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

Infinite...

This morning I take a break from Mr. Hicks's worthy tome, and share instead something I read in my quiet time this morning.  It brought me up short and found me wanting.  It is a from a book entitled Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions.  The portion of the prayer that really caught my attention this morning said:

Thy blood is the blood of incarnate God, its worth infinite, its value beyond all thought.  Infinite must be the evil and guilt that demands such a price.
Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions p.41

I am only a little part of that "infinite evil", but how often I go through my days without ever a thought to my corruption being the cause of Christ's suffering, or the costliness of my redemption.  But this prayer ends with the hope that gives me a place to stand:

Yet thy compassions yearn over me, thy heart hastens to my rescue, thy love endures my curse, thy mercy bore my deserved stripes.  Let me walk humbly in the lowest depths of humiliation, bathed in thy blood, tender of conscience, triumphing gloriously as an heir of salvation.
~Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions p.41 

May we indeed, Gentle Reader, walk in this way.

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

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!

Thinking about education...

In one of my favorite books on classical education, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, David hicks quotes another book that I enjoyed: The Rector of Justin: A Novel by Louis Auchincloss.  In that novel, the headmaster of a classical boys' school, Frank Prescott,  thinks about his philosophy of education. Hicks says:

Prescott's dream, no mere nineteenth-century show of "rugged individualism" or :muscular Christianity," embodies the teacher's ancient and perennial desire to connect the wisdom of the past with man's present and future actions: to educate the young to know what is good, to serve it above self, to reproduce it, and to recognize that in knowledge lies this responsibility.  But Prescott fails. [His school] refuses to produce uniform paragons of virtue, and Auchincloss leaves his readers to ponder some disturbing questions: Is Prescott's failure inevitable-- a flaw of conception, personality, or circumstance? What does his failure teach about the devastating influence of a materialistic and democratic society on education? What is the solution to the paradox between educating for the world's fight and for the soul's salvation?
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pp.1-2

This reminds me a movie we recently viewed: The Emperor's Club (Widescreen Edition).  It also has no easy answers for the educator, because there is something intangible at work to secular educators: the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of students to bring change.  A teacher can only fulfill his or her calling before God and pray to inspire his students.

If you would like to think about the philosophy of education this summer, Gentle Reader, I recommend any or all of these resources for thoughtful consideration.  Hicks' book is my favorite on the subject of classical education, but no easy read.  The Auchincloss is an excellent little novel, fun if you want to ponder in a lighter way, and a good story.  And The Emperor's Club is not a great movie, but a good movie with lots of food for thought.

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

The drama of dogma...

It is...startling to discover how many people...heartily dislike and despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what it is. If you tell them, they cannot believe you. I do not mean that they cannot believe the doctrine: that would be understandable enough, since it takes some believing. I mean that they simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting and so dramatic can be the orthodox Creed of the Church.
Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore-- and this in the Name of One Who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame.
it is the dogma that is the drama-- not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death-- but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.
~Dorothy L. Sayers, as quoted in Glimpses of Church History, Issue 246

Vicariously rapacious...

But this we can know: Ignorance is no asset, and the empty, formless mind is surely a positive liability. Few qualities can be more useful, whatever one's future may hold, than the fortified mind. Parents who cannot see this are shortsighted, misinformed, or vicariously rapacious.
~T. l. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.214

What is it good for?

"Let us not forget," Emerson once said, "that the adoption of the test 'what is it good for' would abolish the rose and exalt in triumph the cabbage." And man cannot live by cabbage alone.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.213

Memory of the past...

The letters of Adams and Jefferson fairly shimmer with the utility of reading classics; for them this was no merely ornamental skill; Greek and Latin furnished their minds and formed their political judgment. Classics contained a not-so-subtle spur to grow up, intellectually and culturally. The Founders took to heart Cicero's standing, eternal question: "For what is the life of man, if memory of the past be not interwoven in the life of later times?"
~T. l. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.211

Preserving democracy...

"John Adams and Thomas Jefferson knew where they stood. They sought, for themselves and their posterity, the vita beata, the happy life. And they hoped for a stable commonwealth. These two men knew intimately Aristotle's vital, now neglected distinction between the education that democrats like and the education that can preserve democracy. Good intention aren't enough.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.210

The imaginative mind...

"To seek to bring the spirit of the dead to life, to summon that spirit to speak and to have it speak, and to make it somehow again a part of the society of the living is an enterprise in which only the imaginative mind can hope to succeed."
~Hermann Hagedorn, as quoted by David Hicks, Norms and Nobility, p.31

Sabbath Sentiments

Join All the Glorious Names by Isaac Watts, 1709

Join all the glorious names
Of wisdom, love, and power,
That ever mortals knew,
That angels ever bore:
All are too mean to speak His worth,
To poor to set my Savior forth.

But O what gentle terms,
What condescending ways,
Doth our Redeemer use
To teach his heav’nly grace!
Mine eyes with joy and wonder see
What forms of love He bears for me.

Arrayed in mortal flesh,
He like an angel stands,
And holds the promises
And pardons in His hands;
Commissioned from His Father’s throne
To make His grace to mortals known.

Great Prophet of my God,
My tongue would bless Thy Name,
By Thee the joyful news
Of our salvation came,
The joyful news of sin forgiv’n
Of hell subdued, and peace with Heav’n.

Be Thou my Counsellor,
My Pattern, and my Guide,
And through this desert land
Still keep me near thy side:
Nor let my feet e’er run astray
Nor rove nor seek the crooked way.

I love my Shepherd’s voice,
His watchful eyes shall keep
My wand’ring soul among
The thousands of His sheep:
He feeds His flock, He calls their names,
His bosom bears the tender lambs.

To this dear Surety’s hand
Will I commit my cause;
He answers and fulfils
His Father’s broken laws:
Behold my soul at freedom set!
My Surety paid the dreadful debt.

Jesus, my great High Priest,
Offered His blood, and died;
My guilty conscience seeks
No sacrifice beside:
His powerful blood did once atone,
And now it pleads before the throne.

My Advocate appears
For my defense on high;
The Father bows his ears,
And lays his thunder by:
Not all that hell or sin can say
Shall turn his heart, his love away.

My dear almighty Lord,
My Conqueror and my King,
Thy scepter and Thy sword,
Thy reigning grace I sing:
Thine is the power; behold I sit
In willing bonds beneath Thy feet.

Now let my soul arise,
And tread the tempter down;
My Captain leads me forth
To conquest and a crown:
A feeble saint shall win the day,
Though death and hell obstruct the way.

Should all the hosts of death,
And powers of hell unknown,
Put their most dreadful forms
Of rage and mischief on,
I shall be safe, for Christ displays
Superior power, and guardian grace.