Tag Archives: David Hicks

Not for the Faint of Heart

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Classical education is hard.  I am not talking about the students’ reality–about rigor or high expectations or “too much homework”–but rather the reality that many of us now find ourselves in, after years of trying to teach or administrate within or cast the vision for this educational project we call classical education.  There are certainly days when I feel like all the cards are stacked against us–the three rivers of Productivity, Utility, and Competition overflowing their banks, fertilizing fields that have been planted with Ambition, Individualism, and Entitlement–all in service of the god of the harvest: Success.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it doesn’t help that our country was founded on the “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

David Hicks explores the problem in depth in Norms and Nobility.  This quote is rather long, but worth a careful reading and contemplation:

“Whereas virtue and piety extract many obligations from the individual, requiring a significant level of self-mastery and self-sacrifice, the political concept of rights implies a set of obligations owing to the individual.  Not only does the democratic-utilitarian education based on rights prevent the student from achieving self-awareness by blotting out two-thirds of his human identity, but it clouds the perception of his relation to others.  The student perceives his classmates and fellow citizens as his servants, owing him rights, rather than as his equals to whose rights and needs he owes virtuous and pious submission . . . It is in the performance of man’s duties to himself, to others, and to God that his rights are important to him.  Without a knowledge of these duties, his concept of rights will be selfish and extravagant, tending to enlarge his expectations, while limiting his sense of fulfillment . . . The democratic youth does not need his school to tell him what his rights are: they beckon him from every billboard, every television set, and every political soapbox in the land.  Nor is the school needed to advise him in securing his rights; indeed, this growing practice may signal the mutual breakdown of democracy and education.

“Nor will classical education be the natural choice of democracy.  The state and the marketplace, looking upon education as a means of ensuring a pliant and productive citizenry, will insist that the school offer a utilitarian education in keeping with their greedy desires; and the democratic youth, with his penchant for restless activity and easy gratification, will prefer self-aggrandizing ends to the self-transcending aims of classical education.  But once education surrenders to the will of the state, the marketplace, or the callow youth, democracy’s natural affinities will, in de Tocqueville’s phrase, ‘divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and the promotion of general well-being.’  An unruly, ungovernable citizen body, with each person set upon his own comfort and well-being, first at the expense of the state, and then of his neighbor, will unloose destructive forces that can only be held in check temporarily by a system of universal greed.  The transcendent aims of education and of democracy having been denied, the two lose their human value and vitality; man, exploiting liberty and learning to fill his belly rather than to find his salvation and to achieve his full human potential, inadvertently throws over his moral democracy for anarchy and tyranny.”

We might accuse Hicks of being a little dramatic or at least hyperbolic in his precipitous rush to “anarchy and tyranny.”  But for those who have paid any critical attention to the state of education in our country (or the state of our “democracy,” for that matter), Hicks is no doomsday curmudgeon; his elucidation of the current state of affairs resonates in our souls.

So, given this bleak outlook, how then shall we educate?  What’s the point?  Is there hope?  It is exactly this question that–in my mind–necessitates that education be a Christian project.  I am not necessarily advocating for more “Christian schools,” but rather exhorting Christians (and the Church) to reassume their responsibility and reinvest in the education of our youth.  And by “our” youth, I don’t mean just our own children.  In fact, “Christian education” will never really be “Christian” until Bob cares about Bill’s son’s education as much as he cares about the education of his own son.

But the implications of this way of thinking are radical and daunting.  In fact, if I’m honest, they make me very uncomfortable.  Because what we’re really talking about is a return to true community.  I’m probably least justified to talk about this–I like the fence around my yard, and I bought my own lawn mower so that I didn’t have to ask to borrow my neighbor’s anymore.  Why?  Because at core I am prideful, selfish, and I enjoy my “independence.”  If I am to truly examine my heart, I am afraid that probably–more often than not–I am “set upon [my] own comfort and well-being.”  The needs of the community are certainly not at the top of my list–it’s embarrassing, but true.

Wendell Berry further describes this problem, of which I am a part:

“Freedom defined strictly as individual freedom tends to see itself as an escape from the constraints of community life–constraints necessarily implied by consideration for the nature of a place; by consideration for the means and feelings of neighbors; by kindness to strangers; by respect for the privacy, dignity, propriety of individual lines; by affection for a place, its people, and its nonhuman creatures; and by the duty to teach the young.  Almost everybody now demands [this sort of freedom], as she or he has been taught to do by the schools, by the various forms of public entertainment, and by salespeople, advertisers, and other public representatives of the industrial economy.  People are instructed to free themselves of all restrictions, restraints, and scruples in order to fulfill themselves as individuals to the utmost extent that the law allows . . . But there is a paradox in all of this, and it is as cruel as it is obvious: as the emphasis on individual liberty has increased, the liberty and power of most individuals has declined.”

