Benedict Option 3: Should Christians Opt Out of Public Education?

The chapter in The Benedict Option on education ("Education as Christian Formation") is certain to elicit negative reaction. Indeed, at times it almost seems calibrated to do so. Dreher is here inclined to make absolutizing statements that alienate an audience. 

Here is one: "Because public education in America is neither rightly ordered, nor religiously informed, nor able to form an imagination devoted to Western civilization, it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system." Apparently you can take your nuance and shove it. And I say this is as one who does not necessarily disagree with Dreher on this point. We, personally, have chosen to opt out of the very good public school system in our neighborhood in favor of home education. I think that most public schools in our country are a flaming pile of garbage. However, I do not think we are at the place where all Christians everywhere need to abandon the system. Indeed, given that 40% of public school teachers are Christian and that your tax money is being funneled into these institutions whether you like it or not, such a wholesale abandonment does not seem to be in the spirit of charity or integrity. Also, I don't know that the notion that the public school system is somehow unredeemable is proven. Dreher is unfortunately data-deficient in this chapter. Such a total claim requires more than anecdote for justification.

But maybe such an absolutist claim is required to drive an audience to think. Here are some questions I am asking: 

• What are the teleological values of the public school system and do they conform to the faith I am trying to form within my children? And, maybe as importantly, do we even know?
• What is the nature of the influence of peers and the social values of the school on children? How do you measure such a thing? Formation is a long-term game; not something as simple as whether or not they are smoking behind the gym.
• Can you count on the few hours you get with them in the evening to act as an antidote to the secularizing impulse of public education? 
• Are they actually learning anything in that building worthwhile or is this more functionally a daycare facility than a place of education? This is a big question.
• Are kids really cut out to be mini-evangelists in the walls of their schools?

These are all questions we ought to ask. They are questions I struggle to answer in the public school system as it currently stands. So, I am going to lay out what I think on the issue with some Dreher sprinkled in.

In an earlier post on the book I noted that Dreher feels strongly that strict media avoidance is a two-pronged need: one, for content; the other for the dependence it provokes. I think the same principle applies to education. It is not merely the content of the public educational system that I object to (though I do object in large measure to the sequencing--kids love facts and memorization, but we run away from this--and basic utilitarianism of the whole endeavor--gotta compete with China! STEM, STEM, STEM), but the sort of dependence on government institutions and the farming out of education to the caprice of the government that is implicit in the system.

Still, I think this decision ought to be left to the judgment of discerning parents. And we ought to be free to disagree, and maybe we should try to do that with charity. Parents don't enroll their kids in Christian schools because they don't care about the lost; parents don't enroll their kids in public schools because they don't care about the spiritual formation of their children.

But I will say something in response to one of the critiques of Christian schools and homeschooling that I have heard in the past that Dreher addresses here: Some critics of home/private schooling say that it is necessary for Christian students to be embedded within these schools to act as salt and light. Here is Dreher's response:

As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

Your mileage may vary on the chosen metaphor, but I think his point is basically this: the system is so inimical to our values as believers we can hardly expect our kids to do more than simply survive the onslaught they face within that system. To expect them to subsequently act as church bait is naive. Especially given the poor job the church in general does at equipping young believers and training them in the faith. There are ways of having the same endgame of outreach, putting your children in sports or arts programs, that allow the level of meaningful interaction with peers and help you get to know other parents that don't involve giving your children over to the government for 40 hours per week.

In a following post on the same chapter I will address the issues confronting Christian schools.

Ambition and the Teacher

I'm picking back up with some thoughts on ambition. You can find the other posts here.

When we were on our Hawaii trip a few weeks back my wife and I drove up to Hawi, a cute little hippie town on the north end of the Big Island, for a sushi lunch and some conversation. As we took our post-lunch constitutional, I started telling her about some of my writing ambitions for the year. Then we started talking more broadly about ambition. In career paths before teaching ambition was always a pretty straightforward matter. You work hard in order to move up the proverbial ladder. 

But what about a job where there is no ladder?

Sure, I can strive to become a department chair someday and maybe something like that will happen. But most other modes of advancement are out. I don't want to be an administrator because I love the classroom. I don't care about being recruited by a "better" school because I already teach at a fantastic school. I have no short-term plans for a Ph.D. or immediate ambition to teach at the collegiate level. Some of this stuff might/could happen someday but it is all Someday. And, there is no clear path to the achievement of this goal.

