Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. 

--Thomas Szasz

 On the surface, practices of modern education seem to be morally neutral, but often they cultivate dispositions that are antithetical to Christian formation. Consider the use and abuse of PowerPoint in the college classroom. The beauty, goodness, and depth of many topics cannot fit within the container of the PowerPoint lecture, yet it has become a default means of transferring information to students—in part because it is so efficient. The overuse of PowerPoint encourages students to imagine their education as the collection of useful facts. Previous cohorts of students digest these useful facts and turn them into flashcards on sites such as Quizlet, which further reduces the incentive for deep engagement with course material. Students whose educational experience is defined by sitting through PowerPoint lectures, studying on Quizlet, and taking multiple choice exams learn to envision the world as raw material to advance their careers, rather than creation imbued with God’s grace and love. This approach to education does not transform minds, but instead conforms them to a secular vision of reality.

"Secular Formation in the Christian College Classroom," Phil Davignon

English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought. . . . 

Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth: Those are the qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we're talking about more than a mere academic major. We're talking about a way of life. We're talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world—what to be, how to act, how to move through time—at its center. What we're talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you've passed that particular course of study—or at least made some significant progress on your way—then maybe you're ready to take up something else.

Mark Edmundson, "The English Major," an essay from Why Teach? Essay adapted here.

Why is "excellence" a bad word? It's not, in and of itself. But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics. "Excellence" means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful--and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. When colleges start talking about "humane excellence" or "generous excellence," then I'll want to listen.

You also have my permission--in fact my encouragement--to gently snout-pop people who talk about "leadership." Why is leadership so bad? In itself, it's not. But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge. . . .

The residents of scholarly enclaves are harder to spot than the denizens of the corporate university, and I can't give you a definitive field guide to finding them. But I'll say first that they don't talk about being a leader and being an entrepreneur. They talk about working in a lab or developing a questionnaire for psychological research or writing a novel, or getting people who don't belong in jail out of jail, or defending their country against its enemies. And they are not smiling all the time. They are aware of the enormous gap between what humans aspire to and what remains to be done. They tend to take joy in their work, but they never feel that they have quite gotten it right. The people in the corporate university are forever pleased with themselves. They are always succeeding, getting A's that will soon be converted into dollars.

Mark Edmundson, "The Corporate City"

This morning I'm reading Mark Edmundson's essay "The Corporate City," which is a fantastic critique of the corporate values that rule most universities. There's an adapted version of this essay on the Atlantic.

Mark Edmundson's essay "Do Sports Build Character or Damage It?" is excellent.

"The Business Book Every Serious Student Should Read" is a great article on Shakespeare.

Christians believe that this world is so much more than a mechanical soulless machine. And yet, we tend to tell our children stories that (we hope) will only speak to their intellects. We want to give them a list of facts to tick off, like we’re trying to communicate a party platform to new recruits, like they’re nothing but brains ready for programming. We feed their souls sawdust and are surprised when they drift away to other cooks (with different tales about reality).

Kids (and adults) don’t just need the truth in their heads — they need it in their bones. They need to know what courage looks like and tastes like and smells like before they ever have to show it themselves. They need to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly — heroes and villains can show them why. They need to loathe the darkness and love the Light.

N. D. Wilson, "Stories Are Soul Food: Don't Let Your Children Hunger"

Any statements made by those who are called philosophers ... which happen to be true and consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, but be claimed for our own use, as it were from owners who have no right to them. Like the treasures of the ancient Egyptians, who possessed not only idols and heavy burdens, which the people of Israel hated and shunned, but also vessels and ornaments of silver and gold, and clothes, which on leaving Egypt the people of Israel, in order to make better use of them, surreptitiously claim for themselves (they did this not on their own authority but at God’s command) . . . --similarly the branches of pagan learning contain not only false and superstitious fantasies ... but also studies for liberated minds which are more appropriated for the service of the truth, and some very useful moral instruction. ... These treasures ... which were wickedly and harmfully in the service of demons must be removed by Christians ... and applied to their true function, that of preaching the gospel.

Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana

Though I have 95 issues with John Henry Newman, I love this passage from The Idea of a University because he captures the intangible benefits of a university education. Whether most universities do this these days is another question, but he's right: this is the idea of a university. Contrary to what most of our politicians are telling us, a university education is not about creating resources for the economy, but about helping individuals become a certain kind of person. Here's how Newman puts it in "Discourse 7: Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill": 

A University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society; at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm.

A gem from John Henry Newman's Idea of a University:

It is more correct, as well as more usual, to speak of a University as a place of education than of instruction, though, when knowledge is concerned, instruction would at first sight have seemed the more appropriate word. We are instructed, for instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in ways of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or to use, and bear upon an end external to themselves. But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being education, we thereby really imply that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought ... to the conclusion ... that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labor.

