Education for growth

The impulse of much of our culture when thinking about education is strangely reductive. We take a dismal and narrow view of the purpose of attending school for much of the first two decades of life without much reflection. Parents recount the bewildering experience of a teen shouting, “What is the point?” when confronted with some arbitrary test or group project. We seem vaguely convinced that completing a series of tasks ensures college preparedness which renders one marriageable and job-ready. But what exactly do dull hours of classroom busywork have to do with thriving in a life fully lived? When pressed, many parents may not have an answer.

The desiccated system of formal learning does not seem to offer the key to a life well lived. The answer, however, is not to rail against the established regime but to build an alternative, whether within or outside the system.

An example of this approach comes from Our Lives in His Hands by Olga Emily Marlin, a book about Tomás and Paquita Alvira, some of the first married members of Opus Dei. Tomás, a lifelong educator, recounted the experience of visiting an all-girls school. In a flowerbed on the grounds, he saw a sign that read, “HELP ME GROW.”

Tomás later wrote, “That simple sign surprised me, perhaps because I was accustomed to seeing another kind of sign in gardens (public or private), forbidding the touching or picking of flowers, and sometimes adding a warning that offenders will be punished.” He continued, “The notice in that garden forbade nothing, nor warned of punishments. It contained a single sentence that seemed to come from the flowers themselves, gently asking the children to help them grown and develop.”

When asked, the teachers said the sign changed the students’ behavior. The girls organized themselves into groups to care for the plants, researched gardening, and took on the project with enthusiasm. Rather than merely banning certain activity, the sign provided an invitation for the girls to seek knowledge and act on it.

For Tomás, he saw an analogous relationship between the plants and the students. He wrote, “I realized that those teachers had applied to the plants what some of the greatest philosophers have said about education: that it is essentially help given to someone’s becoming educated.” The students could not coerce the plants into flourishing but only provide nourishment and allow the flowers to become themselves. He wrote, “I connected that sentence with the home environment, and imagined the notice placed among the children in every family, asking parents and teachers for what the garden plants had requested: help to grow.”

What would an education of this kind entail? What is most essential to man is rationality, and a true education for freedom would provide the nourishment for a thinking mind. The student could reject the invitation, because the teacher cannot force the student to enter the world of ideas. For us mortals, thinking is preceded by an environment that meets and disciplines the desires of the flesh. Without taming the appetites, a man cannot be free. Taming and reining in the passions is not all to quash them but rather to channel them and allow for the possibility of becoming fully alive.

In their own home, the Alviras sought to give their children true freedom by encouraging civility and culture that illuminates. In the book about their lives and their cause for beatification, Marlin wrote that the family encouraged “a relish for good even in the smallest things,” include the mundane things of life, which the family was quick to say was never mundane because they always sought new enthusiasm in their quotidian occupations. Marlin added of Tomás and Paquita: “Convinced that the best way to avoid evil is to drown it in a sea of good things, they instilled in their children a knowledge and appreciation of good manners in the many events of daily life…”

Fearing “poor outcomes” in our children and spending time discussing and distressing over the ills around us gives space in our being for those very things. Encouraging excitement for the many good things, whether in tea time rituals or neuroscience, breathes life into all areas of the day. In order to develop this kind of curiosity, predictable order goes a long way.

An environment which encourages license in all appetites stifles the ability of children to reason and to live in freedom. The idea that school has prime of place in the develop of citizens is to misunderstand that every citizen is first a son or daughter, brother or sister, before a ward of the state. For parents to cede primacy in the development of a child and think that the purpose of education is the input of technical skills to be utilized in the workplace is a gross misunderstanding of the human person.

The challenging part is to be a mother or father or teacher in the true sense of the word requires demonstrating what it is to be fully alive. The Alviras’ son Rafael wrote, “My parents were convinced that the decisive factor in education is the atmosphere in which it takes place, and that the best pedagogy is indirect.” As Cornell West, a man much different from the Alivras but attentive to aspects of the reality put it, “You’re not a spectator; you’re a participant in this formation of your soul, you’re a participant in this attempt to be a certain kind of human being before the worms get you.”