More on myth...

A good myth, like a good map, enables the wanderer to survive, perhaps even to flourish, in the wilderness.  To this end, classical education, like Hebrew education, carefully preserves the best myths within its tradition and insists that each new generation of students learn these myths, imprisoning them in their heart...[O]ne's chances of survival in a wilderness are greater when one is not alone...Myths provide each member of society with something dignify and lend coherence to his life, as well as something of quality he can share with the other members of the community...
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.29-30

The uncharted wilderness of mythopoeic imagination...

I have experienced one of those lovely confluences in my reading this week. One of those times when two separate and seemingly unrelated things form a new whole in my little brain. First, here is a lovely quote from David Hicks: 

It has become almost commonplace to divide ancient consciousness thus between the logos and the mythos, but when fully understood, this division is recognized as timeless-- a precondition, as it were, of the human mind. No one exists who does not in some measure possess these complementary defenses against an unintelligible and hostile world.  The mythos represents man's imaginative and, ultimately, spiritual effort to make this world intelligible; the logos sets forth his rational attempt to do the same.  What is not hedged off in the severely symmetrical German garden of reason belongs to the uncharted wilderness of mythopoeic imagination-- well, perhaps not entirely uncharted, for even the most rational man spends most of his life wandering in this wilderness, learning its ways and doing his best to follow whatever rudimentary maps come to hand...
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.29

This put me in mind of something recently read by Paul Tripp:

The second thing that distinguished Adam and Eve from the rest of creation [after the fact that we were created to be revelation receivers] was that they were created to be interpreters.  people are meaning-makers; we have been created with the marvelous ability to think.  We are always organizing, interpreting and explaining what is going on inside us and around us...When we say that God designed human beings to be interpreters, we are getting to the heart of why human being do what they do. Our thinking conditions our emotions, our sense of identity, our view of others, our agenda for the solution of our problems, and our willingness to receive counsel from others. That is why we need a framework for generating valid interpretations that help us respond to life appropriately.  only the words of the Creator can give us that framework.
~Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (Resources for Changing Lives), pp.41, 43

In some mythopoeic way, this gets to the heart of why I teach.  Since we are built to be interpreters, and we search for meaning, it seems important to guide the young in that important search.  What a calling it is to teach! (And what a lovely word: mythopoeic...)

The theoretical life...

Aristotle defends the theoretical life as the true end of education and the source of happiness. One does not require more than the bare necessities of life to achieve happiness in thought, nor is the active life of the mind dependent  upon  the inherently unequal endowments of nature. One need be neither strong nor handsome, well-born nor gregarious, nay, not even brilliant to participate happily in the theoretical life.  The theoretical life completes the individual, holding him against the warmth of the divine spark in his nature and making sense of an existence otherwise consumed by the infinite wishing of one thing for the sake of another.  indeed, the theoretical life is a life of virtue, so long as we mean by virtue all that the Greek arete expresses: the life that knows and reveres, speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and reproduces the Beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things...
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.21

Happiness is....

The purpose of education is not the assimilation of facts or the retention of information, but the habituation of the mind and body to will and act in accordance with what one knows...According to Aristotle, the perfect end of education will be an activity that is engaged in for its own sake, complete and sufficient unto itself.  Aristotle calls the activity for which education prepares man-- happiness.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.20

Dogma as art...

...[A] classical education presents the right way, not with the intention of stifling future inquiry, but as a necessary starting point for dialogue.  In this sense, dogma can resemble art: it confronts man with some truth about himself, a kind of truth that might have taken him a lifetime of error and misdirection to arrive at for himself, but ultimately, a truth he must test in his own experience of life if he is to appropriate it for himself and benefit from the confrontation.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.19

Good thoughts for a new school year...

HT:  CR

Modern education in a nutshell...

