To Construe or To Collaborate

When is it right to remove the training wheels from the bicycle and let a child ride freely?  What is the appropriate stage for students to stop working with paradigms and established formats and begin to create?  Parents and teachers alike wrestle with such questions, and most adults working with children tend to cling too long to the one or to rush the other, yet both are needed in anyone's development in any endeavor.

Guiding a Child's Gait

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1553-1592

I have often quoted from one of my favorite works, Montaigne's essay "On Education," in which he wrote, "[I]t is the achievement of a lofty and very strong soul to know how to come down to a childish gait and guide it.  I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down," (Donald Frame translation).  Among the reasons why it is such a difficult task "to come down to a childish gait" is that teachers have moved beyond it.  We are excited about the breadth and depth and all the richness of our subjects and cannot wait to get into the good stuff with our students.  What teacher who loves writing and is an author wants to spend time on the structure of the three paragraph essay?  What Latin teacher in love with the pyrotechnic rhetoric of Cicero and the poetry of Vergil, whom Tennyson described as "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," wants to stay in endless verb and noun drills?

One answer to this is to forgo such elementary work entirely.  Throw students straight into the deep end of the creative pool, some would say.  Yet any coach will tell you that athletes must be taught the fundamental movements and rules of the game before it makes sense to run complex plays during practice.  Part of what teachers are called to do is to restrain their own yearning to get into the deep material before their students are ready for it.  They must learn to walk firmly and surely downhill as well as uphill and not feel that they are the less for doing so.

Beyond The Charted Boundaries

And yet, students must be exposed to the deep, rich matters of their subjects to inspire them and give them a vision of where they are going, else the elementary work becomes even more drudgery as it seems to serve no purpose.  I was reminded of this recently when I watched the 1951 film The Browning Version, starring Michael Redgrave.  The entire film is available at archive.org, and it is more than worth the time to watch, but the scene that struck me and stayed with me long after the film had ended was the following.

In this scene, Andrew Crocker-Harris (Redgrave) is giving a tutorial to one of his Greek students, a boy named Taplow, who is translating the Agammemnon of Aeschylus.

Taplow:  Oh, Clytemnestra, we're surprised at...

Crocker-Harris:  We marvel at.

Taplow:  We marvel at thy tongue.  How bold thou art that you...

Crocker-Harris:  Thou.

Taplow:  Thou can...

Crocker-Harris:  Canst.

Taplow:  Canst boastfully speak...

Crocker-Harris:  Utter such a boastful speech.

Taplow:  Utter such a boastful speech over the bloody corpse of the husband you've just slain.

Crocker-Harris:  Taplow, I presume you are using a different text from mine.

Taplow:  No, sir.

Crocker-Harris:  That is strange, for the line as I read it reads "etis toin dep andri kompazeis logon."  However diligently I search, I can discover no "bloody," no "corpse," no "you have slain."  Simply "husband."

Taplow:  Yes, sir.  That's right.

Crocker-Harris:  Then why do you invent words that simply are not there?

Taplow:  Well, I thought they sounded better, sir.  More exciting.  After all, she did kill her husband.  She's just been revealed with his dead body weltering in gore.

Crocker-Harris:  I am delighted at this evidence, Taplow, in your interest in the rather more lurid aspects of dramaturgy, but I feel I must remind you that you are supposed to be construing Greek, not collaborating with Aeschylus.

Taplow:  Yes, but still, sir, translator's license, sir.  I didn't get anything wrong, and after all, it is a play, and not just a bit of Greek construe.

There it is.  To construe or to collaborate, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler for teachers and students to suffer the necessary work of learning a craft or to take what has been learned to create.  Just as there are those who would move too fast to the more exciting projects of creation, so there are teachers who would linger too long in the stage of construal.  I addressed this at the end of an article I wrote years ago about a disputed passage in the textual tradition of Vergil's Aeneid.  Renowned Classics scholar G.P. Goold, who served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, Yale, and University College, London, over the course of his distinguished career had made a statement with which I profoundly disagreed.

"'An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook' (Goold, 115).  I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

In the end, teachers must know what their students need, whether that be the acquisition of facts and basic skills or the development of creativity once those have been mastered.  Both are necessary for a student's complete education, and one should not be pursued longer than necessary, nor should the other be rushed before its time.

The Benefits of Formality and Pageantry

Funeral procession for Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II

In the middle of September in 2022, much of the world focused on the funeral rites of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, rites that brought formality and pageantry to center stage for many days.  As a Christian and an educator, I could not help considering formality and pageantry with regard to the life of faith and the life of learning and have begun discussing this with friends.  What follows are some early thoughts.

Both/And

Except in the areas of sport and entertainment, we in the 21st century United States seem generally opposed to any kind of formality and pageantry.  Perhaps it smacks too much of hierarchy, which in turn recalls images of oppression.  Yet the bland landscape of the lowest common denominator, while, perhaps, providing some corrective to the abuses of hierarchy, has led to its own, sad effects.  At this point in history, misuse and abuse of formality and pageantry hardly need to be described, nor do the benefits of level, egalitarian approaches to just about everything.  The former are simply accepted de facto as bad and the latter as good.  And yet, a garden hoe is a wonderful tool when it is used in planting vegetables.  It is horrible weapon when it is used in committing murder.  So it is with most things, most events, most systems, and most people.  Almost everything has its good and bad aspects.  In the course of this piece I want to examine the benefits of formality and pageantry and the less desirable consequences of the bland and the level.

