Putting on "Intellectual Muscle"

Steven Loomis and Paul Spears recently did an interview on Mars Hill Audio Journal about their new book Education for Human Flourishing (click on the title). I have listened to it now many times and am resonating with great resounding echoes!!

Spears makes the point that failure plays a major role in any intellectual pursuit. We cringe at that because we are quantifiers. We know that if we quantify trial and error after error in a culture where we've programmed students not to fail it will create anxiety. We've created a culture where self esteem is the ultimate good.

Spears also points out that the Socratic method is all about failure, and to the extent that we incorporate it we usually teach kids to do faux dialogue. This means that students will tend to only ask questions that they know the answer to and proceed to show off their knowledge in conversation with the teacher. This way they get some cache in front of their classmates. This also explains why students are usually reticent to answer our questions. What if their wrong in front of their classmates?

This is the opposite of what Socrates was up to. His dialogue partners went away hanging their heads but at least they knew themselves better. Socrates motto was "know thyself" and his second one was like it: "The unexamined life is not worth living." This means that Socrates was a successful teacher and his students were learning whether they realized it or not. It seems to me that Jesus taught a lot like this too as well as his followers.

Spears says that until we find out how little we know, how much we need to learn, and just our uninformed our assumptions are, we are not really on the path of learning. Doug Wilson commented that our motto is: "Thou Shalt Feel Good About Thyself."

I didn't really experience this kind of learning until my master's work and it wasn't full on until my doctoral program. I remember walking away from class day after day thinking, "Matt, you are such an idiot." Well I'm sure I still am, but hopefully I'm a little wiser. Now listen to the way C. S. Lewis describes the manner of his education from about age eleven with his tutor Kirkpatrick:

I soon came to know the differing values of his three openings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent of verbiage which could not be endured a momnet longer; not because it fretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it wasted his time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quiter "Excuse!" (i.e. excuse me) ushered in a correction or distinction merely parenthetical and betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, without absurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of all was, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation (when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidence in my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, Do You not see the that you had no right, etc.

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer.... Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down suffiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety (Surprised by Joy).

It's no wonder that Lewis nicknamed him "The Great Knock." Now what if Kirk had been quantifying young Jack's performance and mailing report cards to his father and building up a transcript to send to Oxford? What if the educational establishment kept asking Kirk about the level of assessment that his student was on and to please hurry and send those standardized test scores.

When we combine our approach with our equally disconcerting message that students go to school in order to get a good job. it's no wonder they get disillusioned. Spears documents that by California social science standards, students are to thinking about their "human capital" in third grade! He explains that this is an economic term which is intended to get kids to think about what they will contribute to the "economic flourishing."

This is disillusioning because students get the message that humans go to school not because they are rational souls who need to develop into their true selves, but they go to school because humans need money and society needs them to make money. (Where is it that we are warned about the love of money?) Don't we need to return to education for "human flourishing" as defined by the Word so as not to be "conformed by the pattern of this world" (click on the title).