Amusing Ourselves to Death: Revisited Part 2

The premise of Postman's book is "The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be." (31)  In Part One I tried to explain what Postman meant by this.  Assuming it was at least partially successful, I want to proceed by commenting on chapters 3-5, thus ending Part One of the book.

In chapters 3-5 Postman sketches out what a print-culture is like by tracing American history since Colonial Times (17th c.).  He then guides us through the vast changes of the mid-19th century, with the invention of the telegraph and photograph and the rise of advertising.  This time the shift from print to image occurred, and finally,we arrive at our culture today where the medium of communication, whether an advertisement, a magazine, or a newspaper is based on the medium of television.  Postman calls the television the "command center" and "meta-metaphor" and he calls this time in history the "Age of Show Business" (the subtitle of the book is "Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business").

Postman calls the early American print-culture the "Age of Exposition" (exposition being "a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression.").   Recalling the basic idea that a form of communication, in this case print, favors certain kinds of content, in the case of print, a logical, rational, and sequential content, one can begin to see what a culture would be like with print as the dominant monopoly of all communication.

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Children's Logic and Human Freedom

My daughter recently and randomly quipped with airtight logic, "God made people, and people made cars, so God made cars."

Lady Truth being Unveiled by Reason

Firstly, as a father I couldn't have been more proud, you know, my daughter putting together these premises to construct a syllogism.  Secondly, as a staunch defender of free-will and human responsibility, my eyes dilated and focus narrowed as I launched into an intense philosophical rebuttal - with a 4 and 5 year old.  When I reached the end of my exordium, and began my enumeration (15 seconds later), I was on the verge of losing my audience.  So, being the savvy rhetoric teacher I am in my dreams, I did what all desperate dads (and speakers) do, I asserted my point with an appeal to authority.

Translated to adult-speak, I said, "If people make bombs, and God makes people, did God make bombs?"  (I translated the word "bombs" for you, dear reader, instead of the much more philosophical and universal term I used for my daughters - "bad things".)

With my question served, my daughters digested, and in the ensuing conversation understood the basic idea that God is not the author of evil, rather, we cause good and evil by our free choice. Though I believe the "free-will answer" the best philosophical answer to the problem of evil, this post is not about that simple topic.  My brother will have to provide that...no pressure Alex.  That aside, free choice is one of the mysteries of life. Yet my children, in their children minds and childlike faith (something we should strive for), understood the basic idea that God created free-beings and the truth that He cannot do evil.   What big ideas in such little people!  What mysteries, though remaining mysteries, grasped by such small statured person!  Upon reflection on my conviction of man's freedom to choose good or evil, applications began whizzing through my mind.  The particular applications that flew past my window at break-neck speeds ranged from my philosophy of education, ideas of parenting, political views, to the reason I'm a Catholic not a Calvinist.  With this post, not wishing to bite of more than I can chew, I'd like to offer a few applications relating to my philosophy of education.

In my Liberating Education articles, I tried to offer a starting point for an exploration of education.  In Part 2, I essentially attempted to communicate my view of education as humanistic.  Though this term is often used in scathing criticism in Christian circles I've been part of, opposed to the Humanist Manifestos rooted in an atheistic secularism, such as John Dewey's, I use the term in an Erasmusian sense, in the spirit of Christian Humanism.  I would, in fact, call myself a Christian or Religious Humanist. What I mean by humanistic, is that my view of life, for myself and culture, is about bettering the human being, improving his ability to first recognize good, and then to choose it; and therefore, being humanistic means reckoning with the fact that all the good or evil we do is never done in isolation.  That aside, my daughter with her bright blue eyes and innocence, reminded me how important it is to see that we can cause good or evil.  Though I am convinced the deep mystery of human freedom will ultimately remain a mystery, as with most mysteries, the power hidden within lifts our hearts to contemplate higher things.  Truly, it is our freedom to choose good or evil that is our greatest power!  We can create cures to ravaging diseases or create oppressive governments to enslave the weak.  We can paint pictures that raise the human spirit or pictures that lead to addictions and societal destruction.  A wise-old man with a white beard past his waist once said, "It is not our abilities that make us who we are, it is our choices."

