How ‘wisdom’ and ‘truth’ fit with making a school great

{Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three in this series.} Warning at the outset – this ground is contentious. Because we’re not just speaking of classically modeled schools, but school as such. Not just Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum. But also a Christian school today, and a secular prep school today, and – here’s the kicker – a public school today, charter, magnet or any other sort. But what could that mean in our pluralistic environment?

Rather than building education for our children on the least common denominator of a foundation of minimal shared values, the key here is that pursuing truth, cultivating wisdom, and contemplating and emulating The Good offers a full-orbed formation for the children we love and are responsible for. What if this substantial set of values and convictions is attractive to you but just doesn’t seem possible amidst our cultural differences?

Consider first why it is desirable, and then how it might be possible. What does school teach if not some version of persisting or eternal verities?

Maybe training, but that’s the factory model for the Industrial Revolution. Maybe, then, creativity of Sir Ken Robinson’s classic TED talk persuasion in a pitched battle of contrast with the rote realism of the assembly line?

A word of heresy here for much of the contemporary educational orthodoxy, yet with respect for creativity and possibility in our students: While Robinson makes the contrast case beautifully, my take is that he builds the constructive case rather fancifully, yet in terms it’s difficult to oppose but even more difficult to practically compose in a curricular course of study for real schools.

Creatively what? Who doesn’t want our kids to be filled with possibilities, and wonderfully smarter at Kindergarten before we’ve ruined them with school by the 8th grade? I don’t mean to draw a thorough-going contrast, but it is instructive to ask what the path toward maturity looks like for a 5 year old master of divergent thinking to grow into a creative and discerning thinker and communicator at 18.  

Could Picasso explode into Guernica without a realist’s training in portraiture along with many stages of design study and passages through maturing periods of perception? Though most world class, reality-defining mathematicians do most of their breakthrough work in their 20’s, they and the engineers who bring their theories to technology all must step their way forward through somewhat linear progressions of conceptual construction.

Even Einstein worked his way through many gedanken (or thought experiments) to burst forth into three revelations of 1905 in the Patents Office with Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and yes, by the way, the special theory of relativity, any one of them singularly worthy of his Nobel. And moving through to the general theory required not just another creative burst but 10 years of grueling work on the field equations. And, yes, school as it was done bored him, counted him mediocre in marks, and did not teach him toward this scientific revolution.

We can certainly do school in such a way as to squash creativity and blunt learning, but the genius and the journeyman alike can be nurtured to full potential on the journey of pursuing truth, cultivating wisdom and embracing The Good. Small-minded mentors can make of these greatest of endeavors mean, petty ideas of constriction and prescriptive moralizing. Pursued rightly in their enormity, however, truth, wisdom and The Good are human potential writ large, the stuff for expanding the greatest of minds and the creativity of all.

Standards. What gets proposed as the alternative? What should guide the course of our curricula, what should shape our schools and the learning of our children? These days, the pedagogy is constructivist but the politics of education is almost entirely realist. Standards-based instruction – common core, state specific, discipline directed, or wherever the objectives hail from -- long before it is tainted by its testing is convergent to constrictive conceptions at its root.

The last half century’s history of schooling in America was scared by Sputnik and raced to the moon. Certainly seems like an uplifting adventure and expansive agenda, but it has yielded too often a vision for creating tight-laced technicians formed by realist expectations. STEM may be seasoned with STEAM, but the hardest fought questions remain how much is too much for testing, and what technology can we best include and best afford to employ in the endeavor of preparing our children for the jobs of this century. Even a Six “C” 21st Century approach attending to creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, connectivity and cultural appreciation seems practically mired in a race to the top of the standards and skills heap.

I certainly cannot offer a case compelling to all that truth, wisdom and The Good should – morally ought to – undergird our formative intentions of education for our children. The thoroughly Postmodern Millennial (There are most definitely many of another stripe.) would likely scoff when truth is even proposed for this language game we’re playing in schooling. I’d like to offer that any of the anti-foundational “Small p” civil commitments necessary for contemporary conversation in ideas and actions are parasitic upon the gravitas of the Big P philosophical virtues which are being denigrated. One doesn’t live through clashes of moral relativism without a prevailing value placed on life, respect for persons, and the difference-making of ideas with consequences. And, in appreciation of irony, I am not unaware that this reads a bit like a postmodern rant against postmodern presuppositions.

If possible, how? Perhaps a conversation of interest and value, but not the course to follow for today. For now, the point is simply that some would see a place for such fundamental pursuits if shared commitment to such pursuits were possible. If school could look like this for more than a retrograde miniscule minority, then to many it would be worth pursuing.

So, on to a quick take on why it may be possible, if one should desire such a teleology in one’s education. First, it is the pursuit of truth rather than its dictation that we are committed to. If we presuppose the absolute denial of absolutes such that there is no such thing as truth, the effort is a non-starter. Otherwise, and where most parents, teachers and civil societies find themselves, we can engage such a pursuit.

Second, while cultivating wisdom may seem a bit old fashioned, a bit old fashioned may be a bit of what’s needed for perspective and tested value in an education aspiring to greatness, and it’s hard to imagine a case against the desirability of wisdom, perhaps as long as we avoid some hegemonic caricature of what wisdom is or should be.

Third, ah there is the third part. If The Good requires Plato’s metaphysic, then this might not wear so well into the present day or amidst our diversity. But what if we intend by this something greater than ourselves and in a morally commendable and defensible way? The terminology used was the place for The Good in an education is as that which we contemplate and emulate. That does seem a bit fixed, settled and preconceived, which it will certainly be for those finding themselves in certain traditions. In other intellectual and moral streams, however, the beatific vision or the natural law or a revealed deontology or a predetermined teleology will not so comfortably settle into place as a conception of The Good.

So, we’re back to pursuit, as of truth, but not in such a bad place after all. Our pursuit is of that which is larger and better than ourselves, even if we look mostly within ourselves in the search. This is no settled portion of the moral and educational landscape. But that doesn’t make it less efficacious as intentionality for great schooling.

Have I fudged back into the broadly fanciful suggestions likened unto Robinson’s “creativity”? It’s not so easy to avoid if you’re working to define greatness for schools in a multitude of schools of thought. But I find the lay of the land so much more promising and productive than “standards” as that toward which we are directing a child’s education for capability, humanity and fulfillment.

Without the greatness of these values, a school would never attain to greatness in the education of young human beings unto their own sorts of greatness. I guess I’d like to see us ‘go big or go home.’