Goal of education
Although it was a zillion years ago, I well recall my casual summer date’s, “Why liberal arts? What can you do with a degree in English literature?” In just a month, I was moving to Houston to work my way through college for a degree in English literature.
I’d spent three years in nursing school. The curriculum was designed to teach procedures, behaviors and techniques and I’d disliked it from the beginning. I graduated because my mother refused to let me quit.
“I told you you wouldn’t like nursing school. You wouldn’t listen.”
Therefore, almost instantly after graduation, working nights in a cardiac surgical unit in New York City, I started college classes while looking for a college that would give me a scholarship. At Dominican College in Houston, Texas. I found what I was looking for. And far more.
While working full-time in the exploding field of Houston’s cardiac surgery, courses taught by John Bradshaw and Sister Marie Bernard, altered what and how I thought. And opened my entire being to the joy of learning, of finding thinkers from ancient and modern times who answered questions I’d been incapable of articulating.
Upon graduation, I took the graduate record exams. And, on a lark, filled out some applications for grad school. To my great surprise, I was admitted to the combined Masters/PhD program in English at Fordham University. The application required a short essay explaining why I wanted to attend. My essay,, In Defense of Liberal Arts, was an ode to that Dominican education and its effect on my life. Had I accepted Fordhams’s offer though, I shudder at the thoughts of the person I might have become: a twenty-five-year-old atheistic aggressive, ambitious female grad student in late-sixties New York City.
To be unfit for the modern world
Richard Gamble’s recent piece, To Be Unfit for the Modern World was the catalyst for this trip back through my educational past. Gamble’s title is compellingly satirical and forces a response to the question, what is the goal of education?
More than two hundred years ago, the utilitarians disconnected themselves from liberal education and the Great Tradition, redefining and redirecting the “useful” away from that which forms the “complete man,” and toward that which primarily promotes man’s material well-being. Of course, education has always aimed to be useful. The question has been, and continues to be, useful to what end? The modern age, often with good intentions, has defined educational usefulness as that which leads to material results that can be weighed and measured and counted. Thus, it is no surprise that it has been darkened by the spiritual “eclipse” that Saint Augustine warned us against so long ago in his Confessions…it will, I hope, inspire modern misfits who seek to initiate themselves and their students into an ancient way of teaching and learning much larger than themselves, and who recognize that their task is chiefly formative rather than instrumental…
To Be Unfit for the Modern World
In the thirty plus years I spent in schoos and colleges, much of that time felt like an endurance test. BUT, in those undergraduate very Catholic liberal arts years and then much later, in my doctoral work, professors showed up who did indeed define their teaching as formative.
What does that mean?
It means resisitng the lure of the bully pulpit, respect and admiration for the uniqueness of each mind and heart. Teachers/professors hold a rare power. For some, the seduction of captured minds is irresistable. The professor, writer or the physician intent on forging his or her solution to everything on impressionable minds is a powerful force.
Most cannot resist the power.
Education and politics
After watching the 2004 film Countdown to D-Day, I became fascinated by Dwight D. Eisenhower and the impossible job of being the Supreme Commander of the allied forces. How could one man handle all those personalities: DeGaulle, Mongomery, Churchill, Roosevelt while planning the largest invasion in history?
So I read Stephen Ambrose’s Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s a tome but lucidly reveals the impossibility of the tasks put before Eisenhower. And yet he did them.
All of them.
Throughout the book, historian Ambrose reveals Eisenhower’s dislike, at times, hatred for politics and politicians. So, of course, I then read Ambrose’s Eisenhower:Soldier and President to learn how and why a man who so intensely disliked politicians, became one. As he deliberates about entering politics, Eisenhower muses that while the British “stand” for office, Americans “race” for it.
“The Republican Party of 1952, after twenty years without power or responsibility, was frustrated, angry, negative. What it did best was to criticize, charge, accuse.. When it went after the New Deal..Eisenhower was in perfect agreement…. But on foreign policy, he had a major problem….The truth was that Eisenhower had been one of FDR’s principal agents in carrying out his foreign policy in Europe during the war, and Truman’s Chairman of the JCS when China was “lost” No matter how much he didged, equivocated, denied, or explained his actions, it was inescapable that he had loyally, indeed, enthusiastically, helped implement FDR’s policy.”
Eisenhower’s ‘dilemma’ illustrates the forced binary, simplistic stance of our two-party system. However, there are legislative adjudications for which there are neither justification nor compromise.
“Reproductive rights”
The overturning of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court should have been the end of federal interference with abortion. But the President’s rhetoric against the court’s decision was not empty threats. The Biden administration ignored the law of the land with an exutive juggernaut-The US Justice Department’s Reproductive Rights. Quietly placing abortiion under the Attorney General’s Justice Department as a protected right changes the whole tenor of this terrible genocide of human babies. And sets a terrifying precedent in the carefully constituted balance of powers by the framers of the Constitution.
We’re just beginning to see the consequences.
The Republicans have diluted their long-held constitutional and moral objections to abortion. While the leading Democrats aren’t merely justifying but celebrating abortion. Carl Trueman writes, “ideologically it [abortion] has become the poster child of a world marked by desecration, a symbol of—even a rite of passage to—exhilarating liberation.”
In a piece called Catholics at the DNC, NCR writes about a panel of Democratic Catholic delegates who discuss the hypocrisy of Catholics like me.
“Claiming to be pro-life but refusing to fund the social safety net, or cutting mental health funding after blaming a mass shooting on mental health issues, is “the definition of hypocrisy,” Carolan said. Another delegate declared that “I believe the world is too complex for black-and-white simple answers.”
When filled with our ideologies, justifications and denials, right reason is impossible. I suppose taking only the parts of a religion that comports with what we choose to believe, discarding the rest. makes sense in this hazy, conflicted world of moral bankruptcy. But then it becomes just one of many thousands of religions denying our individual and collective sinfulness and desperate need for salvation.
If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.
First and Second Letters of John
If we say, “We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
Anyone who is so “progressive” as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God…
Thought provoking and informative writing Lin. I love reading about your personal journey and your never ending education. Thank you for sharing with us.
Hey there Mary!! Thanks for the read and time to write message!