Perhaps it’s an oversimplification of the problem (and solution), but it seems as though we must first hope in the reestablishment of true Christian community if classical education stands a chance at thriving.  Only at the corner of Charity and Deference will we finally lay down the weapons of Competition and Individualism.  Only when we look around and acknowledge that we are all building the same Kingdom and working for the same King will the transcendent aims of education begin to take root and find life.  Only then we will begin to discover a freedom that is truly liberating.

I want to believe this reality is possible.  Lord, may your Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.  Amen.

The Dethroning of Modern Science (Part 1)

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“Where knowledge grows without wisdom and without reverence, it threatens both our humanity and our world.  Yet modern man suppresses his natural desire to throw himself in the path of science and ask his baffling normative questions (baffling to science, but not insignificant to man).  Scientific technology, acting like an opiate, calms his normative inquisitiveness with the hype of its gadgetry’s comfort and security and with the fusion-promise of technological answers to all foreseeable problems.  This opiate, like all opiates, destroy’s man’s critical faculties and makes him blind to the fact that the technological ‘fix’ hides its evil consequences by taking a position of moral aloofness while ‘pushing’ the practical value of its narcotic.  Science must be pulled down from its nonnormative pedestal.  The penetrating intensity of its analysis must be used to expose the narcotic effects of technological advancement on man and on his inquisitiveness.”  – David Hicks, Norms and Nobility

I teach middle school science at a classical Christian school.  I used to think this meant that I teach science the way it was taught to me, except I ratchet up the rigor a few notches and make sure to mention the Intelligent Designer whenever we encounter something in nature that is precisely ordered or astoundingly beautiful.  I still believe very sincerely in at least that second part–in fact, just this past week my 8th grade students and I were wondering at some of the complex three-dimensional symmetries of the electron orbital geometries.

But the longer I am a teacher of science in a classical Christian setting, the more I realize that one of my most important responsibilities is to continually put science in its appropriate place.  In Postman’s words, I have to “break the spell.”  Hicks would probably say I have to smash the opiate vile against the floor.  Repeatedly.

I will not take space here to make the case for what I believe is pretty self-evident: the ubiquitous and uncritical adoption of new technology and its promises in our Western culture (Christian education not being exempt from the spell). Hicks and Postman wrote about our surrender to technology before the Internet and the iPhone became demigods (Hicks’ Norms and Nobility was published in 1981, and Postman’s Technopoly was published in 1993).

When it comes to new technology, the mentality is: “if it can be done, it will be done.” The skeptical outcries of the Luddites are invalidated by references to “extensive research,” “increased efficiency,” or “decreased cost.” The normative questions—Should we adopt this new technology? At what cost to our humanness are we adopting this new technology? Is this new technology good for our soul?—will only be asked if science remains subservient to a normative sniff test.

But the aroma of new technology—and, as Hicks says, its narcotic effect—is overpowering and growing increasingly irresistible, despite our best intentions.  Just like Edmund unwittingly dropped his guard with the White Witch, we are inclined to do the same; before we have even realized it, we have become enslaved by the promise of more Turkish Delight.

N.T. Wright has said that “precisely because Christianity means freedom, it’s important that nothing is allowed to give me orders: not my appetites, not my habits, not the surrounding atmosphere of my culture” (1 Corinthians for Everyone). As the STEM push in our country cultivates the taste for Turkish Delight in our youth, teachers of science in classical Christian schools must fight to maintain the study of science as a liberating art. This means that we must design our curriculum and teaching methodologies in such a way that we are constantly “pulling science down from its nonnormative pedestal.”

Hicks summarizes by saying that “a resolution of values must attend the study of science, and analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry if science is to serve life, not destroy it.” I would go on to say that we must accomplish this normative approach while simultaneously affirming the goodness of God’s creation as well as our mandate to exercise wise dominion over this creation.

What does this radical approach to science instruction look like in practice? As I continue to wrestle with this question in my own classroom, I have started making a list of what might constitute a “classical, Christ-centered approach” to science education. In my next post I will outline some of these thoughts.