living without them. Many large corporations, involved in the same scam, say the same thing. But the colleges have changed their function. Now, rather than preparing us to be free they prepare us for anxiety driven, servile labour. But if we don't go to college, we are told, we can't get a high paying servile job. And so we attend college for four years to learn what we could have learned in two months so we can do a job for which everybody knows the best training is on-the-job.

Yet we die to get into these colleges because we believe the lie - a lie that is buried in the system, rather than stated in the marketing brochures. And since we think we need to get in so we can get a servile job, we let the colleges dictate the terms of admission. Sometimes we let the "best colleges" do it, by which we mean the one's with the highest standardized standards of admission, where the best and brightest go to have their minds molded by the most skilled manipulators. But we still let them put us on the defensive, because we are anxious.

We ought to do what the home schoolers have done. Dictate the terms to the colleges. Nurture the most independent thinking, learned students, and then tell the colleges what they can do. The best colleges will take the best students if they are the best colleges. That's how they became the best colleges. There are enough good colleges that will accept students who were educated instead of prepared to manipulate the system - who were not trained to become obsequious. But we are anxious.

Of course, the government perpetuates this anxiety because a government, in the Enlightenment model under which we are suffering, needs everything to be measureable and controllable. A free school is a serious problem for a modern government. The outcome is unpredictable. The measures are unstandardized. The graduate might not fit one of the jobs the government says need to be filled. So the government supports an educational system that makes the process more predictable.

At least that is the illusion they create. What they really do is dehumanize children through their agents and their processes. But they require that people go through these processes to become -

you guessed it: certified.

And here is where the teachers' colleges come in, and where the vileness of what American schooling has done to education is most clearly evident (except of course for the schools themselves). Let me put it simply: we have replaced apprenticeship with certification. Nobody who understands the art of teaching can read that sentence without some sort of reaction that plants itself in the negative - something between a shock of recognition with the accompanying dismay and a sad, knowing shaking of the head.

Our anxieties have caused us to take the human element out of education because we simply don't trust the judgment of the teacher in the classroom. The result is that we now produce teachers whose judgment cannot be trusted in the classroom.

There is no solution within the presently established system. God save the classical Christian movement from the same anxiety driven death by administration.

Last Night's Debate

2004-10-01T13:52:00.000-04:00

In 1992 when the elder Bush had his clock cleaned by the young imp who went on to defeat him in the election, I was so mad at Bush's performance I went downstairs and lifted weights.

If you can imagine that.

Last night I wasn't that mad. Kerry is nowhere near as empty souled and classless and dishonest as Clinton. He didn't need to be drawn on the carpet and publicly flogged so the rest of the country would witness our leader's understanding of the spoiled child he had to deal with. Unlike Clinton, Kerry wasn't the issue. This time the junior Bush was.

It would have been nice if he had said something before the last two minutes, and if, during those last two minutes he had not assumed we would all be o'erwhelmed by his charm and personal care for us and our soldiers.

As a conservative who believes that conservatism still means something, I walked away from the debate confirmed in my suspicion that sleep remains, along with food, my most urgent need. At least among those our current political system can affect.

Thought and speech

2004-09-07T18:04:00.000-04:00

The great thing about teaching is that you can tell your students things you've always wished you could tell your husband. For example, Karen, my wife, teaches third grade. The other day, one of her students raised his hand to inform the class of something not immediately relevent. Karen looked at him enthusiastically and replied: "And do you know what? Sometimes a thought can come to your mind and you don't have to say it!"

That had them thinking.

Enlightenment Anxieties and the Classical Christian Task

2004-08-14T13:14:00.000-04:00

A school can't be classical and Christian if it puts together what it calls a classical Christian curriculum but has an administrative structure derived from the anxieties of the enlightenment. These anxieties are rooted in a cultural loss of confidence: in the church, in nature, and in the God of the church and nature. The form of everything that has happened in the last 400 years in Europe can be traced to these anxieties.

Descartes, striving to swim this river of fear, attempted to develop a new philosophy - one, as it turned out - rooted in anxiety. He determined to doubt everything until he arrived at the one incontrovertible fact. Borrowing from Augustine and Montaigne, he concluded that the being of a self-conscious self was that one incontrovertible fact. "I think, therefore I am," he argued.

From this foundational premise, he developed his philosophy. Begin with doubting everything the authorities tell you. Seek precise and certain knowledge and dismiss all the rest. Reduce every complex problem to its simplest and clearest form. Measure these simplest forms with absolute precision. Use math to understand the cosmos and everything else.

To doubt, of course, is not to believe. And the Bible tells us that "whatever is not of faith is sin," while common sense affirms that we must always begin with and live by faith in something. But having lost confidence in God, nature, and church, people were looking for a new authority. They turned to reason.

And what did they find? What does unleashed reason do? It doubts. It breaks things to find out what they are. It rationalizes the appetites. It claims divine authority over knowledge and then dismisses what it cannot discover unaided.

Descartes bowed to the church, but his ideas are the seeds of the Enlightenment. The tree grew over the next 150 years, bearing fruit of radically diverse quality. That fruit began to fall in the French Revolution and Europe has fallen with it in the past two centuries.

Philosophically, it seems safe to say that the confidence of the Enlightenment is dead. The trouble is that the leaders of the Enlightenment were aggressive in establishing themselves in the cultural institutions. They replaced ministers with champions of industry in the universities. They replaced statesmen with bureaucrats in politics. They replaced pastors with psychologists and councilors in the church. They replaced natural historians with "naturalists" - i.e. people devoted to the religion of naturalism - in the science departments. Everywhere we turn they have replaced stewards with managers.

Not only did they establish themselves in the institutions of the west. They established themselves in the minds of the west. The quality of our lives is determined by three things: the questions we ask, and the categories and metaphors we use to answer those questions. The classical and Christian world had asked the right questions and used categories and metaphors that enabled them to discover tremendous insights into those questions. The Enlightenment changed questions, categories, and metaphors.

While this alteration is so far reaching as to be all pervasive, I offer the following primal example. The Bible and the classical world made a great deal of virtue and asked how to become virtuous. They saw it as dependent on the health of the being that sought virtue, and they saw it as the perfection of the nature of the being.

But the Enlightenment doesn't trust nature of any kind. Nature, according to Descartes, Bacon, and the rest, was something that had to be brought into the submission of the slave or it would be a destructive tyrant. Human nature too.

Given that we are fallen and that nature has fallen with us, it is easy to see how one can conclude this. But that is because the Enlightenment, beginning with doubt and insisting on reason over authority (obviously a self-deluding premise), could only see things as they are. Only an authority could tell you it was once different. Human nature and the nature around us are declared by God to be good on the day He completes them. Now they are sick, ruined, fallen, dead.

The Enlightenment becomes very confused on this point. They see nature around as dangerous, but they are inclined to worship human nature - at least among those they agree with in social rank or philosophy. At the very least, human nature is seen to be perfectible if only people will submit to the Enlightenment project - which, to an astonishing degree, we have been willing to do. And so we fall into the excesses and deficiencies of the age of reason.

To add insult to murder, these word thieves then steal "humanism" to describe this inhumane activity of perfecting mankind through their procedures. Worse, the Christian world lets them take it without an objection.

The classical Christian sees nature as good, though fallen. It is something we are not only to subdue but also to replenish. We are responsible to sustain it, to maintain its health, to preserve it for its maker's honor and delight. For the enlightenment project, nature can be used, exploited, made our servant. It is there to produce for us.

But if it gets in the way we will blow it to smithereens. Quite literally.

