“To educate means to help the human soul enter into the totality of the real,” so writes Luigi Giussani in The Risk of Education. This idea means generally seeing education as an effort to enable students to connect to reality rather than simply present facts or skills.
I think most of my most recent frustration in my teaching is on this point. I believe that education at its very best is a process of formation. And, at the core of that forming is helping students see the world, the true world. In my field of History, I so often am impressing my students that our job is to uncover the facts, long hidden or shaped by people with agendas. That people have agendas isn’t the surprise, but it does make it very difficult to help students see the truth of the world, the truth of the facts before us.
Education is more than inputs and outputs, just the base dissemination of facts. There is more to teaching than being a good technician. Sadly, it appears to me that our student population seems best trained in this method, the industrial model. You know it: sit still, be presented with and memorize a list of facts, spit those facts back out and at the end….that proves you are learned.
No. I fight against this almost every day. See, to do more than this, to be involved in formation demands something from the participant as well as the professor. For the professor, what I think is that learning is not only in the mind, but also a communal activity…trying to learn together. My job then demands that I create ways for the class to work together, to interact in learning activities. But the student must choose to want to be engaged.
I think for many, they resist this not only because their prior training is in an industrial, or perhaps worst, a consumer model…they resist because to date the “experts” continue to tell them in subtle, or maybe even more overt, ways that none of it matters. Think about it. If nothing is true, nothing is real…then why does anyone need to sit in a class to learn it?
I think our current generation of student senses how messed up this is, but then fears to get their hands dirty so to speak. It’s easier to just roll along, hoping to find professors and classes where no one really expects much. But, if Robert Spaemann is right, that “Educating a child is a process of formation that introduces him to the world, that cultivates capacities to understand what the world is,” then as he further asserts the “efforts require… discipline, deferral and even renunciation.”
We need this awakening. There is Truth, both in a deeper philosophical sense and in a factual sense such as the information I present in my class.