Palmer, P. J. (1993). To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education. HarperOne.
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”
- ﻼF: spiritual ~ personal/professional
- 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
- ﻼF: fear of failure, of diminishment, of judgment, of ridicule, of growth…
- 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).
- ﻼF: Axiology is the branch of practical philosophy which studies the nature of value.
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
- ﻼF: for metaphor paper
- Change questions: metaphor for relationship you had with teachers, then “metaphor for your teaching”
- “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.
Knowing Is Loving [19]
- 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.”
But another kind of knowledge is available to us…a knowledge that originates not in curiosity or control but in compassion, or love
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
Dostoevsky
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.”
- ﻼF: not for spiritual practices embedded in/as cultural practices
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
- 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.”
- ﻼF ~ to know/be known mobius ∞
- Thomas Merton, who was also concerned with educating in love, once wrote that “the purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to his world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of the individual himself.”
- But when education is not prayerful, when it does not center on transcendence, it fails to create authentic and spontaneous relations between the self and the world.
When education divorces self and world from their transcendent source, they become locked in an endless power struggle to create each other in their own image.
Such an education either turns out people who force their own inner distortions on the world, or it produces people who have succumbed to the world’s distortion of themselves
- We help create the outward enemy…to distract us from the inward enemy who always threatens to overcome us.
- As long as we stay locked in their closed logic, allowing self and world to circle each other in an endless quest for power, we have little choice: dominate or be dominated.
We must resist the popular tendency to think of transcendence as an upward and outward escape from the realities of self and world. Instead, transcendence is a breaking-in, a breathing of the Spirit of love into the heart of our existence, a literal inspiration that allows us to regard ourselves and our world with more trust and hope than ever before.
There is no such thing as “spirituality in general.” Every spiritual search is and must be guided by a particular literature, practice, and community of faith.
[Here, Palmer gets into the/his Christian faith, seeing Jesus as the fusion of Spirit and matter, of sacred and secular]
Paul – Corinthians 1, 13:
- Love is patient and kind…
- When I was a child, I spoke like a child…
- Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
- So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Education as Spiritual Formation
- In Genesis we are told that humankind was first formed “in the image of God,” the image of love. But as we move from myth to human history…
- From monastic tradition I have learned three spiritual disciplines, three ways of maintaining contact with love’s reality in the midst of misleading appearances:
- the study of sacred texts: have companions on the spiritual journey…In such study my heart and mind are reformed by the steady press of tradition against the distortions of my day.
- the practice of prayer and contemplation: In prayer and contemplation I seek immediate personal experience of that to which tradition can only testify… it forms me in that receptiveness to love that is at the heart of the spiritual journey.
- ﻼF: “became willing”
- the gathered life of the community itself: ⬇️
The community is a check against my personal distortions; it helps interpret the meaning of texts and gives guidance in my experience of prayer. But life in community is also a continual testing and refining of the fruits of love in my life. Here, in relation to others, I can live out (or discover I am lacking) the peace and joy, the humility and servanthood by which spiritual growth is measured. The community is a discipline of mutual encouragement and mutual testing, keeping me both hopeful and honest about the love that seeks me, the love I seek to be.
- At its deepest reaches, education gave me an identity as a knower. It answered the question “Who am I?” by saying “You are one who knows.”
- At the same time, education gave an identity to the world in which I live. In answer to the question “What is the world?” education said “The world is what your knowledge pictures it to be.”
Education portrays the self as knower, the world as known, and mediates the relation of the two, giving the knowing self supremacy over the known world. [epistemology]
The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.
And how could it be otherwise? We have no self apart from our knowledge of the self, no world apart from our knowledge of the world.
- To put it in somewhat different terms, our epistemology is quietly transformed into our ethic. The images of self and world that are found at the heart of our knowledge will also be found in the values by which we live our lives.