I encourage people who teach in universities--and especially humanities departments--to ... stop the professional posturing and prestige chasing and liberate themselves and others into the fields of joy and salutary change that the liberal arts at their best provide. I'd like them to step up and oppose the commercialization of their universities. I'd like them to think less about their careers and more about the hopes that brought them to the study of great books to begin with.... I'd like all of us to have a little more fun.

I'd like us to blow a hole through the university's ethos of entertainment and training for success and to bury its wearisome work-hard, play-hard frat-boy ideology. We should blast away the customer-coddling deans and student service hacks; blast past academic pretension and the hunger for "standing in the field." Blast university presidents so afraid of offending a potential donor that they won't raise a word in behalf of social justice or political sanity. Blow away the trustees who think that they're a corporate board of directors and will not rest until their schools resemble Walmarts. Blast them all. And while you're doing it, have a good time. Because knowledge is joy. Creativity is ultimate freedom. Real thought is bliss. Sapare aude, as the old thinkers liked to say: Dare to Know; Dare to Be Wise!

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education

Education now is not for the individual. It is not geared to help him grow to his potential and let him find out what he truly loves and how he might pursue it. No. Education now is a function of society. ... Current schooling, from the primary grades through college, is about tooling people to do what society (as its least imaginative members conceive it) needs done. We are educated to fill roles, not to expand our minds and deepen our hearts. We are tooled to slide into a social machine and function smoothly with a little application from time to time of the right pleasing grease. Education now prepares us for a life of conformity and workplace tedium, in exchange for which we can have our iPhones, our flat screens, our favorite tunes, Facebook, and Twitter. But what we want is real learning--learning that will  help us see the world anew and show us that there could be more to our lives than we had thought. (xii)

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education:

The whole aim of an intellectual life ... is to behold the truth, and to love it for its beauty.

It’s hard to keep that foremost in mind, when we are met at every turn with a barrage of ugliness: expensive, deliberate, programmatic ugliness, such as that of the prose from the Alaska standards for reading and writing; and when the eyes of the soul are washed in the carbolic acid of relativism; and when truth is reduced to what is demonstrable by means of some measurement; and when reason is but a clever tool for procuring what will sate the appetite.

. . .

You do not read good books so that you can scramble up some tricks, so that you can write clever things about them, so that you can do well on a test and secure a prestigious job and then die. You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget.

Anthony Esolen, "Read Literature to Learn and Love the Truth"

Here's one college professor's rationale for not allowing laptops in the classroom.

Harry Lewis is dean of the undergraduate school at Harvard. In early 2001, he attended a meeting at which students were invited to air their grievances about staff at the Ivy League university. One undergraduate kicked up a memorable fuss. He wanted to double major in Biology and English, and cram all the work into three, instead of the usual four, years. He was exasperated with his academic advisor, who was unable, or unwilling, to devise a schedule to accommodate all the courses. As he listened to the student moan about being held back, Lewis felt a light bulb flash above his head.

"I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute, you need help, but not in the way you think you do,’” says the dean. “You need to take time to think about what is really important, rather than trying to figure out how to pack as much as you can into the shortest possible schedule.”

After the meeting, Lewis began to reflect on how the twenty-first-century student has become a disciple of hurry. From there it was a short step to speaking out against the scourge of overstuffed schedules and accelerated degree programs. In the summer of 2001, the dean wrote an open letter to every first-year undergraduate at Harvard. It was an impassioned plea for a new approach to life on campus and beyond. It was also a neat précis of the ideas that lie at the heart of the Slow philosophy. The letter, which now goes out to Harvard freshmen every year, is entitled: Slow Down.

Over seven pages, Lewis makes the case for getting more out of university—and life—by doing less. He urges students to think twice before racing through their degrees. It takes time to master a subject, he says, pointing out that top medical, law and business schools increasingly favour mature candidates with more to offer than an “abbreviated and intense undergraduate education.” Lewis warns against piling on too many extracurricular activities. What is the point, he asks, of playing lacrosse, chairing debates, organizing conferences, acting in plays and editing a section of the campus newspaper if you end up spending your whole Harvard career in overdrive, striving not to fall behind schedule? Much better to do fewer things and have time to make the most of them.

When it comes to academic life, Lewis favours the same less-is-more approach. Get plenty of rest and relaxation, he says, and be sure to cultivate the art of doing nothing. “Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled,” writes the dean. “It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 x 4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around.” In other words, doing nothing, being Slow, is an essential part of good thinking.