So it makes the career a perplexing choice for inspiring and fostering ambition. This is part of the reason I think that teaching can be a frustrating career choice for so many. In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey notes that the average post-college teacher lasts just three years in the classroom. There are myriad factors behind this (too many to innumerate here), but I think at least an important one has to be that teaching can feel like a dead end gig. And while the popular claim that teachers typically come from the bottom third of academic performers has been, if not entirely debunked, then seriously called into question, the fact remains that teaching has fallen out of the public estimation as a noble and necessary career.  I have no doubt that some of this is fair and some of this is unfair, but whether justified or not the end result is that both good and bad teachers are maligned and considered, in the words of the old aphorism, as "those who can't do." Which can only serve to cement this notion further.

All of this makes it hard to know how to be ambitious as a teacher. Does it mean to focus solely on classroom excellence, lesson planning, and curriculum development? Is it something I measure based on student survey responses? Is the standard that I simply try to remain happy doing this job? Do I try to become a writer and someone known for educational philosophy or independent scholarship?

My guess is that it is some combination of all of these, though the latter one is hard to pull off. But I trust you see the bind. It is not a straightforward prospect and it makes those of us who are ambitious often unsure of what to do with that ambition. In no way does this decrease my love of this career--it is by far the best I have ever had--but it does mean I am going to have to figure some of this stuff out as I go.

How to Make Childhood Reappear

I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis.

However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. 

But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy.

Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. 

Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.

Empowerment Through Submission

Is there an idea more paradoxical (not to mention inimical) to modern culture than the title of this post: that we are empowered through our submission. Submission is a four-letter word in our culture. 

And not without reason. Wives have been told for far too long to submit to boorish and oppressive husbands. The word seems to be a cudgel with which to put some desired people group (usually women and children) into their place. 

But as (rightfully) distrustful as we are of the idea of submission I find this paradox to be exactly true. In fact, obedience is an idea perhaps more than any other that has occupied my mind for some time now. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) teaching Paradise Lost and the story of "man's first disobedience"; and 2) raising strong willed children. Actually, let's add a third reason: being a disobedient rascal myself, by nature.

I don't want to get into these reasons here exactly. I am working on a book-length unfolding of the idea of disobedience and obedience/submission in Paradise Lost and hope to save some thoughts for that thing which no one will ever read.* But the key idea of that poem is this idea: we are most happy and most able to enjoy our individuality to the degree that we obey God and submit to his commands for our lives.

Crawford comes at this through a slightly different angle in his amazing and should-be-read-by-everyone book The World Beyond Your Head. But this post title is derived directly from a section of his book. He begins with an example from the world of musical instruction:

"Consider another example: the process of becoming a musician. This necessarily involves learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one's fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician's power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this isn't the main thing--there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music than can be expressed mathematically. . . These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. The education of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely that it arises only within concrete limits."

This example is highly instructive. If to be an individual means that we are to be unfettered from others' influence and forms and traditions and free to chart our own paths then we will become shitty musicians and architects and graphic designers and teachers. To be excellent at anything requires submission to the "concrete limits" Crawford locates in every practice. Before a musician becomes unique and plays with the forms she first learned, she must learn those forms. She must submit herself to the knowledge accumulated in the vast realm of prior experience. Creation is not ex nihilo, but grounded in the accretion of cultures that have gifted us a practice.

Here we see the paradox of empowerment through submission fleshed out. To be a great whatever, we must first become a good whatever and this only happens through submission. The applications to religious instruction and education more generally are vast. This is why I will never understand the flipped classroom or this idea that teaching by rote (at younger ages) and tradition is somehow limiting. Guess what: that six year old doesn't know a thing. Submitting himself to concrete limits is the only avenue to excellence. We ignore, or more accurately continue to ignore, that reality to our peril as a culture.

*Except my mom and my wife. . . and maybe the occasional ingratiating student.

A Thing I Try While Teaching

As the new school year dawns I have been meditating on my profession. I have believed for some time that we do children no favors by talking down to them, even fewer favors by dumbing down the content of what we teach them. If we are "over their heads" we can do it in an aspirational way, helping them desire to be better, smarter, wittier, and more verbose than they currently are. It is a hard line to toe, especially given the disparate intellectual capacities in a given classroom, but it is a goal I find it worth shooting for. 

I read the following in T.H. White's excellent Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. It is describing the early days of Arthur's education at the hands of Merlyn.

"The Wart (young Arthur's unpleasant nickname) did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of a porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas."

This is the goal--to make them reach and to help them delight in so doing.

The Ascetics of Attention

It is perfectly natural--and necessary--that at this time of year my thoughts turn to the classroom and the 96 (at last count) students who will be coming into my room starting next Monday. Teaching is the first job I have ever had that feels more like a calling, a vocation and it is one that I think about with pleasure even when I am not in the classroom.

