Tag: Liberal Education

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Bulletin

Euclid and The Mathematician’s Process

Last year, Dr. Seeley of the Boethius Institute connected me with Rosary College, a start-up junior college looking for an instructor to teach Euclidian geometry. Unsure how to teach Euclid’s Elements in a way that was authentic to both the classical liberal arts curriculum and my experience as a mathematician, I looked through the library in the math department at Colorado State University, my alma mater. To my surprise, I found a text titled Geometry: Euclid and Beyond authored by Robin Hartshorne. This text provided me with both insight into how fellow mathematicians think about Euclid in the modern day, and sympathy for how intimidating Euclid’s Elements might be to students reading them for the first time. 

Robin Hartshorne is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkley, and a highly influential mathematician. His 1977 text Algebraic Geometry was one of the first sources that made algebraic geometry – a highly technical and evolving field in modern mathematics born in the 20th century out of the works of Diophantine – “accessible” to graduate students. Yet it was still notoriously difficult, and especially intimidating to me as a first year graduate student. At the time, it seemed just a series of complicated nonsense: an intricate definition, a proposition, another definition, several more definitions, and a long list of proofs I could not follow until I really understood the definitions. Finally, in my third year, I took an algebraic geometry course taught by my advisor. His carefully selected exercises allowed me and my classmates to interact with the content in a meaningful way. Most importantly, these examples were fun to work on together. In a playful spirit, we made progress reading and writing arguments.

That same year, I started to make progress in my research for the first time. Research in mathematics – that is, proving novel theorems – requires a deep understanding of the definitions at hand. Most of the time, building this foundation is a tedious rhythm of reading and taking notes. However, when I went back to basics and played with lower-level examples similar to those my advisor selected for his course, I finally learned the definitions that were previously too complicated to understand.

Such play is not only an essential aspect of modern mathematics, but also of Euclid’s development of the Elements. Starting with five fundamental axioms, Euclid would have played with points, lines, and plane figures until he recognized certain provable truths. Then, using only the axioms and previously proven results, he could construct arguments demonstrating such truth beyond refute. Through the act of reading these arguments, a modern audience might gain an appreciation for Euclid’s use of logic and the axiomatic method but miss the playful discovery of such truths. Euclid’s long list of definitions and propositions may even seem like a series of complicated nonsense like Algebraic Geometry was to me as a graduate student. As I built my syllabus for MATH 101: Euclidean Geometry, I wanted to make the material come to life just as my advisor had done for me.

In the late 1980s, Hartshorne found himself in a similar position – teaching classical geometries as a modern mathematician. In Geometry: Euclid and Beyond, Hartshorne “takes Euclid’s Elements as the starting point for a study of geometry from a modern mathematical perspective,” by walking the reader through Euclid’s most significant propositions and connecting them to newer problems (Hartshorne, 2000, p.1). Although this text ultimately covers material suited for a senior level mathematics major, the first chapter, meant to be read concurrently with the Elements, is filled with accessible discovery-based exercises designed to put any reader in Euclid’s shoes.

Early in the course, I had my students write conjectures based on their explorations in Geogebra, an online calculator that allows for compass and ruler constructions. For example, on a discussion board problem in the first few weeks, I had students answer true and false questions about polygons circumscribed by circles, and write their own conjectures. They had not yet read Books III and IV of Elements which deal with these relationships, but through collaboration and play, they found their own reasoning for why all triangles can be circumscribed by a circle, and used results from Books I and II to justify their reasoning. They also correctly conjectured relationships between angles in a quadrilateral circumscribed by a circle (namely that opposite angles are supplementary). These results were significantly more meaningful when we later discussed their proofs because my students knew them first hand. 

Along these lines, one of Hartshorne’s classical geometry students argued that in order to have a truly authentic experience, it would be better to have no accompanying textbook at all, not even the Elements (Hartshorne, 2000 p.13). Students would live the axiomatic method as Euclid did and discover geometry from scratch. Of course, one pitfall of this idea is that a semester is only 15 weeks long. Exploration takes time, but constructing an argument after the play is done takes even more time. Under an exploration-only model, it would be impossible to cover all of the material in the Elements. Additionally, the act of reading written arguments is an important part of the learning process. How could one write a proof having never read one?

With this in mind, I had my students write their own proofs to problems not found in Euclid’s Elements after reading several similar arguments. For example, the third week, I assigned the following homework problem. 

As to not spoil the problem solving process for the interested reader, I refrain from including a solution here. However, using known results, and other strategies, my students constructed excellent arguments. 

It is worth mentioning that play is sometimes messy. My students did not always find clear-cut solutions like they did for the above exercise. For example, halfway through the semester, I assigned the exercise below.  

While students creatively worked toward a proof, the process for this problem was significantly more open-ended and involved; I could not expect routine answers. For certain problems, all of my students observed and communicated the same ideas. Other times, I received as many different answers as I had students because each individual chose to explore a different angle. In class, having open-ended conversations sometimes meant that I stumbled through the material too. Yes, this process was sometimes frustrating, but it was also exactly the point, and my students rose to the challenge. Because this course included rote activities directly from Euclid’s Elements, structured written homework assignments, and a playful activities adapted from both Geometry: Euclid and Beyond and my own undergraduate geometry curriculum (written by Nathaniel Miller1), my students got to live the entirety of the mathematician’s process. From reading the definitions and proofs to playing with lower-level examples, they persevered through the messiness. Guided by the structure of Euclid’s Elements, my students ultimately communicated their arguments and found success writing proofs. Teaching this course reminded me that people are inherently good at recognizing truth when given the opportunity to reckon with it.

References

Hartshorne, R. (2000). Geometry: Euclid and Beyond. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-22676-7

  1. Nathaniel Miller is a professor at the University of Northern Colorado and has several papers about teaching proof-writing to pre-service secondary teachers. In his dissertation, A DIAGRAMMATIC FORMAL SYSTEM FOR EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY, he formalizes Euclid’s diagram proofs using computer programming.  ↩︎
Bulletin

Fruits of the Fellows Formation Program

When I applied to the Boethius Institute Fellows Formation program, I knew it would be a challenging but fruitful opportunity. I had been involved in the classical education movement for over twenty years but was aware of many gaps and deficiencies in my own education, so I was excited to deepen my understanding of not only what is meant by “a liberal arts education” in its historic sense, but also to become better educated in the very arts themselves. There seem to be many opportunities for educators to sharpen their teaching skills, but I wanted to work toward acquiring for myself that education that the classical education movement seeks to impart to students. The Boethius Institute program was offering the opportunity to move toward becoming that which I want my students to become.
As part of the Fellows Formation program, we each proposed a project to work on throughout the year, and I rapidly realized what mine should be. As a former homeschooling mom, I have long wanted to see a classical learning center in my community – a place where the liberal arts are explored, imaginations are cultivated, and the greatest books, thoughts, and ideas of the past are preserved and passed on to the next generation. My city has a thriving homeschool community, with over two thousand families and several once-a-week classical communities, and I wanted to found a center where those families can turn for guidance, resources, and classes. I also wanted to begin working with several new classical schools in my area, offering workshops and support as they grow. I had already been teaching a series of classes, but I hoped to expand the classes I offer and begin to seek out like-minded teachers whose greatest love is learning to join in my endeavor. And so Legenda Classical Resources began to take shape.