The classical Christian sees human nature as good, though sinful. Adam was a human before he was a sinner, and he and all the saints will be human forever in heaven long after sin is no longer part of their condition. Their human nature will remain - perfect. Sin will be washed away.

To the classical Christian nature is a stewardship. To the enlightenment, nature is a resource. Thus both nature and virtue are altered by the Enlightenment thinkers into something rationally measurable, surmountable, moldable - and meaningless.

So even though nobody outside a few science or philosophy departments believes in the enlightenment anymore, our institutions still embody their dead ideas. We still fall back on Enlightenment habits of thought and feeling. We are still driven by their anxieties. And we submit to their standards of measurement to determine whether we are succeeding.

The battle with these Enlightenment metaphors, categories, and questions rooted in Enlightenment anxieties is one of the most formidable tasks of the classical Christian movement. The parents of the children we teach are drowning in these anxieties. The children we teach are thinking with the metaphors and categories. We as teachers are asking their questions.

To win this battle, we must reexamine our foundations. One of the things we will need to do is to reconsider the structures and operations of our schools - or we will make progress on many fronts only to be turned back on many others.

The Human Scale

2004-07-23T13:34:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-23T13:10:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-15T09:48:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-13T09:15:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-12T15:41:00.000-04:00

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

2004-07-10T14:52:00.000-04:00

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?

2004-07-08T11:24:00.000-04:00

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.

Summer Reading

2004-06-23T16:09:00.000-04:00

Martin Cothran introduced my wife and me to Wendell Berry's works, so my wife read his novel, Jayber Crow. She recommended it to me, so I read it too.

I am very selective about the books I read, especially novels. There are too many and life is too short, so I choose books that are moving enough to matter and deep enough to have something to think about. My favorite novels are Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stengler, anything by Jane Austen, and, now, Jayber Crow.

This might be my favorite novel of all. Reading it was nothing short of a conversion experience for me. I've had problems with materialistic capitalism for some time, but the options seemed to be limited to feudalism and socialism. Feudalism is much more humane than either socialism or capitalism, but it isn't adequate. Wendell Berry digs more deeply into the context of Economic reality than any economist I have ever read. And he puts it in a human situation, telling a beautiful story of the passing of a small community and the loves that lived there. He also explains 20th century American history better than any text book.

Nobody can write like Wendell Berry and that may be because nobody can see like Wendell Berry.

But I've been unfair. I've described this book like it's an essay. In fact, the reason it is so powerful is precisely because Berry shows the human realities that essay fails to express. He tells a beautiful story about a barber, an orphan, who spends his life overcoming "the man behind the desk," and learns the place of suffering and loss in making us what we are made to be.

Put this book near the top of your summer reading: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, by Crosspoint Books.

Remembering World War II

2004-06-10T09:25:00.000-04:00

Education is the institutional memory of a people. What are we remembering about world war II during this memorial day, D-day, Ronald Reagan period? Go to WWII in the schools for an article worth reflecting on. (They'll want you to register, but its generally worth it and only takes a few seconds.)

To remember is to honor. To forget is to despise.

Ronald Reagan: In Memoriam

2004-06-07T09:44:00.000-04:00

One of my prized possessions is a Time Magazine given to me by a childhood friend of my wife. Dated January 2, 1984 it lists the Men of the Year 1983. One of them some people will still remember. His name was Yuri Andropov.

The other one, we will never forget. His name was Ronald Reagan.

I loved Ronald Reagan. He was elected president on my 17th birthday, at the time when a boy starts looking beyond the classroom to the world outside and wonders what his place will be in it and who will make the decisions on which his hopes depend. I still take his election personally - in that quirky way we all imagine cosmic events (like whether your team wins or loses) are determined by our relation to that event. His election was my birthday present.

I first heard about Reagan in 1976 when he was campaigning for president and I was trying to get out of junior high school intact. A heavy set, politically sharp kid named Kirk (Bolis, I think) gave me his bumper sticker and explained conservatism to me. Back then it made good sense. Now that it has become so enmeshed in the power game I don't recognize it any more. Those power games are the eternal advantage of liberalism.

My father told me the difference between liberals and conservatives was that the former insisted that problems had to be solved now, while conservatives understood they sometimes took a long time. That has always seemed very wise to me.

It was something Reagan seemed to get.

In 1984 I married Karen and her brother gave me a desk. I put my Reagan Bush bumper sticker on the side of the desk figuring that way I could keep it forever. Somebody threw my desk out in one of our moves.

That bothers me more than the ounce of gold that disappeared - probably in the same move.

Reagan was hated by the radical and presumptive moral conscience of America. He didn't care for the poor, they insisted. He was racist, they cried. The night of the election, Bruce Springsteen addressed his concert goers. "This is a dark night for America," I believe were his words. I wonder if that wasn't behind his sudden rise to popular superstardom in 1985.

Reagan simply knew these were human problems and that politics on the grand scale, politics run by inhuman bureaucracies and morally decrepit unions, wasn't going to solve the problems of the poor, the minorities, the immigrants. He also had a great deal more confidence in the poor and minorities to solve their problems than the Nanny State will ever have.

Reagan understood that between the idealized statements of the public forum and the actual exchange of resources on the street was a vast unaccountable bureaucracy that would siphon unspeakable amounts of those resources into the abyss of its own corruption. He knew that the poor wouldn't see much of the money the government took in. He knew that politicians weep for the oppressed with one eye, while hunting for a vote - or a victim - with the other. He knew that voters salved their consciences by paying taxes so they could avoid actively loving their neighbors.

Reagan didn't trust unaccountable power - not in Congress, not in the Judiciary, and not in the everexpanding halls of the bureaucracy that endlessly sucks the moral life out of our country.

He knew, as any school teacher knows, that the more laws we have on the books the more lawless a people becomes.

Reagan transcended politics. He infuriated the left in his day because they could not, they did not have the categories to - and they still don't - understand him. Reagan was a shrewd politician precisely because he saw through the illusions of politics. He saw them as a means and a stewardship - by no means an end in themselves.

They called him the teflon president. This was a term made up by journalists frustrated in their endeavor to destroy him. They couldn't understand why their petty attacks had no effect. It was because he had integrity and because we needed him. The journalists were like a group of playground brats attacking the teacher. When we saw how unphased teacher was, we stopped fearing the brats. The brats bided their time.

Reagan knew what to say and when because he had a sure instinct for human feeling. He remembered how America had once seen herself and he believed she could still be beautiful.

What came from Reagan's heart was politically effective, so presidents since him have tried to wear his jacket.

It hasn't fit.

He knew what he stood for and he was mature enough to stand for it without bombast and vacuity. He stood calmly for us all.

Reagan had entered politics relatively late in life, running for governor of California after his 1964 speech at the Republican convention. That speech was a classic and needs to be listened to annually by everyone who believes in humane conservativism.

Because in the end what set Reagan apart was his humanity. As simple as that seems, it simply isn't a common trait. He honored everybody, even those who attacked him. When he said of the Societ Union, on March 8, 1983, "They are the focus of evil in the modern world," he gave them the honor of straightforward dialogue. When he said, on January 29, 1981, "The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat..." he did us the honor of saying what we all knew to be true, what they had written in their manifestos, and what we feared.

So we trusted him.

He honored his political opponents. He honored the media. He honored Nancy and protected her honor and gave us men a model for how to treat a lady. He honored the White House. He honored the oval office. He honored his country.

The world honors him today in a way they would not when he was president.

