When studying the arts of argument and invention with my composition students, I like to show them an image of Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree (1973) from the Tate Museum. It’s what appears to be a glass of water perched atop a shelf roughly eight feet off the ground, a simple installation accompanied by a printed interview with the artist himself. As a class, we read through the interview together—half puzzled, half amused. The text starts like this:
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Money is the root of all evil and fame is hell.
Who would have thought that Ed Sheeran, one of the world’s most popular musicians, would proclaim such a dark truth on the first track of his latest album?
The comedian Bo Burnham, with his sarcastic tones hiding the underlying themes of depression, fear, exhaustion, suicide, and feeling out of place, forces crowds into fits of laughter over things that should never be laughed at, while he himself is standing on stage simply hoping that one person might hear what he is really saying: help.
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In my first article in this series we explored benefits classical educators can derive from interacting with cognitive science. There we examined the first of six systematically constructed principles for learning: that learning takes time and reflection. So, what we are thinking about is the best barometer of what we have the potential to learn. However, that leads to a second, essential question: how much can we think about at any given time?
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There’s a diligence to swimming in the mornings. There’s a willingness in rising early to suit up and shake off the solemnity of slumber in order to make your body do something it doesn’t want to do. There’s an accomplishment to the training, the exercising, the stroking, the breathing, the kicking. The reach of the stroke seems to express the metaphor of one reaching toward the new day. “I’m ready for you,” it says. “I’m coming for you and I’m intentional in my pace.”
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As the beginning of another school year looms in front of us, and as I attempt to align enough ducks to guard against any irreparable meltdowns during the first several weeks of class, I find myself, yet again, thinking more about the broad teleological nature of this work rather than some of the specifics of my lesson plans. Surely the former informs the latter, but perhaps there is a degree to which I should shut down the armchair philosophizing long enough to tighten a few practical nuts and bolts.
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I live in two very different worlds. On one hand, I am a father of four who supports and helps in the homeschooling of our children with a Christian and classical approach. On the other, I have spent my entire professional career in public education as a K-12 teacher and university professor. Perhaps because of this immersion into two very distinct settings, I have been able to bring them to bear on each other. I want to share in this short article one of the wonderful overlaps that few may have seriously looked at.
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The great secret, as C.S. Lewis asserted years ago, is that God is a hedonist at heart. God tells us to say no to many things, but only that we may say yes to higher and better things! God instructs us to say no to avarice and prodigality in order that we may say yes to generosity; He commands that we say no to selfishness and self-centeredness so that we may say yes to love and community.
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I vividly remember sitting in a dim school auditorium my junior year of high school, pencil positioned to take the PSAT when all test-takers were required to copy out a pledge promising that no cheating would take place. The requirement? The pledge had to be written in cursive. One by one, students’ hands went up as they asked, “How do you write in cursive?” “How do you make a capital ‘i’?” and “Are all the letters supposed to be connected?”
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Where does literature fit in a well-ordered life?
That’s a question I try to get my students to ask on the last day of “Civilization and Literature,” a core humanities course I teach at Grove City College. A small percentage of these young men and women will never teach a literary text. The lion’s share never blink at the prospect of a PhD in English. (And thank heaven, since someone needs to keep the world running.) What part will the classics play in their lives five years from now, ten years from now, twenty?
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Today we pursue episodic happiness with a tenacious, if not illogical, commitment. Yet despite our attachment to it, the modern notion of happiness is rather novel.
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