Whatever his reasons for rejecting the classical curriculum, [the modern educator's]  classrooms suffer from its absence in three notable ways. in them, human experience tends to be dealt with narrowly and reductively, broken down into isolated, unconnected units; students ignorant of what questions to ask are presented with uninvited and consequently meaningless informtion; and there is no basis for making moral and aesthetic judgments or for attaching learning to behavior.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.19

Competent to judge...

Classical inquiry possesses three essential attributes. The first of these is general curiosity...Second, one responds to these questions by forming imaginative hypotheses...Third, one completes the inquiry by devising methods for testing the hypothesis...This bent of mind allows the educated man to go on educating himself or extending the realms of knowledge for his fellows...This is the person competent to judge what the experts say without being an expert himself.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.18

Classical education is not, preeminently, of a specific time or place. It stands instead for a spirit of inquiry and a form of instruction concerned with the development of style through language and of conscience through myth. the key word here is inquiry. Everything springs from the special nature of the inquiry. The inquiry dictates the form of instruction and establishes the moral framework for thought and action...
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.18

The wise, not the many...

A school is fundamentally a normative, not a utilitarian, institution, governed by the wise, not the many.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, p.13

 This is why the sort of education that is good for democracy is not the kind of education most democratic citizens want... It assumes that there is such a thing as objective wisdom, and that some possess it while others don't.  This is downright heresy in our culture, but I find it true, nevertheless.

The purpose of education in this age or any other...

Modern man's inveterate tendency to supplant the normative with the operational-- to ask, What can be done? instead of , What ought to be done?-- characterizes today's educational policies...

[But] when we accept the tyranny of the real over the ideal, we deny the human spirit-- the better half of learning and the better half of man.  Instead, we concentrate on his Caliban half, making him a more efficient berry-gatherer, a more discriminating shell collector, or a more willing water-carrier. The notion of spirit we dismiss as mythological, out-of-date, and irrelevant; at any rate, the fact that it cannot be seen in space or under a microscope makes it, in the end, no longer a proper subject for instruction...

Our fascination with technical means, by the very nature of things, subverts the supreme task of education-- the cultivation of the human spirit: to teach the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, to reproduce it, and to recognize that in knowledge lies this responsibility.

~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.11-13

Mastery over nature but not over himself...

Indeed, [we ought to] ponder the difference between the man who was educated to believe himself a little lower than the angels and the man whose education permits him to ignore both angels and God, to avoid knowledge not of the five senses, and to presume mastery over nature but not over himself.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.10

Lust for power, not truth...

Man's lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education.  But this fact does not worry the educator.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.8

Last night, dh and i began watching an old movie entitled Gods & Generals, based on the book Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara.  In this movie (which at this point seems a bit stilted to me- and the beards are just terrible...) there is a very interesting quote from Stonewall Jackson.  He says in essence that Lincoln sending troops into the South was the mark of the end of freedom and the triumph of commerce over truth. I don't know if Jackson actually said that or not, but it resonates with this idea from Hicks. Oh, for the little cottage school and home school where funding and politics and power are not the source of curricular decisions! I really despair for the children of this age who are forced to navigate in such shallow waters, never learning better or deeper!

Prescriptive or descriptive?

Modern education really approaches the idea of man and his end differently than the ancients did.  And I don't think it improves upon them.  David Hicks agrees with me:

Now, the modern educator is apt to dismiss prevarications told in deference to an ideal Type, while he condemns the arbitrariness of a prescriptive understanding of man.  He presumes to have found a method for replacing it, at least initially, with a descriptive understanding...So, without much sober reflection, the early record is quietly dismissed as unscientific--therefore, error-ridden and useless.  In its place, the educator erects a sort of science without reason, random induction predicated upon gnomic utterances like those of Marshall McLuhan: "Data accumulation leads to pattern recognition."
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.3

I live in a scientific town, and am married to a scientist, and am surrounded by world-renown scientists.  But the best scientists I know are the ones who understand the limits of science, and when science ceases to be a descriptive tool, and tries to be a prescriptive one.  As Hicks says:

...[The ancients] themselves, would have agreed that of all creation, the unstable creature man most needed transformation.Thus, Democritus' theory of atomic structures did not start a scientific revolution in physics, but it did provide a theoretical basis for the Epicurean way of life...But modern science-- a phrase we cannot utter without wedding it to technology-- ignores these old warnings...
~David hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.6

It is hard to overstate the consequences of leaving behind the prescriptive in favor of the descriptive alone. One need only look at our current cultural chaos to see its consequences. And if every teacher understood this important distinction, education would be a very different animal!