The Text That Started It All

What follows is part of a text thread among some close friends and me.

Friend:  For what it’s worth, I wanted to share with you guys some thoughts I had while watching the Royals funeral yesterday. Typically, I’m totally not into any of that stuff. For the longest time, I ridiculed the monarchy, and questioned its relevance. Nevertheless, the pageantry and reverential respect I saw yesterday really moved me. My main impression was that God had somehow written royalty on our hearts. All throughout Scripture, from beginning to end, we see images of royalty. There are thrones, a Royal Court, crowns, scepters, etc. There are subjects who bow and lie prostrate before the King. God refers to us as “a royal priesthood.” In the Lord’s Prayer, there’s the line, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.“ It seems to me that there are components in heaven that are duplicated here on earth. I believe the monarchy is one of those elements. I believe God has allowed it to continue even in our time as a reminder of our eventual home and eternal reality. It really moved me unexpectedly yesterday. The longing God has placed in our hearts is real and palpable in every way. May we be found worthy to be in the King’s Court!

Me: My brother, I heartily concur. In fact, those very thoughts had been going through my mind. I’m so glad you gave voice to them. And when I saw them returning her crown, scepter, and orb to the altar at St. George’s Chapel, I was struck by how that symbolized that all authority comes from God, just as Jesus said said to Pilate in John 19. That authority may exercised in accordance with or in opposition to His will, but it originates with Him. Thank you so much for saying this.

And, I would add, that the loss of such pageantry and majesty in our social and religious life has contributed to the results of that survey about evangelicals not believing Jesus is God. Yes, such pageantry can become empty of meaning and constricting of life, just as it did with the Israelites and has in many high church expressions through the ages. But swinging the pendulum to the far extreme of pole barn churches with everything sung and taught in the lowest common denominator has brought forth its own sad effects along with any restorative work it may have done to counteract the former.

Friend: Amen, brother. The days are dark and the time is short. This is the church’s last shot at impacting the world. Orthodoxy is dying. We need to stay connected and stand firm. Blessed to be doing it with you guys!

Pole Barns and Cathedrals

I wrote above that I would not rehash the negative consequences of formality and pageantry and the positive effects of the bland and the level, but so ingrained are they in the public mind and so quick are we to defend our positions, that I am led to acknowledge, once again, that I know all this.  I know the arguments, for example, against elaborate church architecture and in favor of multi-purpose worship spaces, and I would remind those who already are arming themselves for rebuttal by rehearsing those arguments that it is not necessary.  I know them.

What my friends and I were observing in our text thread is that there is something good, something salutary, something edifying in the architectural and artistic glories of a grand church.  Coupled with eloquent and poetic liturgies and rites, these glories in and of themselves teach something that is impossible, or at least quite difficult, to do in a bland, multi-purpose space, namely, the majesty of God and our relationship to it and Him.  A recent survey has revealed that in 2022, 43% of evangelical Christians do not believe in the divinity of Jesus.  It is not immediately clear what definition of "evangelical" the survey used, but any percentage of any group claiming to be Christian yet not acknowledging that Jesus is God is startling.  Neither my texting friends nor I would say that the sole reason for this is either the bland architecture, doctrinally shallow worship music, or less than robust biblical teaching and preaching of many churches, but combined, these have undoubtedly shaped how Christians understand and relate to their Lord.  Consider what is being said in the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and hymns such as "Holy, Holy, Holy," "The Church's One Foundation," and "O Worship the King."  Imagine those ideas being expressed in space designed to lift the heart and mind above the mortal coil and into the realms of the sublime.  Those steeped in such regular worship could certainly choose to reject Christ Jesus as God, but it would take a bit of effort.

Temple of Saint Sava, Belgrade, Serbia (photo credit:  Brad Mitchell)*

The Pink Floyd Effect

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teacher, leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

All in all it's just another brick in the wall

All in all you're just another brick in the wall

"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" from the 1979 album The Wall by prog rock band Pink Floyd captures the driving force behind the lack of formality and pageantry in most schools today.  These are linked in the minds of many with rote, drill-and-kill methods that sucked the life from education more powerfully and completely than a black hole.  And yet, in an attempt to unleash the inspiration of Parnassus in our schools by doing away with such things and making student choice the order of the day, it is more often the case that Bedlam has been let out.  Bill Day, an award-winning teacher from Washington, D.C., discussed this in a podcast several years ago.  Routines and rituals are vitally important in a child's development and, if implemented well, need not be stifling and restrictive.

One of the first things visitors to our Latin classroom notice is the wall of bookshelves.  There are more than twelve hundred books in our room, and while all are available for anyone's use, they serve a function beyond research.  They, along with the various busts and works of art, send the quiet signal that this is a place of serious learning.  Certain rituals that start and end each class convey this as well, even as ebullient laughter is the sound most often heard within our walls.