As I have worked this year to learn about and understand more deeply the liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and geometry, I have been changed as a teacher while my vision for a classical education center has become more focused. Delving into Latin and Greek grammar, as well as exploring and contemplating what language is and how it communicates thought, worked with our study of the rhetoric of famous speeches to give me a deeper love and reverence for the beauty of language itself. Logic and geometry, on the other hand, have challenged me with their precision, and this spills over into my teaching; I find my thought becoming more orderly, my questions to students more precise. It has also inspired me to eventually work with students through some of the speeches we discussed. This year I developed my curriculum for a Rise of the Modern World course, and I have incorporated several of Lincoln’s speeches which we analyzed together this year.


As part of the Fellows program, we met periodically in small groups with one of the Senior Fellows to discuss and receive feedback on our projects. A large part of my work this year consisted in building a website as a springboard to present my learning center to the community, and my small group, under the leadership of Dr. Matthew Walz, was helpful in guiding my choices as it was under construction. Dr. Walz encouraged me to craft a concise mission statement that would convey exactly what I hope to accomplish in my community: “Legenda Classical Resources supports and promotes classical education by nurturing and instructing students, parents, and teachers, encouraging them to pursue the good, true, and beautiful, and joining them in a lifetime love of learning.” I shared with him that there seem to be many in my community who are either unsure or mistaken in their perceptions of what is meant by classical education, and he gave me an idea to address this: to replace my description of classical education with an FAQ page, addressing many misconceptions and concerns sometimes associated with liberal arts education. My answers to several of these were guided and changed as I worked through this year’s fellows training, particularly the question “What are the liberal arts? Why should we study them?” Our working through the first four liberal arts enabled me to hone my idea of what they entail and the effect of studying them on the mind.

After publishing my website (www.legendaclassical.com) and an accompanying social media page (as this is the main means of communication among local homeschool families), I began developing new classes whose content has been shaped by my year with the Boethius Institute. As we have been reading and discussing Aristotle and Plato, receiving an overview of Latin and Greek, and following Euclid through his methodical propositions, I gained a greater respect for those whose minds, for generations, were formed by the same books and discussions. Three outstanding examples of this education are C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton (who, although he had less formal education than the other two, still was formed by the greatest literature). I started development, therefore, of a new set of classes, a “Great Authors Series”, in which students at my learning center can spend a year with each of these great minds. Since my desire, as I stated above, is to have a place where imaginations are cultivated, I could think of no better authors to fire the minds and imaginations of students.


In addition to working with homeschooled students, Legenda Classical Resources also seeks to reach out to and work with classical schools, providing support, guidance, and materials to small, newly-formed schools. This year I laid the groundwork for this by working with one new school and another in the planning stages. For the former, I began coming into the school and offering classes once a week in history, literature, and writing, as well as providing some curricular guidance and materials. I was invited to attend a board meeting of the latter, set to open next year, and I developed a talk discussing “What is classical education?” which I will be giving at their initial meeting introducing the new school to the community. The Fellows program, along with my small group, were also helpful in outlining and developing my talk.


Additionally, Legenda Classical Resources also seeks to guide and nurture parents as they work to educate their children. To that end, I have begun offering workshops which not only teach students but guide parents as well. As a lifelong lover of Shakespeare, I read with delight Dr. Seeley’s account of a Shakespeare workshop he developed for younger children, and I am currently adapting his ideas and developing a similar workshop for my community this summer in which students and their parents can together discover the joys of his plays. I am currently teaching the second of two spring IEW writing workshops; I have been asked this summer to present an introduction to that writing program for parents.


As my vision for Legenda Classical Resources includes bringing multiple teachers together so that students can attend classes all meeting in the same location, I also began sharing my vision with like-minded homeschoolers who have a background in and knowledge of classical education. I discussed my plans with parents currently teaching in classical communities meeting once a week, and several expressed an interest in joining me and continuing to teach when their children have graduated. I also plan to launch a classical education reading group for parents and teachers this summer, where we can read, discuss, and grow together as educators and provide support and encouragement.


And this desire for a community of learning in my city has also been shaped and refined by my year in the Fellows Formation program. As we read through portions of Book I of Aristotle’s Topics, one particular comment he made struck me with special force. Discussing how to delimit the use of a word in any particular case by examining its contrary, Aristotle says that, while pleasure has pain as its contrary when discussing bodily pleasures, “there is no contrary and so no name to the pleasure of beholding that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the side.” The pleasure of knowing, of seeing that something is true, of having one’s mind opened – this is the distinctive pleasure we have enjoyed this year. We fellows-in-training have together worked through difficult material; we have learned from our Senior Fellows and from each other; we have grown as learners and teachers. And it is this idea of fellowship that I hope to develop locally – a place where people, children and adults, but all truly students, can come together and celebrate the joy found in exploring the wealth of the past. The groundwork has been laid, and I hope to continue to build Legenda Classical Resources into a home for the pleasure found in learning.

Bulletin

A Fellow’s Work in Brazil

I was gratified and encouraged to receive the email below from Fellow Lucas Fonseca Dos Santos, a resident of Sao Paolo in Brazil. Lucas is one of many Brazilians who are hungry to learn everything they can about liberal education, so that they can revive education in their own country. Lucas’s zeal led him to learn spoken Latin through the prestigious Vivarium program in Rome, to study for the Master’s in Classical Education under Senior Fellow Erik Ellis at the University of Dallas, and to study the Quadrivium with me as part of our Fellows in Formation program. 

Dear Dr. Seeley,

I wanted to share with you about a course I taught here in Brazil last week. Since last Thursday, I have been in a city in the interior of São Paulo (a 6-hour drive from the capital), teaching intensive teacher training to a group of teachers I have been working with for a long time.

I am sending this information, as well as a link to some photos and videos of the course, as a way of thanking you for everything you have done for me and for your generosity in allowing me to participate in the Institute. A large part of the curriculum studied was born from the Fellowship studies. They are enthusiastic about the project. They are also grateful to the Institute, because I try to transmit, even with my limitations, what I learn from you. I want to ensure that the fruits of these studies can spread throughout Brazil.

In fact, here in Brazil, there is a revival of interest in the liberal arts and classical education, but we have many things related to the Trivium, and almost nothing related to the Quadrivium.

I have tried, in my training for teachers, to bring the importance of the Quadrivium. Only very advanced teachers participated in this course – some pioneers in Classical Education and Homeschooling in Brazil – and with influential work in the dissemination of these studies.

I have set the goal that all teachers in this class should master Latin as well as possible, so that in the near future, classes can be taught in Latin – a good portion of the class already has a reasonable command.

The following were present:

– Gessica Hellman and Alexei Hellman, together with their 3 children.  They are pioneers in Homeschooling in Brazil, and among the pioneers are those who dedicated themselves to the production of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric materials.  They are the creators of the website Vias Clássicas and the publishing house Vias Clássicas. In addition to their participation, their son Michael, 14 years old, is a regular student in the adult class, and I follow his studies and writings. He has a personal goal of gradually following the Thomas Aquinas College curriculum.

– Kemily Rodrigues, a very experienced teacher, who works with Children’s Literature and the importance of reading aloud to children. At the moment, she is delving deeper into John Senior and his vision of the Great Books and Children’s Literature as preparation for the Great Books. In addition, she is competing for a scholarship to take the Latin I course at Accademia Vivarium Novum (online). (https://www.instagram.com/profkemily/)

Ian Pompeu: he is preparing for a doctorate in Philosophy of Law, and is very dedicated to Aristotle, and is also my Latin student. He has worked as a pedagogical director at a Catholic school in the North of Brazil.