The equation of truth with science is peculiarly modern, as is the assumption that the science of the ancients desired to be turned into technology "aiming to mold the future"... [This view of education] effectively excludes the normative aspects of all knowledge (the inquiry concerning what ought to be done) in favor of the operational (the inquiry concerning what can be done). It shuns the prescriptive in favor of the descriptive.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.7

Polemical magic...

Education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of man, and for this reason, no education is innocent of an attitude toward man and his purposes.  The writer on education who fails to state his view of man at the outset expects to perform some polemical magic.  He masks his premises and invites a gullible reader to judge his conclusions on the deceptive merit of a logical deduction. in fact, whether he wishes to or not, he presupposes an order of human values; his understanding of the nature and proper end of man determines the purposes and tasks that he assigns to education.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education pp.3-4

What does the fact that the aim of most education in our culture is pursuit of money (vocational in nature) have to say about what our culture prizes and sees as the main aim of man?  How different would our education truly be if we believed what the Westminster Divines taught: that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever?

Miscellany...

To all of you who enjoy occasional rants about the inconsistencies of the English language, I offer this.  Hopefully, Gentle Reader, it will aid you in getting it "out of your system".

To all of you who tire of the edu-speak concerning self-esteem, I offer this. A little dose of Theodore Dalrymple should help.

And while we're talking about interesting ideas, how about this by Anthony Esolen?  Good food for thought.

Science in service to a prescriptive ideal...

...The expert's total reliance upon the methods of science renders him incapable of learning from his forebears anyway, for they cannot provide him with the hard statistical and clinical data alone with which he can work.  He is like the raw ensign on the bridge of a ship who, mesmerized by the radar scope, refuses to consult an experienced navigator in the fog. His revision of language and his ignorance of history afford him the comfortable delusion of not having to look back to get his bearings. Sure of the all-sufficiency of his methods and blinf to many of his own primary assumptions, he rejects charts that were made--he is convinced-- by worse navigators than himself, bu which he means by navigators whose methods antedated his own...
...I fear that the modern educator's inchoate understanding of science, his naive belief in its all-sufficiency, and his unwillingness to acknowledge its methodological limitations are leading to a reaction and revulsion against it. If descriptive science is to aid our schools and flourish in them, it must remain in the service of a prescriptive ideal.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.2-3

Intellectual shallowness...

Another excess of modern life-- and one not unrelated to well-intentioned, naive multi-culturalism-- is intellectual shallowness. This vice besets all of us. Never have so many people earned so many academic degrees and known so little. Yet never have so many thought they knew so much...
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing parnassus, p.231

A healthy correction to tedious, mindless relativism...

A classical curriculum, though, can act as a healthy correction to tedious, mindless relativism. It is not so much uni-cultural as aristo-cultural-- it directs us to models of the best in all fields of human achievement. And we are all "minorities", all of us are "disadvantaged", in the face of superior objects, whether they be words, thoughts, things, or deeds.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.232

A bulwark...

Classical education is a bulwark against slick stupidity and easy opinions. Far from spiriting us away from the lovely things of the world, it affords greater possibilities of intimacy even with those things we haven't read and been tested upon in school. it opens doors and keeps them open. The trained and cultivated mind is free to enjoy at those times when enjoyment matters most--when we sit quietly by the beach or before the fire with our friends, our drinks, our thoughts.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.231