It is oddly fitting that he should die between Memorial Day and D-day. I remember his speech on June 6, 1984, remembering what our fathers had sacrificed for us. He couldn't fight for medical reasons, so he did what he could. And then he honored the soldiers by remembering them and fulfilling the purpose of their deaths.

And it must be insisted that they did not die on the beaches of Omaha or Utah or on the inland bridges (as my great Uncle Arthur did) or at Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal or anywhere else so our freedoms could be severed from the duties they fulfilled. Reagan knew why they died. We dishonor them when we excuse sin and grant rights founded in the arbitrary will of a state that has radicalized its people and has already begun to reap the whirlwind.

Because Reagan was a man of honor, I will honor him. I will not forget my debt to him. I will strive to help the nation he shared with me rebuild itself on a foundation of virtue, rooted in humane duty, defending the right to fulfill the duties, and denying the infantile right of the self-indulgent to accomplish what neither Hitler, Stalin, nor Osama could have honestly hoped.

I will remember Ronald Reagan.

Because I love him.

Biblical aesthetics and godly poetry

2004-06-04T09:33:00.000-04:00

In Psalm 45 the poet pulls back the curtain on how godly poetry is composed and provides a model for us to imitate.

Consider the words of the first verse:

My heart overflows with a good theme
I will recite my verses to the king
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

Here, listed unpoetically, are some principles exemplified in this verse:

- the heart can still overflow during a recital:
- there is no conflict between the fully active mind and the
fully active heart.
- the audience must be recognized and honored in the form of
the poem
- during a recital, the words should be prepared with skill. To
be a ready writer means to be a writer who is ready to write.
That takes training. In fact, some translations use the
phrase "skilled writer" and it is clear that the poet who
wrote this Psalm was no slouch - as he himself tells us in
line 3.
- Inspiration and labor are not in conflict. This poet was
inspired by God in the most complete sense of the phrase
(this is scripture!) and yet he didn't set aside his own
duties in the production of this masterpiece.
- the form of the poem must fit the occasion of the recital

The closing verse reminds us of the fundamental purpose of all artwork:

"I will make your name to be remembered
from one generation to another;
therefore nations will praise you for ever and ever."

Art is our memory of the noble and good. It is the ultimate expression of honor. That is why we cannot afford for it to be abandoned or corrupted.

Can you see more principles of art? Go to the forum and help the rest of us see them.

Give Me Liberty

2004-06-03T11:11:00.000-04:00

Cathy Duffy has been a leader among home schoolers for over a decade with her excellent curriculum guides and her warnings about the government's meddling drive to deprive us of the right to raise our own children. Her book Government Nannies is an important work on the topic of liberty in education.

At this summer's conference she will be discussing the role of classical education in preserving our educational freedom. Sometimes we think passing laws or writing bills will preserve our rights. It simply isn't so. If we aren't educated for liberty we will not be able to stay free.

Whether you are a home or institutional educator, you are going to want to hear this talk. Cathy is a clear communicator and has a gift for making the implications of ideas clear to us all. Go to www.classicalteachertraining.org if you would like to register or to learn more.

Every day I get a little more excited about this conference. I hope you'll be there.

June Monthly Meditation and conference update

2004-06-02T11:17:00.000-04:00

If you haven't received the Monthly Meditation for June you should sign up for it now. The easiest way is to go back to the front page of the web site and click on the invitation there.

I just spoke with Wes Callihan yesterday and I have concluded we are going to have the most fun conference on classical education the world has ever seen. Wes, who has the perfect voice and disposition for public communication, is joining James Taylor and me in a poetic knowledge panel discussion of justice in Dante. He compared this activity to a jam session, where a group of musicians sit down with their instruments and see where the music takes them.

Exactly.

Wes will also be doing two colloquies:

"Modern Man is a parricide" yes or no.

This is a quotation from Richard Weaver. Wes will lead a discussion as to whether or not Weaver was justified in his statement and how we should respond.

What is God's purpose in history?

In addition, Wes will be doing two workshops:

- How to be classically educated in ten easy lessons
- History as the spine of the curriculum

While I was writing the foregoing, John Hodges called and we finalized his sessions. Listen to this:

Pillar 1: Reflections on the Definition of Classical Education. John will do this talk and emphasize the importance of both ethics and aesthetics in fulfilling the definition.
2 Workshops:
Aesthetic priniciples that integrate the curriculum
Music and Justice: How music prepares the soul for virtue
2 Colloquies
Should love of learning be the goal of instruction?
What is the relation between ethics and aesthetics?

If it sounds lofty, don't be lost in the words. Everyday we think about what is right and wrong and good and bad, and we think about and experience the arts. That's what we mean by ethics and aesthetics.

If you haven't registered for the conference yet, you need to. It'll be one of a kind.

Perverse Incentives (part 5)

2004-06-01T09:05:00.000-04:00

So what are the incentives that pervert education? Here are a few (and there are many more)

1. Making grades the end of school work
2. Making college admissions the reason for study
3. SAT scores
4. Pleasing the teacher

As always, this blog is meant to provoke reflection, not end thought. I'd love to hear your responses. Follow this link to the forum and express your views.

Getting outdated

2004-05-27T11:20:00.000-04:00

To be outdated doesn't necessarily mean to be wrong. We curmudgeons, when we think of viruses, still think of them in relation to diseases. The with it folks (who would never use such a 60's phrase even though their fashions have descended all the way to the unspeakable 70's with touches of the unthinkable 80's) think the idea of a virus started with computers and then was transfered by metaphor to the human body.

That's viral thinking.

Perverse Incentives (part 4)

2004-05-26T09:20:00.000-04:00

I said yesterday that the college has great power over, and therefore great responsibility to, the secondary school. This power arises from the simple fact that when a student graduates from high school he often wants to go to college.

I could write endlessly about the muddle that the American college has become. I'd say it has lost its way, but I'm not sure many of them ever knew their way. The American college, since the late 1800's, is predicated on the need to produce intellects that can keep our economy operational. Anyone who reads about the history of the American college will be amazed at the unending conflict within our colleges, especially those with the most glorious reputations, as to what their purpose is.

One day we'll need to come up with some way to categorize colleges based on their formal causes. I tried but it's too hard to do in a brief blog. But very few colleges spend much time thinking past administrative concerns to the natural function of a college. In fact, I would argue that very few colleges are colleges any more.

My main point so far is to point out that most colleges haven't worked out what they are for. Some have, but their marketing doesn't reveal it honestly. Increasingly, colleges see themselves as the freedom train out of bourgeois bondage to the uplands of liberation and centrally controlled economies.

So in this muddle, how is a high school student to know how to prepare for a college? This is where the delinquency of colleges knows no limits. Most abandon their duties and turn the admissions process over to statistical engineers. Then they let anyone in who wants to come. Though some take great pride in excluding a certain percentage of test-takers from their hallowed precincts.

Colleges have to know what they stand for. They have to have a principle that organizes their activities. Very few do. Not knowing what they stand for, they cannot work out their standards for admission, so they lean on intermediaries. And these intermediaries work together with the college to create perverse incentives.

For example, thank God this is not as significant as it once was, the SAT or the ACT. Or the IB or the AP or the portfolio.

I want to cry when I see a young adult building his whole life around impressing a college admissions officer with his portfolio. A school can teach students how to think and that will help the student get into any college. But far too much control over high school curricula has been handed over to people who don't know what they are doing in the hope that they can inflict their confusion on our graduates.

There might be 100 good colleges in America. If you find one, bind it to your heart and help it stay good. For the rest, our country would be better off if we shut them down and let kids apprentice.