Felipe Rodrigues: a beginning but talented teacher who has dedicated himself to classical education in the city of Araçatuba, in the interior of São Paulo, and has planned events in this area. He found an investor, who gave us the place where the course was held free of charge.

A simple place, as you can see from the photos, but it was a place of great hope for the future of liberal Catholic education in Brazil.

In the curriculum, we had 3 subjects:

1) Advanced Seminars in Classical Literature

We had 3 large seminars, each lasting an average of 2h30min-3h, in which we discussed:

a) Iliad XVIII and Aeneid VIII (study of ekphrasis)

b) Odyssey XI and Aeneid VI (study of katabasis)

c) Commented reading of The Lusiads, book I (comparing the similes with Ovid and Virgil).

2) Introduction to the Quadrivium.

a) Republic, book VII. We had 3 discussions of almost 2h each on this book, dealing with the subjects of the Quadrivium. Unfortunately, Dr. Lehman’s article was not yet available – it was still pending revision – and I was unable to use it with the students.

b) Introduction to Arithmetic, book I, chaps. I-VI. We had an introductory discussion on this text, which I had learned about during our meetings, but which was completely unknown to the students – even the most advanced ones. We had a Socratic seminar of almost 3 hours.

c) Ptolemy, Almagest (excerpts from book I).

d) Euclid, Elements. I gave an introduction to the elements, and the students had to solve propositions I and II. We had two long classes on the subject.

e) We would still read Boethius (excerpts from De Musica) and Copernicus, but we didn’t have time for this.

3) Liberal Arts – Great Works.

In this course, we dedicated ourselves to the study and meditation on the work of Saint Bonaventure, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam. We had two Socratic discussions on the work, one at the beginning and one at the end of the course, and it was a memorable and inspiring closing.

In Christ,

Lucas

Bulletin

Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as Cultural Epic

From a talk given at the Adeodatus Winter Forum: “Canonizing” Tolkien: The Case for Reading Tolkien at All Levels of Catholic Education

I often recommend that parents and students and donors who want to assess a high school should pay attention to its valedictory addresses, to get a sense of the spirit that motivates its best students. At the best schools, these express a conviction that, in words attributed to Benedict XVI, “We are not made for comfort; we are made for greatness.”

What elicits desires for greatness in our youth? What forms the image of greatness that will shape the efforts of their lives? Jane Forsyth, in her 2007 valedictory address at St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, dwelt on the power of the books they read together in English class. 

Our class has always loved English. We have been privileged to read many great works of literature, and our discussions of them have been lively; often they carried on after class. But among all the years of English classes, this last year, especially this last semester, stands apart.

We began the year in much the same vein as past years, reading two works that, though they had little in common with one another, were nonetheless elevating and magnificent: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  The second semester was different: we began with All Quiet on the Western Front, an agonizing story of a hopeless young man in the trenches of World War I who dies abandoned and disappointed by those in whom he had put his trust. We next read The Great Gatsby, a tale of decadence, betrayal and disappointment set in the 1920’s whose theme is the illusory and unattainable nature of man’s innate desire for happiness and goodness. This work was followed by Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath which, through its twisted use of Biblical allusions and socialist propaganda, challenges Christianity, setting up a system of belief founded on human beings and manifested by a communist ordering of society to merely natural goods. 

We were all shaken by these books, so unlike any we had read in our many years at St. Augustine Academy. Their darkness and despair dampened our spirits, and their utter Godlessness was shocking and disturbing. Our souls rebelled against these works; and we realized all at once that everything we had been taught about the nature of man and the goodness of God had taken root within us. 

We closed the year with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and a peek at Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. These, too, dealt with decadence, ugliness, and sin. But they did not leave us with a bad taste in our mouths. Their steadfast hopefulness contrasted sharply with the despair of the other works we had read. They acknowledged the problems with fallen man and with the world, but then pointed to God as the one who can solve these problems.

These works struck a chord in us, teaching as they did that, to be sure, evil does exist; that a battle is raging between Satan and God; that the battleground is our souls; that the battle is to the death; but that, in spite of all this, we have nothing to fear because Christ is our Great Captain who will win the victory with us. Indeed, He has already won: by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, He has bought us back from the devil and made grace, that necessary help of God, available to us. And if we open the doors ever so slightly, that grace will flood our souls.

Let me point out what a model their English teacher must have been. If you want to assess your English classes, begin by rating your students on the extent to which they found the books elevating and magnificent, that they were shaken and disturbed, that they found hope in the face of despair. Great literature is not meant to be dissected and left for dead, but to arouse and form our souls. As Arnold Bennett says in Literary Taste: How to Form It, “The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe.” 

But something is missing in Jane’s list. In previous years, she and her classmates would have read many of the great heroic epics of Western literature – The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divine Comedy. But where is the great modern heroic epic? Brideshead and O’Connor point to God and grace but do not exemplify for us how to live a life heroically. 

In classical times, epics, culture, and education went together. Ancient epics expressed and formed their cultures. Everybody had heard and read them so often that everybody knew them. They could be quoted and referred to without citing them. These cultural epics inspired youth and were a source of wisdom for the learned. The characters and events were an ideal that the young men, especially the leading young men of the time, wanted to live up to. Alexander carried around with him a treasury which included Homer’s Iliad. He saw everything that he did as living up to the glory of Achilles. He carried that with him as he overcame the entire Persian Empire. 

Epics not only express and form a culture, but they have traditionally been the focus of formal education. For the Greeks, formal education meant educating into the Iliad and the Odyssey. That was the whole goal. In the Socratic dialogue, Protagoras, Protagoras describes Greek education: “And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written… they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them.” 

Education into these works was considered sufficient education. Not only were you educated into the ideals, the language, and the mastery of the author, but it also prepared you to learn everything else. It provided a framework within which to judge. You had to incorporate everything else you learned into this framework.

The Lord of the Rings is an epic of a similar character and with a similar profundity of impact to the great epics of the tradition. Dr. Tekla Bude, Oregon State Associate Professor of Medieval Literatures, defines an epic as “a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity.” She then identifies four aspects of a cultural epic:

  1. It is about heroes
  2. It involves universal settings
  3. It involves the supernatural
  4. It provides the foundation of a culture.

1. Epics are about heroes. We often call someone “a hero” who, in the moment and outside of their ordinary life, does something heroic, but that doesn’t make them a heroic character. A heroic character is prepared for heroic things and his life is led in expectation of doing these great things. 

Heroes are judged by and judge themselves by other standards. Aristotle identifies heroic virtue as a separate category from ordinary virtue. He uses Hector as an example. For an ordinary man to do some of the things that Hector did would be rash, but for him, they were right. Heroes are used to the fact that their peoples depend on them. The heroes know that and accept it. 

This doesn’t mean they are all good; when a hero falls, it is a 9.0 earthquake. 

“Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain.”

The Lord of the Rings is filled with heroic figures: Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, the Council of the Wise, Saruman, Denethor, Faramir, Boromir, and Éowyn. These are all heroic characters who have to deal with and make decisions that we don’t have to face. Aragorn is a great example. He knew from his youth he was meant to be a hero. He had prepared himself for the moment of trial for 70 years. At Parth Galen, when Gandalf had died, Aragorn becomes the leader of the company. The Orcs have crashed in on the Fellowship and taken Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam have fled. Boromir is dead. Aragorn says, “Now the company is all in ruin. It is I that have failed. Vain was Gandalf’s trust in me.” It’s almost impossible for us to imagine what a devastating moment that was for Aragorn. He felt that his whole life’s commitment had failed and he was the failure. Yet he went on.