Slow Down is not a charter for slackers and born-again beatniks. Lewis is as keen on hard work and academic success as the next Harvard heavyweight. His point is simply that a little selective slowness can help students to live and work better. “In advising you to think about slowing down and limiting your structured activities, I do not mean to discourage you from high achievement, indeed from the pursuit of extraordinary excellence,” he concludes. “But you are more likely to sustain the intense effort needed to accomplish first-rate work in one area if you allow yourself some leisure time, some recreation, some time for solitude.”

Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness, pp. 246-48

Education is not as much about the mind as it is about the affections, argues James K. A. Smith. From his book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation:

What is education for? And more specifically, what is at stake in a distinctly Christian education? What does the qualifier Christian mean when appended to education? It is usually understood that education is about ideas and information (though it is also too often routinely reduced to credentialing for a career and viewed as a ticket to a job). And so distinctively Christian education is understood to be about Christian ideas--which usually requires a defense of the importance of "the life of the mind." On this account, the goal of a Christian education is the development of a Christian perspective, or more commonly now, a Christian worldview, which is taken to be a system of Christian beliefs, ideas, and doctrines.

But what if this line of thinking gets off on the wrong foot? What if education ... is not primarily about the absorption of ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? What if we began by appreciating how education not only gets into our head but also (and more fundamentally) grabs us by the [heart]? What if education was primarily concerned with shaping our hopes and passions -- our visions of "the good life" --- and not merely about the dissemination of data and information as inputs to our thinking? What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect? ...

What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

That is actually the wager of this book: It is an invitation to re-vision Christian education as a formative rather than just an informative project. (pp. 17-18)

From Creation Regained, Albert Wolters, pp. 22-24:

Our understanding of creation is usually restricted to the physical realm . . . [and we assume creation does not involve] the disciplines of sociology, aesthetics, political science, and economics. . . . We will not make such a distinction if we understand creation in terms of a law-subject correlation. God's ordinances also extend to the structures of society, to the world of art, to business and commerce. Human civilization is normed throughout. Everywhere we discover limits and proprieties, standards and criteria: in every field of human affairs there are right and wrong ways of doing things. There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order. 

[God's creational design applies to government.] The same holds true for such structures as the family and the church and for such modern institutions as businesses and schools. They too are grounded in the realities of God's world order and are therefore not arbitrary in their configuration. All schools and businesses have certain constant features that distinguish them from other institutions. The constancy of these distinguishing features must be referred to the nature of reality as given by God. Educators, for example, develop an intuitive sense for the distinctive structure of a school; if school board members try to run it like a business, they recognize that violence is being done to the nature of an educational institution. They are attuned to its normative structure, to the law that holds for it. Similarly, business executives know that a cannot be treated like a family. Relations in a firm have to be "businesslike" to be normative. . . . 

What is true for societal life is also true of culture. The worlds of art and pedagogy are bound to given standards. . . . Both artists and aestheticians are called, each in their own ways, to discern the criteria that define good art--criteria that are not arbitrary but rooted in a given order of things that must be honored. Things are no different in the field of pedagogy and child rearing. There are stages of emotional and intellectual maturity in the child's development that must be respected by the educator. The teacher cannot afford to ignore a child's natural curiosity or spontaneous playfulness. A pedagogy that ignores these given realities is antinormative; it flies in the face of the law of creation. 

And so we could go on. Human emotionality and sexuality, for example, are not normless. Our reasoning is subject to the laws of thought, our speech to semantic principles. Everything is subject to the given laws of God: everything is creational.... [All aspects of human life] are appointed and ordained by God as provinces of the earthly realm he created."

I'm currently enjoying Carolyn Weber's Surprised by Oxford. I love this passage in which she describes her life as an undergraduate student:

Totally idealistic, I was the quintessential student. One of those inspiring or irritating students--depending on how you look at it--who reads everything assigned and then the footnotes too. And the prefaces, and the references, and the epigraphs, and the marginalia. And the wacky, unrelated stuff on the next anthology page. I devoured everything I came across. I loved it all. Even the annoying parts I enjoyed, precisely because they annoyed me and so, often, made me stop and really think. With college, my life opened up more than I could have ever imagined: into art, and history, and philosophy, and argumentation, and statistics, and postcolonial theory. I began to understand my own spot of existence in relation to the history of ideas. I began to see, both scarily and comfortingly, that all I thought had been thought before. I began to see how studying the humanities illuminates humanitas or "what it means to be human." What it means to become human. The decisions and the responsibilities of becoming truly humane.

From Eugene Peterson's introduction to Philippians:

None of the qualities of the Christian life can be learned out of a book. Something more like apprenticeship is required, being around someone who out of years of devoted discipline shows us, by his or her entire behavior, what it is. Moments of verbal instruction will certainly occur, but mostly an apprentice acquires skill by daily and intimate association with a "master," picking up subtle but absolutely essential things, such as timing and rhythm and "touch."