Where do incentives come from

2004-05-25T09:04:00.000-04:00

To assess incentives and their effect on human action, especially in regard to education, we need to consider their sources. Who is it that establishes the incentives in a school?

Certainly teachers and heads of school and parents provide the most immediate incentives: teachers are closest to the acts of the students in the classroom and thus provide the most constant feedback.

Parents and heads of school are removed from the immediate interactions of the classroom so they can distribute honor or punishment only through testimony. Usually the head of school has an advantage because he finds it easier to enter the classroom (which is, of course, altered by his presence).

And each of these provide incentives that range from being very immediate to being somewhat removed.

But the provider of incentives I want to think about for a moment is the university or the college. (At some point, we'll also have to think about the state.) When a student reaches high school, the shadow of the college looms darkly over all the activities of the school. Its spirit breathes into every event, every assessment, every interaction, every written record.

Educators cower before the college admissions officer as obsequiously as courtiers used to cower before Henry VIII and Louis XIV. For good or evil, the university rules the high school.

So how did the university gain this power? In a certain sense it always had it. Even in the 19th century or the 17th century, a person who wanted to be educated wanted to be as educated as possible. His goal was to get to the university. This is the natural order of things.

And it places a great responsibility on the university. One that the university in America has failed utterly to fulfill. More on that tomorrow.

Perverse incentives

2004-05-24T08:46:00.000-04:00

What makes an incentive perverse? The best way to answer that might be to define what we mean by perverse. It is a compound word, drawn directly from the Latin. vertere means to turn. Per is a prefix with many meanings, the one most relevent to the word pervert meaning aside. To pervert is to turn aside. To revert is to turn back. To convert is to turn with or together. To advert is to turn in the direction of something (thus advertisements). And so on.

A perverse incentive, then, is an incentive that turns one aside. From what does a perverse educational incentive turn a student aside?

The only way to answer that question is to be aware of the purpose of education. Distinguishing between education and training, I have long insisted that education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. The purpose of education is derived from its meaning: to cultivate wisdom and virtue. Anything, therefore, that turns a student aside from the pursuit of wisdom and virtue is a perversion. And if incentives are provided to the student that turn him aside from wisdom and virtue, that is a perverse incentive.

Incentives are provided by honor and shame, pleasure and pain. So we need to evaluate what we are honoring and rewarding with pleasure, and we need to know what we are shaming (there is no way to avoid this happening, no matter how much we fantasize about a world without shame) and what we are rewarding with pain.

And in so doing we need to think deeply and honestly about the ways we honor and reward, shame and punish.

Again, if you have ideas, please visit the forum and share them. I'll have more on this over the next few days.

Education and Institutions

2004-05-21T08:51:00.000-04:00

Teaching encounters dilemmas of judgment at the turning of every page. For example, is it possible to educate a child in an institutional setting? But is it possible to educate without an institution?

The home schooler might respond, "Of course it is possible to educate without an institution. We do it all the time." But I know home schooling. Most home schoolers are every bit as worried about the institutional measures as private and state schools are. Most home schoolers eagerly put their children into some sort of outside the home setting for substantial elements of their children's learning. I think that is right and good.

A head of school might ask what my problem is. Why do I even ask the first question? "Of course it is possbile to educate a child in an institutional setting. In fact, unless ideas are embodied in an institution they will die."

Nor do I deny that. The dilemma learning runs into is this: in an institution, administrative systems are put in place and standards of measurement are enforced (or should be), and the systems and measurements do not necessarily support the needs of learning.

Nothing is more obvious than the way we measure whatever it is we are measuring with our grading systems. Coming in a very near second we find the standardized tests.

I recently spoke to a parent whose children took the Stanford Achievement Test. Their mother was very concerned because they had not been learning the content of that particular SAT. They weren't studying what the testing board had decided they should study in order to form their minds into what the testing board wanted their minds to look like. The anxiety is understandable. After all, how do we evaluate our effectiveness?

Institutions must measure to analyze their performance and hold their members accountable. This is also right and good. But in education, the act of measuring creates decisive incentives. And far too often those incentives are nothing short of perverse.

I have watched eager, hungry learners metamorph into masters of system manipulation.

First, they focus all their efforts on pleasing the teacher.
Then they direct their efforts to getting good grades. After all, that will please the teacher.
Then they redirect themselves to mastering standardized tests - and that will go beyond the teacher to pleasing, um, ...

that great abstraction we call the Immortal They. After all, you know what They say. Plus it will help them get into the best colleges. A Headmaster friend calls this the "Harvard Syndrome."

Now they pour hours of effort into doing what they perceive to be required by the best colleges (I'm not sure what makes the colleges "best". I think it is their reputation, e.g. what They say about the colleges. It might also be the place where you can most effectively network. Then you can be one of Them.)

Here's the awkward thing: If they get into a great college, become part of the Immortal They, do well on standardized tests, get good grades, and please their teachers, that's all good.

But not if it gets in the way of their education.

And let's not pretend the American college exists to educate its students.

Indeed, this points to more problems with institutions:
1. They can be taken over without the supporters knowing it
2. They can lie easily and effectively, especially if they can hire a good marketing department and have standardized tests that show how successful they are
3. They become self-perpetuating or self-aggrandizing -their goal becomes either to survive or to look good depending on their status.
4. They can use statistical measurements as a smoke screen to carry on their social engineering, theological assaults, and ethical radicalism.

So how do we deal with this dilemma? The only way I can think of is vigorous and active integrity. Boards and heads and teachers have to function with integrity. That means honesty and faithful stewardship - not only administrative stewardship (i.e. the money and systems of the school) but also intellectual stewardship. They must deeply understand what the purpose of a school is and they must understand and fight off the perverse incentives to which institutions are prone.

Last year at the SCL conference, Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus, pointed out that the only good schools are those who would rather die than lose their vision. He's right. But it's hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky, now that the spring is in the air...

But the institution that would rather survive than faithfully pursue its vision is already dead. And it will only produce carcasses.

In my next entry, I'll try to reflect more on the perverse incentives that we need to overcome. If you'd like to respond to this entry, PLEASE do. This is a subject that we all need to think about very seriously. To submit your thoughts, please visit our forum by clicking on this highlighted text.

The Feast of the Ascension

2004-05-20T15:33:00.000-04:00

Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and Acts 1 all describe the moment when Jesus ascended with the clouds into heaven.

Matthew ends with the commisioning instructions of Jesus:

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw Him, they worshipped Him; but some doubted.

And Jesus came (had He been at a distance? Think of their anticipation if He had been) and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me (this is an established fact - not a goal). Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (then His authority will be energized), and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you (then His authority will be realized!).

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

That last line is even better than the voice over of Obi Wan in Star Wars. Remember? "Run Luke run. The force will be with you always."

I prefer the incarnate, resurrected, and seated Son of God.

Listen to Mark's version:

"So then the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God."

And Luke:

Then He led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy..."

Luke adds this in The Acts of the Apostles:

"When they had come together, they asked Him, 'Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel.' (They don't seem to have been ready for what followed) He replied: 'it is not for you to know the times or period that the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

When He had said this, as they were watching, He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.

While He was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven."

This is no secondary point. The ascension of Christ into heaven has been confessed every single day by (all together) billions of people for nearly 2000 years. It is essential to the Christian faith and to our blessed hope.

He ascended into heaven
And sitteth at the right hand of God the father almighty
From thence He shall come
To judge the quick and the dead

Whose kingdom shall have no end

Amen.

Ascension Day

2004-05-20T09:07:00.000-04:00

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension! I will be writing more after I return from class, but let me suggest a set of readings for you first:

Read Psalm 8
Ezekiel 1
Hebrews 2

More later.