2. Epics have a universal character. In The Lord of the Rings, we experience villages and agricultural land, as well as ancient forests of great danger and yet compelling beauty. We travel through mountains, caves, plains, devastated landscape, deserts, strongholds, and cities of ancient beauty and strength. My ability to picture what he described was very poor, but when I encountered these things in real life, I understood his descriptions, and his descriptions helped me experience them more fully. I recognized some of the devastation before the gates of Morgoth when I drove through the deserts of Utah. I recognized the mountains when I was in the Rocky Mountains for the first time. I recognized mountain strongholds when I visited Assisi, and Bree in rural villages in Iowa. 

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter many different kinds of people. We encounter the Shire, the ordinary folk who have a home they love. We encounter Tom Bombadil, someone who is at home that way but in the natural world. We encounter the Last Homely House of Elrond, where memory and story are central aspects of life. We encounter Lothlórien, the Dream-flower where the past remains present. In Rohan, we find the the great grass swept plains up against the mountains and a people who are accustomed to both the plains and the mountains – the horse people, the semi-barbaric, who live in relationship with a civilized world like the way the Goths related to the Roman world. We encounter Gondor, an ancient civilization always living in relation to its past. We even encounter the Orcs with their very debased and violent way of life. 

3. Dr. Bude includes the supernatural as an important part of cultural epics. Christopher Dawson, the great British sociologist of the 20th century, said that religion is the basis of all culture. Tolkien, for various reasons, deliberately avoided explicit religion in The Lord of the Rings. ‘ But encounter with the religious is an important part of the education of the four hobbits. The Shire is without religion. As wonderful as the Shire is, there is nothing that looks beyond life in the Shire. The Travellers learned from the Elves to invoke Elbereth. During several months in Rivendell, the hobbits had heard the stories of the Silmarillion about Ilúvatar and the Valar; these later strengthened Sam and Frodo as they were about to enter Mordor. The Gondorians retained some religious practices, such as bowing to the west before eating. For them, this brought to mind Numenor and Elven home and the Valar who govern the world under the one God, Iluvatar. Frodo felt awkward that the hobbits had no such custom.

Still, for the most part in The Lord of the Rings, the divine is hidden. But it is powerfully at work. Providence is a central theme in the work. We see this especially through Gandalf. Gandalf is a wizard on a mission, literally. He was sent by the Valar to fight Sauron, and he was sent back after his death to finish the job. Central to Gandalf’s heroic wisdom is acute perception of Providence at work.  Early in the story, Gandalf speaks to Frodo of how Bilbo came to find the Ring in such an odd circumstance that nobody would have foreseen. He says, “Behind that, there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” Gandalf is very serious about this. He sees that something incredible, something divinely surprising, has happened. So he doesn’t let Frodo give the Ring to somebody more powerful who could be really responsible for it. He seems to think, “Something has happened I didn’t anticipate. I need to understand its whole purpose. What is the One up to in this?” This is the way Gandalf rolls.

Trust in Providence allows Tolkien’s heroes to exemplify mercy, the chief spiritual virtue of the whole epic. Through the story, we are led to believe that having mercy on those who deserve punishment or death will be rewarded and that we should always in every possible circumstance offer mercy. True, it’s dangerous to be merciful to those who don’t deserve mercy. But Gandalf says Bilbo took so little harm from the Ring because he acted with pity by not killing Gollum. In the end, the Quest would have failed except for Gollum; Gollum would not have been alive if Frodo had not learned the lesson of mercy from Gandalf. Providence and mercy are the heart of the religious aspect of The Lord of the Rings.

4. Finally, an epic provides a foundation for culture by presenting its ideals in a way that shapes culture. I think that, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien united and expressed the ideals of Christian civilization in a purer and more heroic way than ever before, as love for the lowly, hope for its ennoblement. The story presents with a clarity of Christian moral vision – mercy, duty, freedom, choice, heart, will, love for the natural, love for the laborer. I also think that we imbibe from him the best spirit of Christendom, including the Greco-Roman, and Norse traditions it united and purified. We are prepared to love and learn from the cultural, theological, philosophical, and historical experiences of the Church that help us understand more deeply the spiritual vision he presents.

5. I will add one aspect of a culture epic to Bude’s list: a cultural epic invites and rewards thought. It is a repository of cultural wisdom. A cultural epic means more to you the older you get. You learn more from it. When you go back as a scholar, you discover more of its treasures. And you reinspired by it. When you go back and read it again as an older person, when you have yourself tried and failed, when have yourself experienced so much more of people and places and things, his works mean so much more to you. I now find it hard to read many passages aloud without crying.

Did Tolkien intend The Lord of the Rings to become a cultural epic? He did see that it would play that role in the Shire. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo gives the Red Book of the Westmarch to Sam before he goes over the sea. He says to Sam:

You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger, and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part in the Story goes on.

The Lord of the Rings as written by Bilbo and Frodo, passed on to Sam, becomes the cultural epic of the Shire. It leads them into a new relationship with the kingdom of Arnor and Gondor and ennobles the whole society. From then on, young hobbits would realize, “We are made for greatness.” 

Bulletin

Friendship, History, and Tradition: Three Criteria for the Development of the Canon

I was recently asked by friends in South America to help set guidelines for the establishment of a canon of great books. At first glance, this might seem a straightforward or even unnecessary task. Surely, everyone knows which books are the great ones! And certainly, we can almost all agree on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and a few others, but any student of the history of Great Books programs will know that the details quickly become murky —and show definite biases— once one moves much beyond those universal authors. As a Roman Catholic and medievalist, I have long felt that a great weakness of Adler’s Great Books in the Western World is its deemphasis of Roman authors and the almost complete lack of medieval authors. I also dislike the resulting overemphasis on nineteenth-century and anglophone authors. These faults in Adler’s canon can almost certainly be explained by his peculiar taste, formed as it was in New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, and with a Great Books movement that is becoming increasingly globalized, we may need to work to form a new canon, and that means developing criteria for selecting those works that are of universal importance.

The first criterion I settled on was friendship. This was based on my experience that each of us has a private canon of favorite books, and we share that canon with our friends and relations, often whether they want us to or not. They then might like a few of the books we recommend, and then share them with their friends or relations, and in a generation or so, a subculture has formed, with its own canon. I imagine that, given a sufficiently long temporal span, this is how all canons came to be, and it is a good place for us to start as we work to form our list of the books that every educated person should read. For my part, I am working to ensure that all of my friends and students read the Tablet of Cebes, and I would trade all of twentieth-century fiction and poetry for The Lord of the Rings.

The next important consideration for canon formation is history. History is intimately tied up with identity,

with questions of us and them. My discussions with colleagues in both North and South America have led me to conclude that we can use basically the same list of books until we reach the sixteenth century. Such a list includes the Hebrew Bible, Hellenism, the New Testament and the Fathers, and the common legal, philosophical, theological, and literary inheritance of Latin Christendom. After that, religious difference in North America and ethnic difference (more marked in the past and diminishing rapidly) between the two Americas makes finding undisputed and universally great books more difficult. We ought probably all to read Shakespeare and Cervantes, but must every student in Buenos Aires and Santiago read Huckleberry Finn? Ought every student in Dallas and Detroit read Martín Fierro? We may need to accept different lists for these more recent authors, at least until another century (or two) has passed, and we have the benefit of hindsight.