One battle every teacher has to fight in our current intellectual climate is the temptation to replace instruction and dedication to a craft, even if this at times and of necessity borders on rote instruction, with mere entertainment. I have no idea how in the hell this organization got my email address and why they keep hitting me up (no one else in my department gets these emails), but I get monthly emails from Pop Culture Classroom with tactics for making learning fun and one invite to their Denver ComicCon booth. How well they know me! That's an interesting phrase, though: Make learning fun. I cannot help but think the adjective here is actually of more consequence than the gerund. For if we are not entertaining above all, so the thinking goes, how can we expect actual learning to occur?

It also seems as if the teachers who capitulate most readily to the entertainment model are popular teachers. Take two teachers, each teaching Frankenstein to a group of high school junior: Teacher 1 sits her students in front of a text and makes them practice the rigorous task of rhetorical analysis. Teacher 2 just shows his students the movie version of Frankenstein. Which one is likely to be more popular? All things equal, it's Teacher 2. In the same way my son would prefer a dinner of pizza and apple juice and ice cream every night of the week, most students would prefer the academic equivalent of Little Caesar's pizza over, I don't know, a kale salad. But we eat kale salad because it is better for us, both in the long term and the short term. 

I devoured over the last week Matthew Crawford's new book The World Beyond Your Head:  On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. While not explicitly about education, the need for proper education undergirds the entire book. I will write more about this book in the time to come as I process it and return to it, but for now I wanted to throw out an observation Crawford makes in the introduction. In a section titled "The Ascetics of Attention" he writes:

"The existentialist writer Simone Weil and the psychologist William James both suggested that the struggle to pay attention trains the faculty of attention; it is a habit built up through practice. Grappling with a problem for which one has little aptitude or inclination (a geometry problem, say) exercises one's power to attend. For Weil, this ascetic aspect of attention--the fact that it is a 'negative effort' against mental sloth--is especially significant. 'Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely associated with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.' Students must therefore work 'without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention which is the substance of prayer.'"

To educate is to form a young person. Not simply their mind and the content that fills it, but to form their emotions, passions, convictions, and ability to attend to difficult, sometimes intractable problems. Education that cuts off any ascetic element--any rote memorization, deep rhetorical analysis, quiet, contemplative reading--is going misshape the students being taught. Attention has always been hard to cultivate; the difficulties are exponentially greater now than they ever have been. But to attend to the world around us is to be human. To pay attention is indispensable in becoming an individual. I pray for myself, and for all teachers, at the cusp of this new year that we are mindful of this charge. That we seek to educate the whole person under our charge and give them what they need rather than what they think they want.

Teaching Philosophy

A few of you have asked in conversation about my new teaching position what I wrote about in my Statement of Teaching Philosophy. I mentioned in an earlier post about how the words just flowed out quickly and while I still don't think it is perfect, and it is certainly not polished, here is what I wrote. I was mercifully brief for once in my life:

Teaching Philosophy

I believe that all knowledge, wisdom, and truth emanates from the triune God. As such, all education, whether in mathematics or languages or literature is a striving to know our omniscient God in a deeper way. John Milton put it nicely in his educational tract, written in 1644 (I will colloquialize the language and spelling): “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may be nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” Milton of course goes on to say how difficult of a process learning is, but that the end is to become like God and so to glorify Him.

I remember reading that passage for the first time in graduate school and thinking of how far my experience of education had been from what the old Puritan divine had in mind for the education of young minds. In my childhood education the subjects were so atomized. What hath Christ to do with Belial? What hath reading to do with science? But when all education and all knowledge and wisdom is under the umbrella of repairing the fall and learning to know God and the things he has revealed to us then it takes on new life again. Science is a way to praise God for his power in creation. Math is a way to marvel at his precision. Literature puts us in touch with the eternal.

For me this realization liberates education. Time spent learning is never time wasted. Given that we spend so much of our lives, especially our early lives, in educational situations this is extremely fantastic news. It is this that I want to impart to the students that I teach: that all knowledge testifies to Jesus. If, as Milton suggests, in our quest for knowledge we unite our studies to love of God and imitation of Christ we will have the type of knowledge that can build up and not the empty sort of knowledge that only puffs up our own egos. 

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Like I said, short and sweet, at least by my usual long-winded standards. And I mean everything that I wrote and if I had not been intentionally short-winded I would have elaborated on each point. And, of course I quoted Milton. Like I do. However, there is the bare-bones outline for my philosophy both of teaching and learning. The epiphanies I had about education in my mid-20s changed my life and I hope to encourage my students to avoid some of the angst Christians can feel about education as well as to avoid a sacred/secular divide in their views of the subjects. I don't want to create thinkers only, but worshipers who worship our Father in spirit and in truth.