The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity, and Caring
The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America's Public Life
The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life
Education as Spiritual Formation
Personal Knowledge: Christian spirituality calls us to seek personal knowledge that fosters community and heals, requiring mutual observation and accountability.
Transformation through Love: We should allow love to transform our way of knowing and being. Love is patient, kind, and not arrogant. It helps us to recreate the community in which we were created, and know the world.
Genesis and the Image of God: Humankind was first formed "in the image of God", but this image becomes distorted by the powers that imprint our souls.
Spiritual Disciplines: Spiritual communities have developed daily practices (spiritual disciplines) to resist deformations of self and world, to recall and recover the image of love.
Monastic Tradition: Schools have a historic taproot in the monastery from which we can recover a sense of education as a process of spiritual formation.
Three Spiritual Disciplines from Monastic Tradition:
Study of sacred texts: maintain contact with spiritual tradition and recollect truths obscured by culture.
Prayer and contemplation: to seek immediate personal experience of spiritual life, allowing receptiveness to love.
Gathered life of the community: a discipline of communion and relatedness that checks personal distortions, interprets texts, gives guidance in prayer, and refines the fruits of love through mutual encouragement and testing.
Secular Education as Spiritual Formation: Even secular education is a covert type of spiritual formation, recalling education to its forgotten roots and meanings.
Counterparts in Secular Education:
Study of sacred texts parallels the reading that forms students' views of self and world, containing clues about our view of ultimate reality.
Prayer and contemplation are mirrored in research and analysis, which seek to penetrate the surface and touch what lies beneath through empirical study and logical thought.
Communal discipline is reflected in the academic community's culture, which shapes our views of self and world through a "hidden curriculum" potentially more formative than the advertised curriculum.
Images of Knowledge
Impact of Education: Education has a slow, subtle, nearly unconscious process of formation by:
Mastering a body of knowledge that sets vocational course.
Learning the skills of observation and analysis.
Surviving the competition of the academic community.
Identity as a Knower: Education answers "Who am I?" by saying "You are one who knows."
The World as Known: Education answers “What is the world?” by saying “The world is what your knowledge pictures it to be.”
Supremacy over the Known World: Education portrays the self as knower, the world as known, and gives the knowing self supremacy over the known world.
Epistemology: The discipline that explores the nature of the knower, the known, and the relation between the two.
Epistemology's Impact: The patterns of epistemology shape how an educated person thinks and acts; the shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living and our epistemology is transformed into our ethic.
Key Words and Their Implications
Fact: Vital for describing knowledge; marks the turn from superstition to modern science.
Root: From Latin "facere," meaning "to make," suggesting something crafted by the human hand.
Implication: We construct a livable world with our facts, acting as master builders in a mind-made world that is precarious.
Theory: Webs of connective logic to order and integrate our facts.
Root: From Greek "theoros," or "spectator," suggesting detachment and distance from the known.
Implication: Knowledge is "out there" on stage, holding us at arm's length as detached analysts rather than drawing us into relationship and participation.
Objective: Essential for modifying key nouns; claims without objectivity are seen as passion or prejudice.
Root: Latin means "to put against, to oppose"; German means "standing-over-against-ness."
Implication: Puts us in an adversary relationship with each other and the world, enabling us to coerce the world to meet our needs, leading to potential violence.
Reality: The standard by which we test all pretenders to knowledge.
Root: From Latin "res," meaning a property, a possession, a thing.
Implication: We seek to know reality in order to lay claim to things, to own and control them, turning subjects into objective things.
The Myth of Genesis
Deformation of Love: The story tells how the image of love was deformed by Adam and Eve's action.
Original Sin/Epistemological Error: Adam and Eve committed the first sin/epistemological error by reaching for a knowledge beyond their limits to make them like God.
Consequences: They were expelled from Paradise for distrusting and excluding God; their drive to know arose from curiosity and control rather than love.
From Objectivism to Truth
Premodern Knowing: Relied on emotion, intuition, and faith, receiving the world as a given and making the knower an integral part of it but also leading to superstition and prejudice.
Benefits of Objectivity: The commitment to objectivity has helped untangle twisted strands of the human soul and can be a hedge against self-centeredness.
Dangers of Modern Knowing: The divorce of the knower and the known has led to the collapse of community and accountability between the knowing self and the known world.
Objectivism: Assumes a sharp distinction between the knower and the objects to be known, with knowers as active agents who observe and dissect objects using empirical measurement and logical analysis.
Contemporary Epistemology Challenges: Argues that we can make no rigid distinction between the knower and the known, as every scientific finding is a mixture of subjective and objective elements, such as in quantum mechanics.
Polanyi's View: Knowledge is neither subjective nor objective but a transcendence of both achieved by the person, involving personal "indwelling" with the physical world and influenced by the scientific community.
Objectivism in Education: Objectivism is institutionalized in our educational practices through the "hidden curriculum," conveyed to our students through conventional teaching methods.
The Teacher as Mediator: The teacher is the living link in the epistemological chain, conveying both an epistemology and an ethic to the student, influencing their sense of self and world.
The Message of Education: The message education should convey is not identified by words like "fact," "theory," "objective," and "reality," but is called "truth."
Truth as Troth
Truth: From a Germanic root that also gives rise to "troth," as in a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable relationship.
Truthful Knowing: To know something or someone in truth is to enter troth with the known, becoming betrothed and engaging with attentiveness, care, and good will.
Elements of Truthful Knowing:
Entering a relationship with someone or something genuinely other than us, but with whom we are intimately bound.
Educating toward truth requires the knower to become interdependent with the known.
Finding truth by pledging our troth, making knowing a reunion of separated beings whose primary bond is not of logic but of love.
The Teaching Behind the Teaching
Objectivism in Conventional Classrooms: Conventional classrooms revolve around the activity and authority of the teacher, with students memorizing and repeating reports on reality.
Critique of Conventional Teaching: Too much lecturing is authoritarian, listening is unengaged, and memorization is mechanical, with the classroom fostering competition rather than collaboration.