A Secret Vigilance
Summer is the time for leaping into waves, and no one leaps as heartily – and as recklessly – into things as a child. So it was that on a trip to the shore this summer, my daughter jumped endlessly into the white waves, with a gusto that made it seem like the ocean would grow tired of rolling in before she grew tired of splashing around in it. On this particular day, the tide came in with a considerable force, breaking loudly on the beach and rushing back into the depths with a commotion that was more than a match for her delicate, pixie limbs. So as she frolicked this way and that in the water, I did my best to stay close enough to jump in after her if at any moment the strength of the current proved too much for her.
I tried very hard, however, to keep her from realizing that this was what I was actually doing. I pretended to be soaking my own feet in the water, or mining a promising vein of seashells that happened to be planted in the sandbar right below her feet – anything other than demonstrating an apprehension that would spoil her instinctively elated response to the world about her. Her mind exulted with a careless joy entirely appropriate to her youth, mine was enveloped in the caution appropriate to my station as a parent, but it would have been a great shame – and a bar to her healthy development – if I had allowed the shadows of my adult mentality to obtrude upon the sunshine of her childhood at that moment.
In truth, I have found myself adopting this posture of clandestine wariness more than once as my daughter has grown up – as she toddled around uncertainly on her first fledgling steps, making me aware for the very first time of the perils of coffee tables, or as she learned to ride her bike in the parking lot near the house. The trick always lies in exercising a due supervision without derogating the least bit from the elan and accomplishment of these first adventurous forays into a world prickling with beauty and danger. The challenge is to bear the burden of the awareness of riptide and asphalt and electrical socket, and to exert a proper prudence in the light of this awareness, without allowing the weight of that awareness to impinge on her aspiring spirit, and hold it back from flight.
I think the difficulties of striking this balance lie at the heart of parenting, and I think they lie at the heart of the educator’s task too, particularly in this day and age. No one can be oblivious to the manifold and dire cultural perils that imperil the growth of young people in our times. No serious educator can be indifferent to the antics of those who are actively working to make the world more ugly, more unstable, and more toxic to the students in our charge. For myself, I will confess that I am filled with tremendous apprehension, and not a little bit of rage, about the future these people are marring for so many of the bright and kind young people I get to work with.
But I consider it a professional duty to make sure that not a trace of these emotions makes its way into my pedagogy, because such emotions have no place within the burgeoning minds of young people. There is something profoundly unfitting about a young spirit in which fear and resentment sound the predominant note. That, of course, is what is so objectionable about the progressive ideology being drummed into students across the country, that it instills just these passions into young people with a kind of systematic zealotry. But the emotional profanation is no less objectionable when the ideology is our own. The habit of regarding one’s contemporaries primarily through a lens of wariness or reproach can have a tremendously disfiguring effect on a still-forming personality – even in a cultural atmosphere where there is abundant rationale for wariness and reproach. There are emotions that are damaging to the development of personality - regardless of the justifications for those emotions - if they are allowed to proliferate through the duration of a young person’s growth. It is of the utmost importance, then, that we as educators do all we can to stifle that proliferation.
It seems to me that the most effective way to do so is to exercise extreme judiciousness in the way we introduce controversial issues of the day into the classroom. Many will find this suggestion problematic; many believe that we should be training young people to engage assertively with the pressing cultural issues surrounding them. But I think we assume too much in supposing that teenagers can dispassionately engage with topics that are driving the adults all around them mad. What is far more likely to happen is that the routine debate of these topics will conjure and eventually instill a love of contention for it’s own sake, a love of arguing for preeminence rather than for the truth. But these are mental habits that have no place in the composition of a well-trained mind. The rancor, the pettiness, the simple-minded zealotry that such debates tend to arouse are precisely the emotions driving the cultural decay which we want our educational reforms to begin to ameliorate.
A due reverence for the souls of the children we teach impels us to guard against those poisonous emotions – to guard against all wrath, all cynicism, all terror – and to regard them in any of their manifestations as present dangers to the well-being and well-becoming of our students. In their place, we want to nurture the generous motives that are already present in the psyches of these children, and which only lack such nurturance for their strengthening. We want courage and brio there instead; we want awe, we want piety, we want the abiding awareness of how fearfully and wonderfully made they are. These are the sorts of emotions that guide the development of a young person towards goodness and truth; these are the habits of heart we want taking root in them.
The way to foster such a disposition is not by dwelling relentlessly on the questions of the times, but by drawing the attention of students to the abiding questions of all time. It is in the study of poetry and history, of philosophy and theology, that the contours of human life begin to reveal themselves, with all that is both frightful and invigorating about the form of being we have inherited. One of the fruits of that course of study, when it is most diligently pursued, is a kind of moral serenity resulting from a knowledge that the challenges of one’s own day and age are merely a recapitulation of the perennial ills of human life, that when it comes to sin and suffering, there is really nothing new under the sun. There is a great steadfastness that grows out of such an awareness, a dauntless readiness to face whatever life has in store. One of the prime qualifications for a wise educator is a confidence that this sort of oblique mental training will prepare their students to confront the evils of our culture far better than direct and dogmatic assaults on that culture will tend to do.
There is a passage in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that is highly relevant here. I may have quoted it at this site before; it is one that I find momentously insightful. Schiller takes issue with the sort of author who is lured away from the imperatives of art in order to take direct issue with the political ills of his day and age. For Schiller, this is a betrayal that reveals a lack of faith in the capacity of art to change souls in ways that conduce to the cultural health of society over a longer term than one’s day and age. He writes:
If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to ask me how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can satisfy the noble longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the world on which you act towards that which is good, and the measured and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your leanings
Likewise, the educator must have a genuine faith that by implanting thoughts of the necessary and eternal in young minds, the measured course of time will allow those thoughts to determine the growth of our students. The only possible hope for the future lies in minds so formed, and everything that threatens that formation should be banished from the schoolroom. So we as educators have a duty not only to be wary of the evils of our time, but wary even of our own wariness.