The last criterion is tradition, which is more abstract than the other two, in that it cannot be reduced to a finite list of texts, and also more concrete, in that tradition is more fundamental and constitutive of the practices that animate our day-to-day experience. Our common traditions include the seven liberal arts, the historical connection to or continuing participation in Latin Christendom, and the controversial legacies of empire, colonialism, and mestizaje that make us Western but not European, and American whether we live north or south of the equator. In our new canon, I hope we will take inspiration from the wise, old ordo disciplinarum, which tells us that we read Aristotle’s Rhetoric more profitably when we have first mastered Cicero’s, we understand the Nicomachean Ethics better when we have already learned the habit of virtue from Seneca, and we may love Wisdom more if we meet her first in Boethius’ cell rather than in Plato’s cave. And of course, our path to philosophy will be straighter and narrower the more we have mastered the arts of language and number.

It takes a generation to destroy a tradition and three to build one. I think we are about halfway through the second generation, and I am full of hope. I look forward to navigating the next cycle of cultural renewal with friends in Europe and in both halves of America as we chart a path forward.

Bulletin

The Albertus Magnus Institute

From the time of its inception in 2020, the Albertus Magnus Institute has blessed many who are hungry for a liberal arts education. Setting out to make a liberal arts education accessible to all, we offer Great Books courses to adults from various walks of life and various educational backgrounds. These courses are live, online, and taught by some of the greatest minds in higher education– Drs. Anthony Esolen, Joseph Pearce, and Pavlos Papadopoulos, among them. Since 2020, we have offered 41 live courses that span from novels to Aristotle, logic to Euclid, from Shakespeare to Homer. 

As a board member, Senior Fellow, and instructor for AMI since the first round of courses four years ago,  I have seen personally the profound effects these courses have had on the Magnus Fellows, most of whom have never received a liberal arts education, and all of whom have joined us with a love of learning. 

When the 2023 Academic year began in August, the Magnus Fellowship had 904 of these hungry fellows. 

We offered ten courses this past academic year. Last fall we offered our first Latin course, Introduction to Ecclesial Latin with Father Peter Hannah; the third installment of Friendship and Freedom in the Lord of the Rings with Dr. Helen Freeh; Rousseau and the Moral and Diabolical Imaginations with Dr. Emily Finley, and my fifth philosophy course, Philosophy of Man. 

Early 2024 we offered four new courses: Professor Cortright taught our first course on Ancient Greek; and Dr. Hattrup of Thomas Aquinas College taught his first course with us (but not a new topic for him!) on Aristotle’s Categories. We welcomed Drs. Amy and William Fahey from Thomas More College to our fellowship and they offered courses on War and the Great Books and Northern Literature, respectively. 

Magnus Fellows were able to take part in these liberating courses at no charge to them. Stephen, who received a liberal arts education from Thomas More College said of the courses, “It has been far too long since I have been able to study, converse, and think deeply with a group on a single topic for an extended time. It was terrific fun and sorely missed. I’m glad that I get to do this without having to worry about school payments or stressful circumstances.”  A large number of our fellows are like Stephen,— students who received a liberal arts education from a great books school and want to continue that education. 

Though many of our fellows did receive a liberal arts education, an even greater number of them have come to us because, until now, they have missed out on the beauty of a freeing education. Raymond, who participated from the Philippines said, “It’s amazing how these AMI courses provide me the university education I wish I had, and I’m sure many of us feel the same!” And Claudia, who has taken six classes with us, does indeed feel the same: “Having received a public school education in a third-world country, learning all these things has enriched my life tremendously and filled in many educational gaps.” 

But from the beginning, the goal has been to offer these courses in a coherent and complete curriculum as well as “stand alone” courses. Earlier this year another fellow, Joe, said, “When there are enough courses to run the curriculum in sequence, in record — or even, if we dream, to run it live in sequence or even in cohorts — what a powerful influence on culture and faith this can be.”  

Our greatest success of the academic year was realizing this dream— a program that does just that— run the courses both in live sequence and in Cohorts. We launched this program earlier this fall and filled it with 26 registered fellows. For three years, students will meet once a week for eight weeks for four terms each year. In the spirit of 2 John, as friends who have become cooperators in a work of truth, fellows will complete a coherent liberal arts curriculum that will guide them toward becoming liberal artists.

Beginning this past September our first Cohort embarked on this three-year journey through the Trivium, Quadrivium, and Philosophical sciences utilizing the Great works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, St. Thomas Aquinas, and more. Through these texts these Cohort members will learn to contemplate the true, good, and beautiful in hopes that by the end of the three years they will be even closer to understanding the eternal Logos Himself. Dr. Hattrup and I are leading the Cohort during the first year, and we are presently closing our eighth week, having completed Homer’s Iliad, and just about to complete Homer’s Odyssey.

Our now 1,060 Magnus Fellows (Joe, Claudia, Raymond, and Stephen among them) have received different educations, have come from various parts of the world, and have joined the Fellowship for different reasons, but together they all believe in the value of a liberal arts education, and have come to the Albertus Magnus Institute to come one step closer to the truth that that sets us free. With God’s grace, we hope the coming year will continue to bless our fellows, new and old.

Bulletin

Teaching Shakespeare to the Young: An Interview with Megan Lindsay

I enjoy attending conferences, especially when I have no responsibilities, and am just free to attend talks of interest, reconnect with old friends, and make new ones. At last year’s National Classical Education Symposium in Phoenix, I was free to feed my passion for Shakespearian drama by attending 3 workshops by Globe director/actor/teacher, Nicholas Hutchison. They were wonderful, but I came away more excited to have made the acquaintance of Megan Lindsay, a drama instructor and director at Cicero Preparatory Academy, who introduced all three sessions. I discovered that we shared not only a common love of Shakespeare but also a conviction of the formative effects that performing his works can have on the young.

Like many involved in the liberal arts renewal, Megan stumbled into involvement because of her kids.  She visited her child’s third grade classroom at a classical Christian school, where they were being taught Shakespeare as a grammar stage activity in connection with Renaissance history. Megan had loved acting when she was young so much that she wanted to study acting in college. (“My parents said, ‘No. That has no future.’ So I studied philosophy and history to spite them!”)

Megan was deeply disturbed by what she saw. The teacher seemed to have no idea how to teach Shakespeare to the young. It was obvious that the kids had no idea what Shakespeare was saying. They had no idea the drama was about real people. “I am the kind who raises their hand to solve a problem before I think it out. I asked the school whether I could stage Shakespeare scenes to show parents? ‘Ok, on your own time.’ As I left I gasped to myself, ‘What did I just do?!”

File:Macbeth consults the three witches; an apparition appears of Wellcome V0025890.jpgMegan didn’t really know what kids that young could do. But she thought, ‘I’ll throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.” She  started with some scenes that she thought could be really fun for the kids – the  witches’ cauldron scene from Macbeth, and the scene featuring the drunken sailors and the monster, Caliban, from The Tempest. It was daring – imagine third graders at a Christian school playing as witches and drunkards. But the kids had a great time!