The ought of pleasure

2004-05-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

The arts and maths show us that we are often unable to enjoy a work of art or a fact of math because we lack the skill or understanding to perceive and thus to appreciate some wonder. Perception always precedes true appreciation. Thus teaching an appreciation course should be teaching a perception course - not how to feel about things, but how to perceive things.

For example, a music course might be called "Listening Lessons in Music" rather than "Music appreciation". You can teach people to listen to music. It's just a skill. You can't directly teach them to appreciate it. But if they learn to hear and if it is worthy of appreciation, they will, more often than not, come to appreciate it.

This process of appreciation serves as an analogy for the enjoyment of God. If we are not moved by God, the problem is not with Him. It is we who are unable to enjoy what we ought to enjoy.

And some things simply ought to be enjoyed.

There is an "ought" to pleasure. Pleasure has many aspects, but one of them, and probably its essence - or at least its high point, is adoration or worship: that experience in which we are drawn out of ourselves and absorbed in the object of our perception. We are made to adore, and what we adore will form us into its image.

History of classical education

2004-05-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

The history of classical education is the story of men confronting educational, philosophical, theological, practical issues and making decisions about how to deal with them.

The history of progressive education is the story of men reducing all these issues to their cash value and making decisions accordingly.

The first priority of childhood is to learn submission. He must learn to submit to the laws of thought, the rules of efficient operations, the principles of each art (especially the seven). The degree to which a child learns this submission determines his capacicty for progress on the path of wisdom.

Demanding and modeling this submission is the first duty of the teacher.

Have you seen the new CiRCE forum? I'm very anxious to know your thoughts and opinions. Please come to the forum and teach me! Ask questions. Express opinions. Disagree. Let's grow together. Click here to enter the CiRCE Forum.

The Right To Rule

2004-05-12T19:03:00.000-04:00

I didn't hear this, but a local radio talk show host was discussing spanking children yesterday. Parents were calling in and describing how they had to spank their children when they did things that were wrong or dangerous.

The host said he could understand spanking a child for leaping from a car while it is moving (I wonder why a child would need to be spanked after doing something so stupid). But he also said this: "Just because a child doesn't do what you want that doesn't mean you can spank them."

I will not be tricked into discussing the abominable grammar. In fact, I may surprise some of you. I agree with what he meant to say.

It is absolutely true that you cannot justify spanking a child because he doesn't do what you want him to do. But that really isn't the point.

A parent has the right to spank a child for no other reason than that he has the duty to spank a child (sometimes). All of our legitimate rights are simply the right to fulfill our duties. When we separate rights from duties and fail to recognize that our rights are derived from our duties, we come up with any right we want to come up with.

It leads to peculiar contradictions. For example, a baby can be aborted but not spanked.

It leads to silliness too. Listen to what else I am told he said: "Who am I to judge another person's behavior to be bad." What's wrong with that, you ask?

He was talking about a father judging the behaviour of a five year old child. And there is your answer.

You are the father. You are the one obligated to judge. If you cannot distinguish right from wrong, then you are not fit to have children. It is your duty to judge your child's behavior. That is the source of your right to judge his behavior.

The Absence

2004-05-11T17:24:00.000-04:00

The idea is missing from modern education. That’s why even in AP programs students spend too much time on what becomes busy work – worrying about facts, data, things to remember - and not the ideas that make the facts meaningful. While AP courses seem better than the disturbing standard fare, even they place too little emphasis on actually understanding ideas.

The loss of the idea is the loss of a focal point in education. When you take away the idea it is impossible to determine what one is being educated for, precisely because the purpose of education is to understand and live in ideas.

The ultimate idea is the logos. It is the sun in the solar system. You take it out and you’ve got a mess.

Please let me know

2004-05-11T13:30:00.000-04:00

Do you like the new look? E-mail bloglook@circeinstitute.org and put a y or n in the subject line. I really do want to know.

Thanks.

All things made one

2004-04-27T15:10:00.000-04:00

-
The great condemnation of the enlightenment must be it's radical divisiveness. Claiming to free every nation and people from religious oppression, it proceeded to divide the French into a radically romantic revolution, to divide the people of Europe from their rulers, to divide the nations from each other, to divide the classes into frequently warring, always envious factions, and, at the root of it all, to divide the mind from itself.

Ephesians 1:10 tells us God's apocalyptic plan for His creation - and it's not what Voltaire had in mind:
"He made know to us the mystery of His will.. to bring all things in heaven and on
earth together under one head, even Christ." (NIV)
"The summing up of all things in Christ" (NASV)
"To gather up all things in Him" (NRSV)

In the originial, we find this beautiful phrase: "ta panta en to Christo" - "all things in Christ."

And what will happen to all things? They will all be brought together, summed up, gathered up, made one - in Christ.

The modern Christian, because he lives in the modern world, imitates the modern in many ways, but in none, I think, more than this: He has a dis-integrated mind.

The modern mind has no principle of unity. That makes any meaningful education impossible.

The glory of Christian education is that it is possible. It is possible to have a unified mind. But it is not easy and it takes overcoming 500 years of bad habits plus 6000 years of bad nature.

The modern mind is characterized by its disunity. The scientist and the poet have nothing to say to each other. The humanities and the maths are at war. The romantic and the rationalist do not know a common language. The university is a diversity - a triversity - a multi-versity.

The solar system has no sun.

Ethics is separated from politics. Education either equips for a job or is barred from life and is called academic. Yeats was famously right - almost. "The center cannot hold," he said. I'm not sure what center he was referring to, but it is evident that no center is holding the world we live in together.

We have turned from intellect to sentiment, for believing separates us and having abandoned the manly unity of Christ we have come to fear separation as a testimony against our folly. We all can love, we think. So we suppress thought on things that matter most and follow our feelings, only to find that our feelings are even more divisive than our thoughts.

We are divided among ourselves, within ourselves, between ourselves, and among others as well. We are not one and we have no means to becoming one. Dividing our souls by diminishing one faculty in the hope that thereby we can attain a Utopian social order will not do. We must believe. We must believe believingly. We must be satisfied that our beliefs arise from valid reasons and that they matter.

But in this fallen order there is no order and all things are in disarray. Especially our minds.

But there is a sun in this solar system and one day He will bring all the planets into their orbits again - He will make all things one by relating them rightly to Himself - He will shine on them in all the glory they are created to enjoy.

Living in that light and being summed up in Him is the purpose of Christian education.

Happy Days

2004-04-27T11:40:00.000-04:00

-
I'm pleased to announce that the Great Ideas Academy did well in its final competition. Under the tutelage of Jean Robbins with help from Sherri Madden, we took first place for small schools in North Carolina at the NCJCL competitions. The only detail I've heard so far is that David Kern took first place in the state in the category of Roman history. This is a proud moment for a dad.

Do Children care about Justice?

2004-04-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

-
Last night my 9 and 12 year old children were running around the back yard playing every manner of variation on hide and seek. There were lags of occasionally as long as two minutes between cries of "that's not fair!" but usually they were much shorter.

That's why we are doing a conference on justice. If we can't figure out what it is, we really don't have any hope for a civilized society. If education doesn't cultivate it, something needs to change.

Reflections on Ptolemy's reflections

2004-04-21T10:14:00.000-04:00

*
If Ptolemy (see 4/16 entry) is right when he says that advantage in theoretical knowledge is gained by a continued progress onward, while with practical knowledge the advantage arises "from a continued and repeated operation upon the things themselves", then his theory has much that is practical for the teacher to think on and apply.

