In his book To Know as We are Known, Education as a Spiritual Journey, Parker Palmer takes some time in his first chapters to discuss the (d)evolution of the image and purpose of knowledge.  To paraphrase, Palmer posits that in premodern times, knowledge was approached lovingly, reverently, and for the purposes of drawing the knower into a deeper communion with the known, that “hidden wholeness” of creation that Merton speaks about.  Modern images of knowledge, however, suggest that we value knowledge only to the extent that it allows the knower to control, to manipulate, and to lay claim on the known.  In other words, “we value knowledge that allows us to coerce the world into meeting our needs–no matter how much violence we must do.”  Palmer cites the invention of the first atom bomb as an extreme example of this “violence.”

Palmer then connects this denatured image of knowledge to the story of Adam and Eve:

“In the language of religious tradition, Adam and Eve committed the first sin.  In the language of intellectual tradition, they made the first epistemological error.  [. . . ] The sin, the error, is not our hunger for knowledge [. . . , rather] Adam and Eve were driven from the garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for–a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God.  Their desire to know arose not from love but from curiosity and control, from the desire to possess powers belonging to God alone.  They failed to honor the fact that God knew them first, knew them in their limits as well as their potentials.  In their refusal to know as they were known, they reached for a kind of knowledge that always leads to death.”

I was immediately convicted by this discussion.  As the teacher, “the mediator between the knower and the known, the living link in the epistemological chain,” I repeat this original sin in my classroom whenever I present knowledge as something to “master” or “possess” or “control” rather than something to love for the sake of bringing my students into closer communion with the Lover.

Even in classical Christian education, we talk about “teaching for mastery” and “mastery learning.”  I tell my students every day that they need to “master” this or that.  Sure, I also explicitly lead them in discussions and exercises for the express purpose of cultivating in them a love for math and God’s creation as explored through the sciences, but at the end of the day they are assessed and evaluated (“told their value”) based on what concepts and skills they have mastered.  Is there something out of joint here?

Perhaps instead of telling students that I expect them to master the factoring of polynomials, I should say that I expect them to enter a state of loving communion with polynomials.  This sounds kind of ridiculous, but is it not what Palmer is getting at?  Palmer, Jamie Smith, and a host of others – not to mention our own experience in the classroom, whether as teachers or students – tell us that students are significantly formed by the “hidden curriculum”  in our schools as much if not more as by what we explicitly teach.  If this is indeed the case, then the words we choose to describe the “act of knowing” should really matter.