She decided to begin by having them just experience Shakespeare’s language. She had them say the words in different ways, playing with their sounds. “‘Double, double’ is full of assonance and big vowels. They enjoyed saying the words though they didn’t know what a lot of them meant. As I watched them, I realized how natural this approach is for kids – they are used to learning from listening to adults although much of the vocabulary is beyond them.”

Then she had them act out the scene according to the way the words sounded to them and what they could get of the words. She supplied meanings for a few of the words, but for the most part she let them develop the story without direction from her. “They discovered the story! This was so freeing for me as a teacher. I discovered that my role was less to tell them the meaning than to help them discover that meaning through acting it out.”

Megan also saw how they began to learn about themselves through the process of discovering the story through Shakespeare’s words. “Caliban the monster was played by a lovely little boy. He struggled to understand Caliban’s anger, he couldn’t feel it himself. I asked him, ‘Do you ever feel your parents are unfair? Like some time when your mom said no to you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when I really wanted the gum in her purse.” ‘Did you take it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How did you feel?’ ‘Guilty, but I was still mad at her for being unfair!’ ‘That’s how Caliban felt,” I said. Mowing the lawn when he thought his brother should have done it helped him connect with Caliban who had to carry logs. I never told him, but I was teaching him the acting technique of substitution.”

She has applied this technique to learning Shakespeare and to many other kinds of literature. Sound it out, act it out, then add meaning. This works, she believes because it is so natural. “Kids come to language in a pre-rational way. Language lies in the human heart. It is our way of making meaning.”

Megan also has found that acting contributes to forming what Vigen Guroian has called the moral imagination, and so influences how they live their lives. Through acting, students discover that thoughts (The True) carry emotions (The Beautiful), which make us want to act (The Good). Likewise with the false, the ugly, and the bad. She once heard a Junior who had played Macbeth trying to help his little sister, who was struggling with playing a giddy girl in another play. “‘We struggle,’ he said, ‘with characters because we are judging them; we are not seeing things as they would see them. I had to understand Macbeth’s pride. And I realized that I am like him.’”

It takes time for an actor to experience his character as real.  “New actors have to begin with external representation, until the performance starts to come from within and feel more authentic.”  As a director, Megan conveys to her actors that they have a responsibility to the characters they are creating. “You must be true to your character, who is just words until you incarnate him. If you portray him truthfully, he will become real. And this might affect your life.”

Megan experienced this herself recently while playing a narcissistic controlling mom. “Classical education allowed me to enter into her while still maintaining separation. I made her so real that audience members said afterwards, ‘I hate you.’ Then I went backstage, and took the whole mask off. Yet this woman has influenced me. I was humbled, I could see the beginnings of her character in myself. I became more sensitive to conflicts with my daughters as they went off to college, less willing to sweep things under the carpet, even with my husband.”

Megan fosters this experience with her students by having them, after a performance, articulate what they learned. “They will go into life knowing many kinds of people. And they will have been trained in the art of moral imagination.”

A giant spider

Megan has adapted this technique for Shakespeare works for all literature. She tried it with the chapter, “Shelob’s Lair,” from The Lord of the Rings.” She read it herself, and put together a list of great quotations. She then noticed patterns. “In this chapter, Tolkien focuses on the sensible. He highlights the loss of all the  senses except smell, which is heightened. He chooses gross words like ‘foul’ and ‘reek’. Darkness becomes a thing destroying all senses, and even the memory of sensations. This is a great description: ‘a shadow that being cast by no light, no light could dissipate.’” She wrote out the best quotations and put them up around the room. As with Shakespeare, she had her students read them, say them, and act them out, even if they didn’t yet understand. Then they talked about them, starting generally with, “What did you notice?” eventually moving to “What is darkness? Is it fitting to portray darkness as evil? Why is it Sam who remembers the light, not Frodo?”

Megan was extraordinarily generous with her time and her resources. Her advice helped me have one of the most delightful experiences of my professional career – a two-day Shakespeare workshop with elementary students. The success of today’s  classical education movement comes from having aroused thoughtful, passionate, generous teachers like Megan.

Bulletin

The Path Less Traveled: Early Education in the Liberal Arts

I fell in love with liberal education during the pandemic. I was teaching first grade at a poor school that had only recently decided to renew its curriculum and embrace the liberal arts. But through all of the training sessions, retreats, and curriculum writing, I continually encountered the same frustration: All of this would be so useful if only my students could read!

Our school primarily served immigrant families, so a variety of factors – particularly competing spoken languages between home and school – delayed literacy. I knew these children deserved the freedom provided by the liberal arts and, in fact, that the very philosophical underpinnings of liberal education all but demand that preliterate learners be included in this fully human way of engaging reality. But so few of our resources could accommodate these sweet, eager minds.

There’s much work to be done in exploring best practices of modern-day early liberal education. While I’m convicted of that, I’m not qualified to provide much of the necessary scholastic momentum. Instead, I would like to humbly highlight three qualities that, it seems to me, set early liberal education apart from other pedagogies. Perhaps these can be a starting point for deeper consideration by those wiser and more experienced than me.

First: imaginative. 

Modern pedagogy often uses children’s natural propensity for imagination as an engagement tool for otherwise sterile lessons. This use is improper. Imagination is not an alternative to reality – it’s the key to reality. Imagination helps us to understand the most fundamental truths around us: it helps us to explore what is beyond the physical limitations of the moment; it helps us to explore what isn’t by showing us what is preventing it from being so; and it helps us to explore what could be by going beyond the is and isn’ts and into the unknown.

One of my favorite and oft-repeated lessons comes to mind. Each year, my own five- and six-year-old students spent our much-anticipated Dinosaur Day studying fossils, biological adaptation, deductive reasoning, and earning “doctorates” in paleontology. The crowning moment of the event was when, donning their handmade T-Rex hats, they “became” dinosaurs. With elbows tucked to their sides and secured with soft, oversized yarn, the young T-Rexes were simply asked to extend two fingers from their closed fists and then go about the rest of the day. It wasn’t a particularly interesting itinerary for human students – eating a snack, putting on a backpack, opening the door, drawing a picture, free play with friends – but the dinosaurs alternated between laughter, frustration, and exhaustion as they discovered the evolutionary disadvantages of a T-Rex’s short arms and few, non-opposable digits. Some students resorted to holding pencils in their mouths. A pair of boys playing Tic-Tac-Toe with sidewalk chalk repeatedly lost balance as their truncated arms failed to reach the ground, even from a kneeling position. Catching a fall was hard, getting up was even worse. Duck-Duck-Goose had to be adapted. Cretaceous chaos reigned.

No adult merely informing them about evolutionary adaptation would have seared the reality into their minds the way that imaginative play did all on its own.

Such an example confirms that when learning, young children ascend a ladder which is equal parts imagination and reality–often done through nature’s own pedagogy: play. Children need to begin in imagination, measure it against reality, and then return to imagination to process what they’ve learned. This means finding the virtuous middle between sterile lessons which employ imagination as an afterthought and abandoning children to their own devices in largely unstructured “play education.”

Second: nurturing of true schola. 

To explain this, please pardon a brief departure from the topic at hand.

Schola refers to leisure devoted to learning. For the ancients the ability to study was leisure – that is, time away from the physical demands of survival. But education as leisurely seems contradictory to modern sensibilities. For myself, when I think of school, I think “restriction” and “stress.” When I think of leisure, I think “engaging” and “freedom.”

Freedom is the intention of the liberal arts; that is, freedom to see the Truth of things. The ability to teach oneself well is a freedom that opens up greater access to Truth, and knowing that Truth allows us to work with things as they are, rather than being restrained by assumptions, projections, and guesses.

