BOOKS AND LETTERS Podcast
In 1947, the English writer Dorothy Sayers stood before an audience at Oxford and asked a question that continues to haunt modern education to this day. In some ways, the question has become the catalyst for the growth of classical Christian education over the past 30 years. “Do you often come across people,” she asked, for whom, all their lives, a ‘subject’ remains a ‘subject,’ divided by watertight bulkheads from all other ‘subjects,’ so that they experience very great difficulty making any mental connection between, say, philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art? Let’s think about that image for a moment. A watertight bulkhead is a wall inside a ship, sealed so that nothing passes from one compartment to the next. This is a fine thing for a ship, but it’s a disaster for a human mind. Sayers pressed the point even further. “Is it not the great defect of our education today,” she asked, “that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.” I’ve been an educator for more than thirty years, and I have to tell you: not much has changed since Dorothy Sayers lamented this pedagogical deficiency nearly eighty years ago. Modern academic programs, even some of the better ones, are still organized around “subjects.” Students take Math at nine o’clock; history at ten; literature at eleven. Each discipline is sealed in its own watertight compartment. Each with its own textbook. Each disconnected from the others. And, more often than not, each is disconnected from the child’s soul. But here is the thing every parent instinctively knows: reality is not fragmented that way. Learning “subjects” is no substitute for learning the arts of dealing with the interconnectedness of our reality, the reality from which subjects are merely extracted, or dissected. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he was not writing “literature,” per se. He was writing theology, astronomy, politics, philosophy, and poetry all at once, because that is what reality is actually like. When the medieval builders raised a cathedral, they were dealing with geometry, engineering, music, and worship all in a single act. The whole was greater than the sum of all of its parts. A truly humane education is an integrated education; it’s an education that teaches students how to see and how to think about reality in all of its layers and complexities, such that the whole of it is much greater than all of its parts. Now, why am I telling you this? Because if you have a child who is twelve or thirteen years old right now, you are standing at the single most important educational crossroads of that child’s life. These next six years—from about age twelve to 18 (i.e, graduation)—are the years when a young person’s mind and character take their lasting shape. It’s true that early development plays a huge part in a child’s personality, but these are the years when a student either learns to think, or merely learns to check boxes and perform the prescriptive hoop-jumping routines of cogs and consumers. These are the years when the child will either come to love what is true, good, and beautiful or learn to love whatever the algorithm serves him next. A drum that I am continually beating, something I tell parents every chance I get is education, rightly understood, is the formation of a human soul. It is the noble work of passing down wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next. It is where every culture tells the truth about what it believes and what it loves. Consider that in the modern world, we have learned how to effectively transfer information to a machine. We’ve learned how to store massive data in clouds and on devices. And just like our machines, modern education has taught students to accumulate disconnected facts while remaining unformed, unwise, and spiritually malnourished. And in an age when artificial intelligence can produce gobs of information instantly and endlessly, the one thing your child needs most is the one thing you cannot get from a machine: a humane education. The education of the whole person. An education that forms judgment, imagination, courage, eloquence, attention, and wisdom. That is why, this fall, I am offering something I have spent the better part of my career preparing to teach: a robust, integrated humanities course called The Great Conversation. It’s a single course of study that spans six full years, covering the best primary literature of the Western tradition from antiquity to postmodernity, with history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, logic, writing, and rhetoric woven together the way reality actually holds them together. This course is not a collection of subjects confined to watertight bulkheads. It’s one ship, built whole. In the next video, I’m going to tell you exactly what the Great Conversation is, where the phrase comes from, what my six-year course covers, and why a small cohort of students reading together for six consecutive years accomplishes something no year-by-year program can ever replicate. Let me encourage you to take a moment to ask yourself Sayers’s question about your own child’s education: is he (or she) learning “subjects” or is he (or she) learning the art of learning? I’ll see you in a couple of days in the next video. 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