If I am teaching something theoretical (math, ethics, theology, etc.), then the problem that will always have to be dealt with is the gap between the teachers mind and the level of understanding to which the student can attain. The teacher needs to know the student's present understanding and then needs to engage the student in a process of moving him forward to the next degree of understanding. But the teacher can't hope that the student will attain to the level of understanding the teacher has reached - not very often anyway. That's why the Isocratic "Didactic" and the Socratic Dialectic modes are so important.

If I am teaching something practical (handwriting, batting, reading, writing, calculating, etc.), then the problem is different. Here it is the students reticence to do anything with a "continued and repeated operation upon the things themselves." Only discipline and submission can solve this problem. Motivation helps, of course, but it can't be relied on as the only or even primary solution.

Furthermore, if the teacher sees the theoretical and the practical as warring with each other, the student is doomed. If theoretical means "having no practical application" and practical means "having to do with active application" these ideas are impoverished distant cousins of the realities.

In the words of Benedick (the practical man) to Claudio (the theoretical man) at the reconciliation in Much Ado About Nothing:

"Come, we are friends."

The teacher, who strives to maintain harmony in the classroom, must not allow anything to break that foundational friendship.

This is not a joke

2004-04-19T15:39:00.000-04:00

At least not by me. I read this in the Charlotte World sports page on Sunday:

"Cleveland outfielder Coco Crisp, after he dropped a routine fly on Monday: 'I did my job. The ball didn't do its job.'"

The mind reels.

Ptolemy and the practical

2004-04-16T10:00:00.000-04:00

He is risen!

Some practical insights from the Preface to Ptolemy's Almagest:

"Those who have been true philosophers... seem to me to have very wisely separated the theoretical part of philosophy from the practical. For even if it happens the practical turns out to be theoretical prior to its being pratical, nevertheless a great diference would be found in them; not only because some of the moral virtues can belong to the everyday ignorant man and it is impossible to come by the theory of whole sciences without learning, but also because in pratical matters the greatest advantage is to be had from a continued and repeated operation upon the things themselves, while in theoretical knowledge it is to be had by a progress onward. "

I never cease to be amazed by the ability of the classical authors to unveil so much truth and application in so short a space. Perhaps Aristotle was best at this. But here in Ptolemy we see one of the fundamental realities of teaching - and one that is frequently overlooked to the anquish of both teacher and student.

If a student is learning a skill, it can only be done through "continued and repeated operation upon the things themselves". If he is learning an idea, the greatest advantage goes to him who "progresses onward." That is why trigonometry helps us understand algebra better and why forgiveness helps us understand law.

The Paideia Plan applies this distinction in their concept of the three columns: Knowledge, understanding, and skills.

By the way, Jim Laney has created a new web site for our teacher training program. It's in its very early stages, but it is up and running. If you would like to check it out go to classicalteachertraining.org.

Moving Conversations

2004-04-14T11:01:00.000-04:00

He is risen!

Why is it that CS Lewis enjoyed nothing more than sitting around a fire talking with his friends? Why did Plato's young friends say there was no greater pleasure? It looks so boring from the outside.

Movement.

We love movement. Especially coordinated movement that overcomes challenges, like in basketball or football.

What has that to do with good conversation?

Movement.

It isn't only the physical eye that delights in movement. The mind's eye also is charged by it. But the mind's eye can see the movement of the soul. Thus a conversation can be said to move us, even if we sit still through the whole thing.

This is the reason why Socratic conversations are such blasted fun.

Secrets of Revival revealed!!!!

2004-04-13T11:23:00.000-04:00

He is risen!

Classical Christian schools have already had a significant impact. ACCS is almost 200 members strong after only 11 years. If we keep learning and growing and absorbing new insights that arise from the nature of classical Christian education - even if somebody from outside reveals them to us - there is no telling what might be accomplished through our efforts.

When I moved to Boise I didn't realize I was moving to the northern edge of the great western desert. The lawn outside the house we were renting had not been watered or tended in what I could only guess was at least a year or two. It was tall, brutish, and nasty. Cutting it kicked up a cloud of dust - but no "Heigh ho Silver, away," or anything else romantic.

We did cut that lawn. Then we watered it.

And then a miracle occurred:

It turned green!

It doesn't take a lot of water to revive a famished lawn.

Liberal Conservatism

2004-04-12T19:26:00.000-04:00

He is risen!

I think it was Michael Reagan who was being interviewed on some TV talk show the other day. He said liberal radio won't make it because liberals have too nuanced a view of life so they can't hold strongly to opinions.

So that's where we stand is it? The conservative is the guy who sees everything in black and white while the liberal sees everything in endless shades of every color of the rainbow. One has everything sharply defined; the other defines nothing.

So much for the politics of prudence.

Or for these words by Aristotle:

"It is the mark of an educated man to demand precision in each subject so far as the nature of the thing admits."

I know we aren't supposed to judge, but surely we've gone too far.

Baseball

2004-04-08T14:52:00.000-04:00

It's the game the gods play.

I had to get this prediction made before it lacks credibility: The Milwaukee Brewers are going to be the surprise team in baseball this season by winning 80 games. Watch out for them - in three years they'll be in the playoffs.

Mandatum Novum

2004-04-08T12:32:00.000-04:00

A New Commandment. I learned from Leithart.com that the name Maundy Thursday is derived from this Latin phrase. In the context of washing the disciples' feet, Jesus said, "A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another." Which humbling do you need - Peter's in letting one wash your feet, or Jesus' in washing another's feet?

Why Americans Can't Figure Out Education

2004-04-08T12:25:00.000-04:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust,
And unto dust thou shalt return

Contrary to the popular myth, American education in general wasn't very good in the fifties. From what I've been able to determine, it wasn't terribly good in the 40's or 30's either. When you consider it's claims, it was abysmal even in the 19th century.

I don't mean to be rude, but it seems to me that education in America has pretty well paralleled education throughout the world for its whole history: high hopes and low realizations. For the most part.

Still, there have been eras and cultures that nurtured truly educated people and even a few that honored them for what they were. All in all, the Athens that assassinated Socrates did pretty well with a few of her more resilient citizens like Plato and Xenophon. 13th century Italy can be proud of St. Thomas and Dante. Elizabethan England remains the glory of the literary world for Shakespeare. It does seem rare that the truly educated are honored by the communities in which they grow. Perhaps education requires both a rich soil and a harsh gardener.

In America we have a particularly difficult time cultivating truly educated people. I suppose one could find multiple reasons for that: teachers' unions, linguistic isolation (where else on earth can a person know only one language and still look intelligent), egalitarianism, pragmatism, science worship, bad theory, and so on. All of these need to be considered seriously.

I have my suggestion too. I'm not ready to assert this as "The core reason," so for now I'll just present it for your consideration. Maybe we'll determine that it is a symptom that points to a deeper cause, or maybe we'll end up concluding this is the cause of all causes. I rather doubt the latter. But here's my suggestion.

As a nation born of rebellion, we reject every call to submission.

Let me explain why that matters. From K to about, say, 10th grade, the main thing a child needs to learn is submission. For example, the kindergartner needs to learn to submit to the rules of reading, the first grader succeeds if he submits to the rules of grammar, the second grader submits to multiplication, the third grader submits to principles of composition, every student is learning to submit to the rules of thought and expression etc. After all these submissions are accomplished, then the student becomes free.

How can submission set us free? Because freedom is the ability to perfectly express one's nature and thus fulfill its purpose. All of nature is a tapestry. So is the soul. Thus the human soul, to be free, must be rightly ordered within itself and rightly ordered to nature around it.