In terms of education, and by education I mean a way of life not "school", is it not the chief aim to form our wills, that is free our wills, to choose the good consistently?  But what kind of formation does our will need?  There is not other answer than the Truth; and the faculty that apprehends Truth is our intellect.  Therefore, our will needs to be directed to the good by the intellect.  Here we have arrived at the heart of a liberal arts education, and consequently, my philosophy of education.  In other words, my philosophy of education is a training in recognizing the Truth and therefore forming the will to choose the Good.

The challenge that I immediately run into in teaching 7-12th graders, even with great families that I have served over the years, is the many varying ideas of freedom dancing about their heads.  What is the truth about freedom?  Freedom is typically thought of as freedom from someone or something,not entirely untrue, but half the truth is as valuable as a lie.  Another view of freedom that bombards us in our media and universities, is the freedom from political oppression, racism, sexism, and religion.  The classical or traditional view, which I believe to be the true view, is that freedom is freedom from, first, ourselves and our own warring desires, but it doesn't stop there, it is in order to be a master of oneself to have a freedom to act in accordance with the truth, in other words, to CHOOSE what is good.   The lecture I posted by Robert George discusses this idea in more depth. The youth-culture view of freedom consists of being freed from rules to do what they desire, so from the outset, they are suspicious and skeptical of authorities, because this view of freedom places authorities in the way of the youth's quest for freedom, so called.

What, then, is the way out of this bog of confusion?  At the risk of sounding cliche, it is through the love of the truth as a teacher, and the love of the youth as a person.  Scripture says, "Love covers a multitude of sins."  This is what is on the inside of my wedding ring, 1 Peter 4:8, and I believe it to be central to my life: as a man, husband, father, and teacher.  As a teacher, I think loving the youth as they are, as human persons and mysteries, with virtually limitless potential has been the key to my praxis as a teacher.  Concretely, the vision of a classical education, rooted in a view of human nature and freedom as outlined above, best fits with my strong belief of loving truth and loving people.  I believe this way of life, that is education, is the best hope for the renewal of culture.  This is not to say one kind of classical schooling is superior to another, as a liberal arts education isn't a TECHNIQUE, something I wanted to stress in my articles, and am forever stressing in a confused culture that wants an immediate pill to swallow to relieve the problem.

Classical education is not a pill to solve a short term problem.  It is not new technique to get ahead in society, to keep up with the Joneses, to get more money for college, though it may help with all of these.  Classical education is above all rooted in a view of human nature, and it's end is the perfection of human nature.  As a Catholic, I call this Divine Beatitude, that is to see God as he is, to be brought into the very life of the Triune God.  This is the ultimate destiny of Man.  The human being has the freedom of will to bring about good or evil, and those in their most radical forms; and we all have this potential.   This is the bedrock of my philosophy of education because it is of my life.   It is a view that looks at the person as the most important thing in the universe (see quotes below and Psalm 8).  The most important, the most precious, and the most mysterious.  For, classical education's most noble aim is to bend the mind's eye to the Truth, where fixed upon it, the mysteriously powerful freedom we all have to choose, will habitually choose the Good and Beautiful.

+In Mexico

Viva Cristo Rey de la paz en mi corazón, en mi casa, en mi patria y en todo el mundo!

One of my favorite pictures of Lewis!

I offer these lengthy quotes by C.S. Lewis who I thank God for every word he wrote.  I hope it provides you with the inspiration it does me every time I read it.

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which,if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilites, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - These are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”


"Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object present to your senses."

Both quotations are taken from The Weight of Glory.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Revisted - Part 1

Since my eyes first fell on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death,  they were glued  to every page until they had their fill.  That was then, this is now; and now, approximately 10 years later, I’m re-reading this provocative and prophetic book.  An now, just as then, I find this book to be indispensable to those interested in the renewal of our culture.

Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death  in 1985; it has been 17 years since, and our society seems to be changing more rapidly than ever.   In spite of all the changes since 1985, his insights remain ever-fresh.   Though some may see Postman’s work as an intellectual elitist or high-brow rant against TV, they couldn’t be more mistaken.  Nuanced and humble, Postman poignantly analyzes our culture.  I offer this as my first post in a series of posts, essentially my comments and notes on this re-entry into the mind of a great cultural critic and prophet.  I hope my commentary provides some hope in this “Brave New World” we find ourselves in.  Above all I hope you buy this book and read it more than once!

Part 1:  A Reflection on Ch.1 and 2.

Orwell was wrong, Huxley was right. 

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Lecture: Robert George on Liberal Arts Education

Here is a lecture by Robert George, given at the Alexander Hamilton Institute, titled, "Self Mastery, Liberal Arts Education, and Academic Freedom."

He discusses the idea of a liberating education.   He compares the classical sense of the idea of liberating with the contemporary or revisionist notion.   In short, the contemporary or revisionist sense of a liberating education  is freeing one from social constraints, racism, sexism, religious-repression, etc.   The classical idea of the goal of a liberal arts, aka, liberating education is freedom from the worst form of slavery - slavery to our own desires, slavery to ourselves.

Saints: Friends for the Journey

Before, during and after my swim across the Tiber, I often read and heard about Catholic idolatry and worship of the saints.  My views from childhood, through high school, college, and to where I am today, have gone through much development.  By the time I was in college, the story I knew from tid-bits and piece meal sources I can't recall, went basically like this: Christianity was fairly pure until Constantine (or sometime around there).  With Constantine (or sometime around there) the Church gained political power and therefore polluted Christianity with the paganism of the day.  One of the most effective ways to maintain order in the Empire was devised by leaders regarding the worship of saints.  The strategy was to take existing pagan idolatry of the Greco-Roman and Near-Eastern pantheons and replace them with the saints in a virtual and instantaneous switcheroo.   (In my imagination, I saw pagan statues with plaques titled "Apollo" and the next day a new label placed on top of the previous one titled "St. Michael".)  This paganization then continued for the next 1000 years (or something like that) until the Protestant Reformers pointed out the idolatry and freed the people from these pagan accretions.

Though more sophisticated arguments exist in this dialogue, I want to limit this post to an overview of the development of my view of the saints.  Forever grateful to my mother and Protestant upbringing,  I knew with conviction then (and still do as a Catholic) that I worshiped Jesus Christ, True Man and True God, and Him alone. Like all good Protestants, this lesson was impressed on me well; but like all Protestants, it was not the fullness of the truth that the Church is the family of God, and that "we believe in the communion of saints."

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Liberating Education: Part 2

With part one of "Liberating Education" the desire was to establish the idea that the mainstream idea of education, that being one with a materialist end in a consumer society, is ultimately destructive to the human person and society.  Like a child, tearing down is much more enjoyable than building up, so in an attempt to be a mature and responsible adult, I offer part 2.  In this post, I'd like to gather my experience into a contained pile of assorted ideas and attempt to build something positive ex nihilo.

Here I offer some strands of thought from my experience and life.  The first is the difference between school and education.  Education is a very difficult activity but the most noble one a human can engage in. As I noted in part 1, it is common, and absurd, to conceive of education as beginning in kindergarten and ending in either a high school or college graduation.  Education, though, is a lifelong pursuit of truth, of goodness and of beauty.  It is as natural for a human to learn as it is to breathe.  It is deeply human and is necessary to become a flourishing individual and a flourishing community - but here's the kicker - school is not.  School is the place you go to get educated, sometimes de-educated, but education cannot be limited to that time and space and it never has been.  There are countless stories of people who didn't fit into school and became the inventors and creators of many wonderful things: from medical breakthroughs like radiation to treat cancer, extending the life of millions to the entrepreneurial idea of space tourism, to the creators of facebook, youtube and google.  It is deeply inhuman to view education as applying technique A to subject B in order to produce, what inevitabably must follow, product C for consuming and producing material goods.  We are dealing with human beings not machines, though machines are preferable for their ease of management.  We are educations persons not products.  Education then, at its heart is a human thing, its a relationship thing, it is a lifelong thing.