- I want to uncover some of those epistemological and ethical images by inspecting the key words we use to describe the kind of knowledge we value and trust—words like “fact” and “theory” and “reality” and “objective.” Hidden inside our words, buried at their very roots, are ancient word-pictures… [share with Miliezko]
- “Fact” comes from the Latin facere, “to make”: we are busily engaged in trying to construct a liveable world with our facts…We no longer see ourselves as recipients of the world as gift…when reality is what we make it, we can unmake it at any time.
- “Theory” comes from the Greek theoros, or “spectator”: we regard what we know as “out there,” on stage, and we relate to it from a distance…Like theater-goers we are free to watch, applaud, hiss and boo, but we do not understand ourselves as an integral part of the action.
- The Latin root of “objective” means “to put against, to oppose.” In German its literal translation is “standing-over-againstness.” This image uncovers another quality of modern knowledge: it puts us in an adversary relationship with each other and our world…Objective knowledge has unwittingly fulfilled its root meaning: it has made us adversaries of ourselves.
- “reality”: By modern standards myths and stories and poems, however entertaining they may be, have nothing to contribute to our knowledge since they are not about the “real” world.
- The root of “reality” is the Latin res, meaning a property, a possession, a thing—a meaning most clearly seen in our term “real estate.” This image suggests another quality of modern knowledge: we seek to know reality in order to lay claim to things, to own and control them. No wonder poetry and religion are beyond the pale.
We value knowledge that enables us to coerce the world into meeting our needs—no matter how much violence we must do.
- In the language of religious tradition, Adam and Eve committed the first sin. In the language of intellectual tradition, they made the first epistemological error.
- It was an error that has been repeated many times in human history, not least by those scientists of whom Robert Oppenheimer said, “The physicists have known sin.”
- Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for—a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God.
- In their refusal to know as they were known, they reached for a kind of knowledge that always leads to death.
- Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for—a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God.
- It was an error that has been repeated many times in human history, not least by those scientists of whom Robert Oppenheimer said, “The physicists have known sin.”
- In our quest to free knowledge from the tangles of subjectivity, we have broken the knower loose from the web of life itself.
We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself….
- The most searching exposé of objectivism has been made by Michael Polanyi.
- “knowledge is neither subjective nor objective but a transcendence of both achieved by the person.”
I teach more than a body of knowledge or a set of skills. I teach a mode of relationship between the knower and the known, a way of being in the world. That way, reinforced in course after course, will remain with my students long after the facts have faded from their minds.
- The message education should convey is not identified by words like “fact,” “theory,” “objective,” and “reality” (though those words have their place). Instead, the message is called “truth.”
- [45] “truth” comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word “troth,” as in the ancient vow “I pledge thee my troth.” With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable and transforming relationship, a relationship forged of trust and faith in the face of unknowable risks.
- Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other’s life and fate.
- ﻼF: trust; “authority” in a marriage?
- Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other’s life and fate.
- [45] “truth” comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word “troth,” as in the ancient vow “I pledge thee my troth.” With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable and transforming relationship, a relationship forged of trust and faith in the face of unknowable risks.
Truth involves entering a relationship with someone or something genuinely other than us, but with whom we are intimately bound.
In truthful knowing the knower becomes co-participant in a community of faithful relationships with other persons and creatures and things, with whatever our knowledge makes known. We find truth by pledging our troth, and knowing becomes a reunion of separated beings whose primary bond is not of logic but of love.
╬
How do we touch that love, allow it to touch us? Perhaps it is by living faithfully within the paradoxes and tensions themselves, refusing to resolve them by collapsing into one pole or another, but allowing them to pull us open to that transcendent love in which all opposites find reconciliation. Such is the suggestion of E.F. Schumacher, whose words about love I find not only evocative but absolutely true to life:
…All through our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled. The typical problems of life are insoluble on the level of being on which we normally find ourselves. How can one reconcile the demands of freedom and discipline in education? Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended—the power of love…. Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.
Schumacher (1973) Small Is Beautiful
∞
Archive: https://archive.is/hMu12