Beyond even that, discovery is what happens when we see what is (that is: the Truth), embrace it, and make new connections. More properly, we make connections that are new to us. This discovery deepens our delight in the complex nexus of truths made by Him who is Truth so that we may further delight in Him. True understanding, then, is that which allows us to more deeply delight in Truth. If the liberal arts free us to see the Truth of things, the understanding gained therein frees us to delight in that Truth.

Here we return more directly to the topic at hand: the ideal of the liberal arts – to connect schola to the modern understanding of leisure and further, to the freedom to delight in God – is perhaps most easily achievable in early childhood.

These things should, of course, be intuitively connected at any age, but we live in a fallen world with a further fallen education system which has masterfully divorced leisure from discovery and discovery from delight for many of its students.

Early education is the ideal time to bring ancient and modern understandings of leisure together by making learning truly delightful. Examples are truly endless. Preschoolers may encounter evaporation firsthand as they “paint” with water on a hot sidewalk and watches their art disappear before their very eyes; kindergarteners may dissolve into fits of giggles as they learn to manipulate words by changing the first letter of “cat” to an “f”; first graders may be confronted with the difficulty of making a teepee stand on its own as they explore the difficult implications of a nomadic lifestyle; second graders alternating between laughter, frustration, and gratitude for the human form as they go about their day with their elbows tucked to their sides and only two fingers extended from their closed fists, emulating the evolutionary disadvantages of a T-Rex’s short arms and few, non-opposable digits.

Liberal arts education for preliterate learners must be marked by fostering the natural eagerness and delight of children while buttressing that posture against the empty cynicism of modern education.

It is a disservice to our children to strengthen them by building walls and obstacles against the rest of the world. Instead, we must foster a love of schola that is strong within itself by nurturing, to borrow Tolkien’s poetry, deep roots that are not reached by the frost. This creates a difficulty, addressed by the next mark of liberal arts early education.

Third: patient. 

File:First spring sprouts of Narcissus 02.jpgDeep roots are formed in secret, sometimes without measurable changes above the soil. One cannot measure wonder nor grade the gradual integration of numeracy, literacy, and reasoning into the bedrock of a child’s mind. This lack of qualitative measurement is a difficulty when assuring parents of the value of a slow and steady approach in these critical years. Parents–particularly young ones–almost unconsciously measure their children’s progress against the perceived progress of the offspring of their peers. While young students of more popular pedagogy may be able to spout off math facts or identify words memorized by sight, young liberal arts students may not necessarily display such superficial knowledge at the outset.

One student in particular comes to mind, who could barely associate letters with their sounds through kindergarten and most of first grade while her peers steadily progressed beyond her. Barring seasons of discouragement, she was engaged by the pedagogy. She paid attention, let herself be enamored by wonder at the content, but displayed little or no measurable growth. Discussions about retention were in progress. Suddenly, two weeks before the end of the academic year, she successfully sounded out a two-syllable spelling word in front of the class. Given another, she nailed it. And another. And one even more complex. Just in the nick of time, she had her breakthrough. Her determined mind had finally – and seemingly all at once – synthesized and integrated two years of patient, steady work and burst forth, shining with pride.

We as educators know the wait is well worth it, but will the parents? Will they fear the early years wasted if not immediately able to impress with shallow appearances? Will they maintain hope in the time that the seed is drinking, germinating and diving deep into darkness before it pushes through the soil to stretch in the sun? The inexperienced gardener may believe the sowing in vain and scoop up the kernels from their rich soil for fear they will never bear fruit. Therefore, without patience, the liberal arts model is unsustainable for early education. Schools will wither and die from dropping enrollment if impatient parents quickly transplant their children to shallow germination plates for sake of meeting arbitrary expectations set by trending pedagogy.

Whether metrics such as grades are appropriate at this age is a topic beyond the purview of this summary. What is clear is this: any method used to gauge the learning of preliterate students finds its proper place secondary to the pursuit of wonder and establishment of a deep love of learning Truth.

—

Beyond the practical need to adapt curriculum and the reality that young learners deserve freedom, it makes sense to establish the foundations of human learning from the outset of each student’s academic adventure, rather than to try and patch in human pedagogy later.

Again, these waters are somewhat uncharted, so I’ll leave it to those wiser and more experienced than myself to more fully plot them out. But consider this the official call to action.

May we indiscriminately echo the invitation given by Truth Himself to all the children: come to me.

Bulletin

On the Liberal Arts in Response to an Article in Principia

As we mentioned in our last bulletin, a group of classical educators and scholars has launched Principia, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing scholarship on classical education. As Brian Williams, General Editor, reports in his article introducing the journal, forty years of education renewal has spawned a growing body of scholarly research and writing. Principia provides a “venue for robust and vigorous dialogue and debate about classical education” that “will make substantive and positive impacts on the practical implementation of classical education in schools and homes around the world.” Williams' own summative expression and description of classical education provides a strong beginning.

The goal of classical education is to educate whole persons through the accumulated wisdom of the ages for a lifetime of flourishing regardless of their profession or place of employment. It attempts to recover the integrated ends, curricular materials, pedagogical methods, and formative culture that characterize the 2,500-year old tradition of liberal arts education, while remaining open to new works of profound insight, beautiful artistry, and genuine discovery. (p.2)

Christopher Schlect’s article, “What is a Liberal Art?”, highlights the need for common dialogue and debate. By all accounts, the idea of the liberal arts was central to pre-twentieth century Western education, and most current educators in the revival of that education embrace their importance. But as Schlect relates, confusion and disagreement over what the term liberal arts means is prevalent today, not only among universities with no particular interest in classical views, but even among those deeply interested in them. Schlecht emphasizes the need for each educational institution to reach clarity on its own understanding of the liberal arts, while he believes that historical disagreements about their nature will prevent any widespread consensus among classical educators as a whole.

Schlecht expresses the consensus that guides his institution, New Saint Andrews College in Idaho:

The liberal arts teach us how to learn—how to freely gain knowledge and understanding. Insofar as they are arts, they produce something, in this case, the ability to learn. Because they are liberal arts, they liberate us not only from ignorance, prejudice, and provincialism but also from servile dependence on the tutelage of others. 

Schlect goes to clarify the significance of “servile”:

This notion of liberality does not exclude teachers, and it certainly does not suggest any radical notion of independence. Indeed, a liberally educated person continues to learn from teachers, and even relies on them. But he no longer depends upon any one teacher, nor upon a particular school of teachers, to initiate and direct his learning for him. A liberally educated person becomes the master over his own progress in learning. 

With deep respect for fellow laborers in the field, I think this is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, especially as applied to pre-collegiate learning. A recipient of a serious liberal arts education has received a tremendous blessing. But he is certainly not ready to be set loose in a library, as Schlect suggests, inhabited by the likes of Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant, and Einstein, and press them into his service. Add Marx and Nietzsche, and our liberal arts graduate should be in terror of opening the books at all. As Aristotle and Aquinas say, to order belongs to the wise man. A young person trained in the liberal arts, but who has not been schooled in philosophy and theology, is far from being wise. He is capable of being taught by the wise man, but not of making wise judgments in the midst of powerful minds compellingly advocating for contrary answers to the fundamental questions of reality.