In his 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities titled "The Vindication of Tradition," Yale theologian Jaroslav Pelikan famously observed, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.  And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name."  Rich traditions with formality and pageantry can, when employed rightly, lead us beyond ourselves, which should be the goal of any act of worship or education.  Their absence too often leaves us in a bland, desolate landscape with little company other than the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I.

*My friend Brad Mitchell, credited above with the photograph of the Temple of Saint Sava in Belgrade, shared these pictures of from the Sinaia Monastery in Prahova County, Romania, as well.  Since they so beautifully complement the theme of this post, I wanted to included them.

Little Green Men From Greece?

A search for space aliens and antiquity will take you into some of the stranger parts of the Internet, but is the idea of intelligent life on another planet merely a staple of modern science fiction?  As it turns out, humans have been giving this some thought for more than 2,500 years.

Philosophy and Science (Fiction)

Lactantius, c250-c325

While preparing for one of the most exciting units of study I will have ever entered into with a high school class (MUCH more on this here), I ran across a quotation from Lactantius, the early Christian author who was an advisor to the Roman emperor Constantine at the time of his conversion to Christianity.  A quick search for the Latin text at Documenta Catholica Omnia, one of the greatest text repositories on the Internet, turned up the quotation and a bit more.

Xenophanes...dixit, intra concavum lunae sinum esse aliam terram et ibi aliud genus hominum simili modo vivere quo nos in hac terra vivimus.  Fuisse Seneca inter Stoicos ait, qui deliberaret utrumne Soli quoque suos populos daret.  Sed, credo, calor deterrebat ne tantam multitudinem periculo committeret.  (Institutiones Divinae III.23)

Xenophanes said that there was another earth inside the hollow bosom of the moon and that there another race of humans lived in a similar manner as we we live on this earth.  Seneca said that among the Stoics was one who deliberated whether he should also attribute to the Sun its own peoples.  But, I believe, the heat deterred him lest he commit such a great number of people to danger.  (Divine Institutes, III.23, translation mine)

It is amusing how Lactantius dismisses the unnamed Stoic's idea of a population on the Sun by suggesting he didn't want even in theory to condemn a race of people to such burning heat, but pause to consider that someone was even thinking about this in the time of Seneca, which was the first century A.D.  Even more striking is that Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher who lived from about 570 to about 478 B.C. kicked around a notion of another planet full of human beings existing inside the moon more than two thousand, five hundred years ago.  Lactantius scornfully disregarded that idea as well, but what is striking to me is how imaginative these ancient thinkers were.

Research Rabbit Trails

One of the things I love about academic life, whether lived out principally in elementary and secondary schools or at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is the discovery that comes from research rabbit trails.  While preparing for a new unit in a second-year Latin, high school Latin class, I chanced upon a quotation in a footnote that caught my attention.  That quotation led me to the original text of a Latin author from the third-to-fourth centuries, which in turn revealed the amazing imagination of a man named Xenophanes, who lived two and a half millennia and half a world from my own time and place.  As I have said countless times in talks and in writing and as has formed my Twitter background for many years, education is a shared journey of discovery.

Three Johns

 

Our Latin students at Guerin Catholic High School explore a verse of the Bible in Latin each week, and this week the first-year students took a look at John 1:14, which reads, "And the Word became flesh and lived among us."  It is a verse that, especially when take with other verses from the Fourth Gospel, speaks to the divinity of Jesus, and we discussed that earlier in the week, but today we examined another aspect.

After the students spent some time reading the verse aloud to practice their Latin pronunciation, I told them to think back to the book of Genesis and then asked, "In whose image are we made?"  They quickly answered, "God's," and I pointed out that this was a pretty big deal.  After all, God could have created donkeys and then said, "Let us create man in the image of the donkey."  And then I suggested that what John 1:14 has to say is an even bigger deal than that.

From there we took a look at the work of another John, the English poet John Donne (1572-1631).  I pulled up on our large screen Holy Sonnet XV, and we spent a few minutes with the second half of the poem.  You can read the full sonnet at the link above, the but the lines on which we focused were these.

And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find

His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,

The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,

Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.

'Twas much, that man was made like God before,

But, that God should be made like man, much more.

I invited the students to turn to the faith section of their notebooks and to jot down their thoughts on what it means to them that God became one of us.  Often this will lead to a sharing of ideas, but this time I told them that their thoughts would remain their own.  This was to be a time of private reflection.

After they had taken their time to ponder, I told them a story, one that came from a third person named named John.  In Season 2, Episode 10 of The West Wing, a character named Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, encourages a colleague by telling him the following parable.

This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole.  The walls are so steep he can't get out.  A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you! Can you help me out?"  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole.  Can you help me out?"  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on.  Then a friend walks by.  "Hey, Joe, it's me!  Can you help me out?"  And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, "Are you stupid?  Now we're both down here."  The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

Before moving on with the grammatical lesson of the day, I suggested to the students that when they are overwhelmed in life, they should reach out to the One Who has been down here, with us, before.  He knows the way out.