This is the first and most important idea I have in regards to liberating education:  it has to do with being and becoming a better person.  Now if we conceive of humans as persons, not machines or units in an economic system, or as chemical reactions to manipulate and mold into a product, we need to speak accordingly.  Business metaphors such as "students as products" or "selling our school" are the wrong language and are deeply flawed.  Computer or machine metaphors to describe human intelligence or thinking are wrong and deeply flawed.  For example, "he's really good at processing information" contains the idea that the human mind is simply an advanced computer.  This, I suggest is false and dehumanizing.  We must, instead, choose to imagine humans as mysteries, dynamic and diverse persons, immortal souls, vast potentialities, unique beings with creative and imaginative powers ready to engage with the world in unpredictable and exciting ways.  In 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child Anthony Esolen exposes this destructive way of thinking about humans in many ironic and entertaining ways.  Provocatively he points out that instead of the thinking of students maturing into adulthood, we should think of boys and girls growing into men and women.  Adulthood is gender neutral and scientific, but men and women, Mars and Venus, are different universes that are unique and mysterious planets to explore.  This vision and language is not the vision of human nature today, rather the prevailing ideas and stories that shape our understanding of our nature amounts to complex biochemical machines in a dying universe devoid of any ultimate meaning and purpose.  And we wonder why young men and women are uninterested in school and apathetic about life.

This message, that we are insignificant specs in a never-rending universe, a universe with no ultimate meaning is like Groundhog's day with Bill Murray, on endless repeat every day.  Student may hear "WE are all different and special" in a million pedantic and sentimental ways, but they then learn differences don't really make any difference.  Instead of encouraging wonder about the world around them, children are boxed up in neatly and tightly packed "pods".  Education should be elevating our nature, not pulling it down.  Another related idea to the prevailing view is the idea that there is nothing sacred.  Reinforced through shows like South Park and Family, school curriculum shies away from mystery and awe because that veers to closely into the sacred and religious.  No sacred spaces and no sacred times only meaningless moments passing by.  Moments to be filled up with busy-ness, usually entertainment that stultifies, makes passive, and interrupts the most meaningful moments we have - like evenings with our family.

The vision of education I'm offering here is not YET ANOTHER technique in the "marketplace" of education.  I'm inviting a  RE-imagining of education.  An education that looks at the student as an immortal soul, a mysterious and sacred person, worthy of respect and dignity.  So worthy that the purpose of education is to life that nature up to higher things, to contemplate great ideas and lofty ideals.  Not in order to manipulate and control, and certainly not for passing tests, but because in the act of education there is joy and meaning.  Human persons are free by their nature, given tremendous gifts and powers of imagination, creativity, ingenuity, individuality, and of course, the mysterious freedom to develop these powers into virtues or vices (words to be recovered).  These powers of the soul (a word to be recovered) are the key to liberating education - for this liberation of education becomes a liberating education because it is a lifelong process of becoming a liberated person.  A person that is free to imagine, to create, to build, to love, to flourish as a human being within a flourishing human community is a person liberated for the sake of humanity.

Liberating Education: Part 1

Book titles can be very entertaining and enlightening.  Though we are not supposed to judge a book by it's cover I often do by its title.  My title, "Liberating Education" may or may not be either, however, I did want to draw attention to the word liberating.  Liberating  in this isolated phrase can be taken as a verb modifying the noun - setting education free, which of course assumes education is in some sense in bondage, or it can also be an adjective - meaning a kind of education that sets a person free.  The heart of my educational philosophy is twofold: to liberate from and liberate for. 

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