To understand the minds of any one of those authors takes a great deal of time and effort. The general mastery of words and quantities given by the traditional liberal arts makes understanding the authors possible but not easy. It takes docility and receptiveness, which are dangerously given to the sophistical and brilliant. Plato’s dialogue, The Protagoras, begins with the question of how a young man desiring to become really well educated can judge a teacher. Socrates warns him emphatically about the dangers of learning from just any teacher:

Now, if you are knowledgeable as to which of these wares are beneficial or harmful, you may
purchase learning, in safety, from Protagoras or anyone else at all. Otherwise beware, blessed
man, lest you take chances and imperil your most precious possessions; for there is
surely an even greater danger in the purchase of learning, than in the purchase of food….Learning, by contrast, cannot be borne away in a separate vessel. No, once the fee has been proffered, it is necessary to take that learning into the soul itself, and once you have learned something, you must go your way, having been either harmed or benefited thereby.
[313e] (Platonic Foundation translation)

What do the liberal arts produce in those who become proficient? In answer, Schlect is guided by the claim of Hugh of St. Victor  “that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher” (Didascalicon. 3.3). As Schlect suggests, Hugh meant that the liberal arts opened up the world of books to the learner, so he could learn directly from the best minds of all time. But at that time, the world of books consisted of the Scriptures, the Fathers, monastic authors, along with the best moralists among the ancient Romans. The learner was expected to trust that all these authors were wise, not to judge among competing worldviews presented by powerful sophists. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning witnessed, even in the 19th century libraries were dangerous places.

Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,
You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,
As if the worst, could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,
Behold!—the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness. Aurora Leigh

Too often high school graduates from liberal arts schools, although very grateful for what they have received, feel they are done with liberal education, and head to college to take on the serious business of preparing for a career. Often high school educators underestimate the crucial importance of their influence on inspiring a love of serious learning, and of directing their students towards the authors, programs, and professors that will guide them towards wisdom. For training in the liberal arts is only the beginning of a complete liberal education. As Newman wrote in the Preface to his Discourses on University Education, being well-grounded in grammar and mathematics will “make them feel nothing but impatience and disgust at the random theories and imposing sophistries and dashing paradoxes, which carry away half-formed and superficial intellects,” and will prepare them to be “gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views.” But Newman warned it could also make them powerful proponents of error:

In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. 

As we think through together what is being accomplished in our times by the many different efforts to renew education in the light of (but not limited by) the successes of the past, the liberal arts should be differentiated from – while finding their role within – our understanding of liberal education as a whole. The liberal arts are to be treasured for the role they play in awakening and forming the mind, but they must not be considered to complete education to the point of making their possessors masters of their own learning. Rather, their most important role is to open the ways to begin to profit from the wisdom presented by authentic guides.

Bulletin

Only the Lover Sings: The Secret to Teaching Literature

I have spent my twenty-five years as a teacher further and further refining my purpose, to its present obsessive focus. My animating ambition, the one I live, sleep, and breathe, is to help people learn to love – to love – great literature.

In the span of that time, the task has become only tougher, primarily because of the omnipresence of technology. The quick and ready entertainment, meme and soundbite style content, and constant din of calls for our attention that come with a smartphone in every hand mean it has become increasingly difficult to get anyone to read.

Nevertheless, when my students are in the classroom, held as a captive audience, their devices all turned off and set aside, and we have in our hands one of the beloved books of my carefully chosen curriculum, I still feel an almost infallible power to turn them into thoughtful, eager, and passionate lovers of books.

While I myself am always learning more about what it takes to teach literature well – whether that means conceptualizing techniques that come to me as instinct, or gaining new insights from the world’s great teachers, present and past – I am confident I can name the fundamental principle behind my (perhaps immodest) boast of infallibility.

To be an effective guide and mentor, you must be in love with literature yourself. 

I say “be in love with” rather than “love” to give emphasis to the personal and passionate form the attachment has to take. If familiarity with great books feels to you like some duty of cultural literacy, if the experience of reading is more cerebral than it is of the soul, if the books you teach do not reverberate in the very core of your being, then you are not “in love with” literature.

Most of my memories of studying books in school involve, at best, dry discussions of literary devices, and, at worst, no discussion at all, but only multiple-choice tests to prove I’d done the reading. Almost never do I recall a teacher modeling an earnest emotional investment in the work, and rarely did I myself come to feel that kind of intense and personal connection.

By contrast, someone recently described to me how, as a boy, reading Lord of the Rings had made him desire to be good. He found himself unable to abide the thought of doing anything that, in his mind, would make him a disappointment to heroes like Frodo and Gandalf. That is what it means to be in love with a book. He saw the novel’s theme, he felt its import, and he made it a part of himself.

One of the problems endemic to education is that this love of literature has been lost. We cannot teach that which we are not capable of ourselves. So, if our capacity for that love has atrophied, or was never properly developed, what are we to do?

It is important for me to note here that I myself did not learn to love books until I was in my mid-twenties, and already working as a teacher. I have a vivid memory from my youth of watching a performance of The Miracle Worker and finding it painfully dull. Today, it is painful for me to confess that, because this play has come to stand in my mind for what it means to awaken a child’s soul to “a consciousness of her immortal nature” – to be a teacher, in the truest sense of the word. And after teaching this play every year for two decades, I still cannot read the climactic scene without crying.

My own eyes were first opened when I read Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three aloud to my little group of homeschooled students so many years ago. We were wholly absorbed and focused. We were riveted by the plot. We gasped in chorus at the sudden twists and sighed over sentimental passages. We discussed our reactions as we read, and we worked to decipher Hugo’s message. The experience was as much a life-altering one for me as it was for them.

The point is, even if a passionate approach to literature does not now come naturally to you, it is a skill that can be revived or learned afresh.

  • Connect again with that classic that really made you feel – in love with the aloof Mr. Darcy, awed by the integrity of Atticus, pitying of poor Jane Eyre.
  • Find a mentor. When I discovered a great literature teacher, I consumed every word of his I could, and, afterward, strove to emulate his process. I am now trying to offer mentorship myself through a program called Read With Me, whose mission is “to help people connect emotionally with the classics.”
  • Take a close look at Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? or Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste. Hear the former tell you in impassioned tones why “real reading is reincarnation,” and let the latter explain how literature helps us raise the plane of our existence “to the top level of the peaks.”
  • Recall that reading great books is meant to be a pleasure – not an idle one, but the profoundest kind we can know. Don’t consider a book part of your personal repertoire or eligible for your curriculum until you are able to consume it as a life-enhancing pleasure yourself.

Now, in one sense, a love of literature is only the precondition of effective teaching; it doesn’t give you a process. But it another sense, it is necessary and sufficient.

If you yourself have mastered a book’s meaning, felt its import, and made it a part of yourself, then you will know that all your efforts must be integrated around helping your students do the same. You won’t allow yourself to be distracted by too much talk of literary devices, you won’t be content for your students to prove only a rudimentary grasp of the content, and your discussions won’t be soulless and cerebral. You will be better able to trust your instincts, because you will know, deeply, the purpose you hope to achieve.

With my own faithful repertoire of books I dearly love, I can now be sure that every year a student will, for example, beg to keep her copy of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House so she can share it with a sister, or create a year-long calligraphic log of favorite literary quotes, or declare indignantly that I have ruined her for romance because no man will ever be a Cyrano de Bergerac, or weep with me more than once over scenes in Les Misèrables, or ask for keepsake versions of the books we read for Christmas.

I am in love with these books, and they learn to love them too.