Since we are born in rebellion, this right ordering requires being brought into submission. And we Americans hate submission. That's why we orient the arts to self-expression, which is not what the arts are for. We use the arts to express ideas, not "selfs". The only value in self-expression is when it contains an idea that goes beyond the self. This isn't as harsh as it sounds.

Indeed, it is liberating.

Back Home

2004-04-06T17:34:00.000-04:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust,
And unto dust thou shalt return.

I've just returned from four days with The Summit Academy in Indianapolis, Indiana. (I didn't see any indians there, so I wondered if the city's name isn't about as valid as Philadelphia, but that's just a bad joke so I've put it in parentheses). If you want to see how a school is working together to lay the right foundations, this is a school to spend time with.

What stood out to me was how they are built on a strong artistic foundation. They have a strong intuition of poetic knowledge. By giving the fine arts and letters their due they are freed from the hyper-analytical mode that is so easy for a school to fall into.

Clair Staley, the headmaster, and his faculty and staff inspired and refreshed me, reminding me of what God is doing in this renaissance.

How to read poetry

2004-03-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust,
And unto dust thou shalt return

Dante was the most complete poet who ever wrote. Not only does he write one of the five poems reasonably qualifying for discussion as the best poem ever, but throughout this poem he provides amazing practical guidance. I believe sincerely, for example, that Dante's Purgatorio is one of the best books ever written on how to teach.

But in this entry, I want to show how, in the crucial 14th canto of the Purgatorio, Dante teaches his reader how to read poetry. To do so, he gives us two characters who are blinded by having their eyes stitched shut with wires as punishment for envy. They know someone is before them, but they don't know who. So they ask.

This whole passage in Dante is a meditation in how to respond to poetry, so I would urge the reader of this blog to read this canto with the purpose of learning to read poetry. Here I want to draw your attention to one important element.

Dante is asked to identify himself and where he is from (good background information for most poems). He responds by describing where he is from indirectly, never naming either his city (Florence) or the river on which it was built (the Arno). The "readers" (remember they are blind) discuss it among themselves. One says to Dante, "If, with my understanding, I have seized your meaning properly, you mean the Arno." The other responds, "Why did he hide that river's name?"

The genius of Dante is to hide so much in those two statements that unless we do what he teaches us to do we won't even see what he has done. It is common for poems to say a great deal more in one line than appears at first. One might even argue that that is precisely what makes a poem a poem. So how do we see to the "deeper meanings"?

First, we use our understanding to figure out the literal meaning of what was not stated clearly. Then we ask the critical question: Why did the poet not simply say it? Another way of saying this is, "What does the poet accomplish by speaking indirectly?"

In Dante's case, he accomplishes a great deal. First, he instructs us (as an aside, really) in how to read his poem (and at a crucial point, I might add). Second, he has something to say about the Arno and its occupants that was better said through silence. Says the "reader" who seems to know what is going on: "I do not know; but it is right for such a valley's name to perish."

To see why, read the Purgatorio. But note the first words: I do not know. When we read poetry, the precise and exact reason intended by the author is important but not the critical point. The author of any great literature is trying to get us to speculate, to move, to arouse the intellect to reason. When the student hands in an essay, the important thing is the quality of thought that went into it, not whether he anticipated the teacher's desired answer.

So when we read a poem, we should first take the time to speculate about what can loosely be called the allegorical interpretaton of the imagery. Then we should ask what the poet was able to say indirectly that he couldn't have said directly.

An example: In canto XIII, line 16 Dante has Virgil say:

Oh gentle light, through trust in which I enter here
on this new path...

The "gentle light" is the sun. So why not say, "sun"? Is it just because it is prettier? There is that benefit, but to reduce poetry to ornamentation is to disconnect beauty from truth, and that simply isn't a good idea. No, I the blind reader speculate, he calls it "gentle light" because he wants to communicate confidence in its reliability. He also wants Dante the pilgrim to see how Virgil the teacher (a gentle light himself) is dependent on the light given by God through common grace.

Now you speculate.

The foregoing is a hint - a shadow - of what Dante offers on how to read poetry and how to teach. Read this poem. Talk about it. Live with it. It will feed you for a lifetime.

My favorite blog to date (and they mention CiRCE!)

2004-03-19T09:05:00.000-05:00

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es,
Et in pulverem reverteris

Joel Brondos is linked by World Magazine and has a wonderful blog to visit: Collarbones. Check it out and be ready for depth and levity.

Pagan Literature and my toe

2004-03-19T08:35:00.000-05:00

The early Christians rejected pagan mythology, but they saw in the works of the immortal poets a greatness of artistic expression that they could not deny. This led to two great literary developments: one, a formal understanding of poetry and the arts to a degree that the Greeks and Romans never seem to have reached, and two, a psychological approach to the arts that the Greeks and Romans never could have attained.

I did something this morning I am willing to bet puts me in elite - or at least unique - company. I cut my toe shaving. Yes, you read that correctly (at least you did if you read what I wrote). I cut my toe shaving.

How can this be? you ask. Me too.

First, some background. I have only cut myself shaving three times in my life. The first time I have forgotten. The second time happened in 1983 the morning after I had boasted to someone that I had only cut myself shaving once. Then came this morning.

I shave in the shower because the hot water makes the skin and whiskers more receptive to a razor. This morning there was water in the bath, so I bent down in the absent minded way one does things when one is shaving to rinse the shaving cream off the razor. In so doing, I dragged my razor across my toe.

And so, I cut my toe shaving.

There is, no doubt, a deep allegory to this post, but you will have to discover it because it is beyond me.

CiRCE teacher training

2004-03-17T10:44:00.000-05:00

Memento, home, quia pulvis es,
Et in pulverem reverteris

The board of directors of the CiRCE Institute met over the weekend and made some significant decisions. The biggest of them was that to fulfill our mission I need to devote my attention whole-heartedly to consulting with classical schools.

I'm very excited about this, because I have come to realize more and more clearly that many people are enthusiastic about the classical vision, but they are seeing how hard it is to implement and even, at a certain level, to understand.

Teachers tell me that CiRCE teacher training has enabled them to take the vision or idea of classical education and implement it in the classroom. They show a heightened clarity of purpose, increased confidence as they enter the classroom, and strategic effectiveness in their preparations.

Heads of school tell me their schools are more united than ever because the whole staff sees where the children need to go and each teacher understands his role in moving them there. When the end is understood, it becomes possible to unify the whole curriculum in its pursuit of that end.

People from all levels of involvement tell me that they better understand what classical Christian education is, what it looks like, and how to do it.

CiRCE teacher training simplifies the horrible complexity of modern instruction, which is driven by the insatiable appetite for ever more precise particularities. The net effect of this love of particularities is that no two students have anything in common and the curriculum crumbles in the hands of the bewildered teacher.

Classical education, on the other hand, is rooted in a love of what we share as humans and a recognition of an actual, universal, God-given human nature. It seeks out the universals and seeks to perfect them by identifying their ends - and the means to those ends.

We've worked with over 30 schools and 500 teachers in the last eight years. If you would like to join them or to learn more about our teacher training, call us at (704) 321-2929 visit the web site at www.circeinstitute.org or E-mail us at ttinfo@circeinstitute.org.

Gene Edward Veith does it Again

2004-03-16T17:27:00.000-05:00

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es,
Et in pulverem reverteris

My teacher, Dr. Veith, has done more to explain art to the Christian world than anybody since Francis Schaeffer. The latest issue of World Magazine runs a cover article by Dr. Veith on the Christian approach to the arts. His meditations lead to some surprising discoveries and insights. Read it at their web site by clicking this link to World Magazine.

