But yield who will to their separation,
—Robert Frost
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Header image: ﻼF in Gimp
- regarding the spiritual dimensions of education, “conventional wisdom tells us that educators range from indifferent to cynical on the matter”
- I call the pain the permeates education “the pain of disconnection“. Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues from their students and from their own hearts
- when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us
- Fear, not ignorance, is the enemy of learning and that fear is what gives ignorance its power
- Community is clearly central to four issues that have long been basic to the life of the mind: the nature of reality (ontology), how we know reality (epistemology), how we teach and learn (pedagogy), and how education forms or deforms our lives in the world (ethics).
A recovery of community: ﻼF ~ A community of recovery
∞
Communal Images of Reality and How We Know It The Nature of Reality
…our culture and institutions tend to take shape around our dominant metaphors of reality, and to hold that shape long after our metaphors have changed
- “Just as ancient China ordered its social life around a cosmology of interdependence, so modern America has fashioned itself around a cosmology of fragmentation. For over a century, atomism, individualism
How We Know Reality
- The popular image of how we know reality is as non- or anti-communal as is the popular image of the nature of reality itself.
- “The myth of objectivity, which depends on a radical separation of the knower from the known, has been declared bankrupt.”
- “We now see that to know something is to have a living relationship with it—influencing and being influenced by the object known.”
- “When Fritjof Capra says, “We can never speak of nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves,” the death knell of objectivism has been sounded”
If we could represent knowing for what it is—a way of creating community, not destroying it—we would draw more young people into the great adventure of learning.
Communal Images of Teaching, Learning, and Living How We Teach and Learn
“delivering data to students who must compete for those scarce rewards called grades.”
But what scholars now say—and what good teachers have always known —is that real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject. We cannot learn deeply and well until a community of learning is created in the classroom.
- good teachers bring students into living communion with the subjects they teach
- “Intellectual rigor depends on things like honest dissent and the willingness to change our minds, things that will not happen if the “soft” values of community are lacking. In the absence of the communal virtues, intellectual rigor too easily turns into intellectual rigor mortis.”
How We Live in the World
- When we deal with ethics in education (and often we ignore it altogether), we approach it as a matter of helping individuals develop standards for personal behavior. Not only do we stress personal at the expense of communal ethics; deeper still, we ignore the fact that the presence, or absence, of communal imagery at every level of teaching and learning can form, or deform, students for life in the world. We underestimate the hidden curriculum of ethics that is being taught in classrooms even—and perhaps especially—when ethics is not the formal topic.”
Such an education would root ethics in its true and only ground, in the spiritual insight that beyond the broken surface of our lives there is a “hidden wholeness” on which all life depends. In such an education, intellect and spirit would be one, teachers and learners and subjects would be in vital community with one another, and a world in need of healing would be well served. That, finally, is the reason why the spirituality of education deserves and demands our attention.
- For all the differences between those scientists and me, we have one thing in common. We are well-educated people who have been schooled in a way of knowing that treats the world as an object to be dissected and manipulated, a way of knowing that gives us power over the world.
History suggests two primary sources for our knowledge…One is curiosity; the other is control. The one corresponds to pure, speculative knowledge, to knowledge as an end in itself. The other corresponds to applied science, to knowledge as a means to practical ends.”
The goal of a knowledge arising from love is the reunification and reconstruction of broken selves and worlds. A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to love. Here, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we know and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community’s bonds.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing
Dostoevski
A Prayerful Education
- Many of our schools are supported by the state which is legally barred from imposing religious claims on its citizens. The nurture of spiritual life is regarded as a function of family and church. So any effort to recover the spiritual grounds of education seems to run into that wall of separation we have erected between sacred and secular, private and public, the church and the state.”
What do I mean by prayer?
I mean the practice of relatedness.
- In prayer, I no longer set myself apart from others and the world, manipulating them to suit my needs. Instead, I reach for relationship, allow myself to feel the tuggings of mutuality and accountability, take my place in community by knowing the transcendent center that connects it all
- ﻼF ~ HP
- In prayer, I not only address the love at the core of all things; I listen as that love addresses me, calling me out of isolation and self-centeredness into community and compassion. In prayer, I begin to realize that I not only know but am known.”