Western Civ and ed

2004-03-12T12:13:00.000-05:00

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es,
Et in pulverem reverteris

Western civilization, which is not what we see around us, was built on education.

Education, in turn, is built on definition, which is to say, it is build on the idea that words can be defined.

Refusal to define or commitment to the idea that it is impossible to define marks the triumph of barbarism and the end of what can honestly be called western civilization. When this refusal is the mental habit of a society, that society is not civilized.

That is why Socrates, for example, and the church fathers, spent so much time defining and defending the validity of definition and the necessity to define.

Logic is the second level and everything I just said about definition also applies to logic.

Still Practical

2004-03-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust
And unto dust thou shalt return

I think I figured out this idea of being practical. Something is practical if it tells me how to do something I want to do.

That's why I frequently find the discussion frustrating. Too often we want to solve an immediate problem without looking beyond it to the purpose behind the activity that contains the problem. If a teacher, for example, is struggling to teach a child spelling, the problem might well arise from the theory of spelling that he is following. What good will it do if I teach him how to use an ineffective program more efficiently.

In short, practicality involves understanding truth, not just doing things. It involves asking why and what just as much as it involves asking how.

So at our conference we spend a lot of time thinking about what and why so as to make sure the how matters.

Because we are committed to true practicality.

I hope that helps.

The Practical Man

2004-03-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust
And unto dust thou shalt return

So (to continue from yesterday) yes, the conference is going to be practical. Very practical. More practical than any conference I have ever attended in my whole life.

And no, it isn't going to be practical. It won't teach you how to solve the specific problem that you are trying to solve right now on your lawn mower.

Some people read the foregoing and what I wrote yesterday and conclude somehow that I am opposed to practical instruction. This is incorrect. I grew up in Wisconsin. You don't have time in Wisconsin to live a theoretical/academic life. When you aren't digging out from under the snow you are trying to fix your air conditioner. People from Wisconsin are practical.

The whole point of the last two days reflections is to say that people mean a lot of different things when they talk about being practical. The demands of life must be met - not to survive, but to be sanctified. Every act gains its value from the idea that motivates it. But there is nothing more practical about a made bed than there is about a beautiful poem.

Let's be practical. And let's begin being practical by figuring out what we mean by being practical. That way we can actually be practical when we are being practical.

On Being Practical

2004-03-09T13:32:00.000-05:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust;
And unto dust thou shalt return.

I had a call the other day about our conference in which the caller asked if it would be practical. I have to admit, after 40 years I haven't figured out how to answer this question. What do people mean by it? It's like when my mother used to say, "Do you need that candy (or whatever)?"

Need it for what?

In just the same way: practical for what?

Was it Chesterton that said, "there is nothing more practical than a good idea"?

I can teach you how to use Shurley grammar or The Writing Road to Reading or Saxon math or any number of other programs. Heck, if I can't teach you how to do a program, give me a week. Or two hours usually. Surely that isn't what people mean by practical.

Maybe they mean we have practice sessions. Technically, that would be the difference between practice and theory. So maybe people want hands on practice. When I do in-house teacher training I try to provide this, though it does take more time. It's hard to do at a conference though.

But then, come to think of it, we provide a lot of hands on practice, because teaching is the communication of an idea and we have lots of discussion time. That's the best hands-on practice you can have for teaching.

Maybe they mean "are you going to talk about practical things?" And this I can't answer because I don't know what different people consider practical. For example, one might mean classroom management. Well, yes we will be talking about that at this year's conference. But what is practical about classroom management if what you are teaching efficiently isn't worth teaching. We're going to talk about justice. What could be more practical?

Another might mean college admissions. Dr. John Seel gave a great talk about that last year. You can purchase it through the web site if you are interested. But what could be less practical than going to college for the wrong reasons?

Maybe they mean something you can do with your hands without thinking about it. But if they mean that they are so far removed from thinking about education that they should be removed from the classroom.

I guess what they must mean is that practical things are things we do and theoretical things are things we think about. That's why I get lost. We're talking about education. Education has to do with thinking. How can you talk about the act of thinking without talking about thinking about thinking?

Education isn't rocket science. It is far less predictable, reliable, or precise. It is far more complicated, poetic, and artistic. If we get the theory wrong, our practice doesn't stand a chance. So we are going to talk about very practical things at our conference.

Things like:
What is justice?
How can I become just?
How can I establish justice?

What could be more practical?

Conference Update

2004-03-06T10:39:00.000-05:00

Remember, oh man, that thou art dust;
And unto dust thou shalt return.

We are days away from final confirmation of the precise location of our summer conference! It looks like Christian Brothers University will be the place. Click on the link and you can see their facilities (if it doesn't work, the url is www.cbu.edu/Resources/map/). We won't have the marble atrium, but we'll have diamonds in its place. The only kind of diamonds that matter, that is.

Baseball diamonds.

Bring your glove.

And a swimming suit.

Take a tour of the campus by clicking on the link above. Looking at the buildings and the years they were built is an architectural lesson in itself!

On March 8 we will announce the ricipient of this year's Paideia Prize for lifetime contribution to classical education.

David Hicks.
Dr. Louise Cowan.

And now...

Speaking of the conference, my friends at Memoria Press advertised the CD set from the 2003 conference in their catalogue and they tell me they are back-ordered. If you haven't ordered a set yet, you will want to think seriously about doing so. Go to the web site at www.circeinstitute.org and click on the resources page if you'd like to see what's available or to order directly from us. You'll see a list of the extraordinary speakers and the things they spoke on.

Five talks you mustn't miss:

Ken Myers: A Beautiful Spirit; the Grace of Humility
Evan Wilson: Education to Order the Soul
Dr. Anthony Gordon: Why the Poor Need the Classics
Tracy Lee Simmons: Climbing Parnassus
Dr. Louise Cowan: Paideia Prize Speech; Beauty and Suffering

Great Schools

2004-03-05T16:59:00.000-05:00

If you want to see the web site for a great school, visit Roxbury Latin School and read around.

John Eliot founded Roxbury Latin in 1645 in Roxbury, Massachusettes. 2004 marks the 400th anniversary of Eliot's birth.

2004-03-05T12:32:00.000-05:00

Remember, Oh man, that thou art dust
And unto dust thou shalt return

A Hymn for Lent:

Lord Jesus, think on me
And purge away my sin;
From earthborn passions set me free
And make me pure within.

Lord Jesus, think on me
With care and woe opprest;
Let me Thy loving servant be,
And taste Thy promised rest.

Lord Jesus, think on me
Amid the battle's strife;
In all my pain and misery
Be thou my health and life.

Lord Jesus, think on me,
Nor let me go astray;
Through darkness and perplexity
Point Thou the heavenly way.

Lord Jesus, think on me,
When flows the tempest high;
When on doth rush the enemy,
O Saviour, be thou nigh.

Lord Jesus, think on me,
That, when the flood is past,
I may the eternal brightness see,
And share Thy joy at last.

Bp. Synesius, 375-430
Translated by A.W. Chatfield

If you aren't engaged in a lenten discipline, may I make a suggestion?

Read one canto each day of the Purgatorio. It is all about what lent is all about.

An all too brief excerpt from Mandelbaum's translation:
Why have you let your mind get so entwined,
My master said, that you have slowed your walk?
Why should you care about what's whispered here?
Come, follow me, and let these people talk:
Stand like a sturdy tower that does not shake...