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By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg
Sitting atop his ivory wall, the pedantic egghead Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that any word he uses means "just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty deflects: "The question is. . . .which is to be master – that's all." Humpty Dumpty means master in the sense of ruler, the one who holds power over the word. But "master" carries an older sense that he has discarded: the ancient term for teacher (magister), whose authority ought never to be power, but the conformity of his mind to reality.
In this scene with Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll gives us a portrait of a certain kind of Oxford academic: pompous, contemptuous, and confident in his own authority. He subordinates the true source of speech, which is reality, to his will. Humpty Dumpty is the prototype for a veritable army of modern professors, convinced that in controlling the meaning of words, they control the world. Sit through an accreditation review, or a staff development day, and you'll encounter Humpty's prolific progeny. The radical abuse of speech is no isolated phenomenon; it is the new norm in "education."
What Carroll conveyed through Humpty Dumpty has now proliferated throughout the entire profession. Even the most vital words in teaching, "school" and "education" have lost their grounding in reality, a crisis academia fails to address.
We ought to follow, instead, St. Augustine's thought in De magistro "On the Teacher"; a word's meaning is never ours to invent. Augustine gives us a dialogue with his son on what a teacher's words can actually do when they pass from one mind to another.
Augustine demonstrates that words cannot put truth into another human soul; they can only prompt the hearer to accept or reject the truth of what is said. He asserts that it is only the "teacher within," the Logos Himself, who is the one true teacher. In Augustine's own borrowed wisdom, we are "not to call anyone on earth our master because there is only one Master of all who is in Heaven." A teacher who arrogates to himself the right to have his words mean whatever he wants them to mean has abandoned the source of all truth.
We are apt to think that "school" is a building where children go for instruction. Our modern notions of "school" differ radically from ancient exemplars like Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, or the gymnasium where bodily discipline accompanied the contemplation of philosophical truth.
The word "school" once conveyed a surprising meaning. In antiquity, school meant leisure, not in the modern sense, but as an interior disposition of the soul: at rest, still, and yet wide awake to receive all of reality as it truly is. School, or leisure, is the proper interior state of being to hear a good lecture or to receive from a master teacher what is real and true. In past ages, if one was gifted with leisure time, it was the proper response to spend that time cultivating the interior life.
The word "education" is as much abused as "school." A few years ago, I interviewed top teachers, school leaders, and county administrators to ask them to define the word "education." The answers were noteworthy in at least two concerning ways.
First, I received as many different definitions as the people I asked.
Second, none of the answers conveyed a concept of education rooted in reality.
In the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, to educate has always meant to educe, to lead a student forth, out of the darkness of error and sin, and into the light of truth and virtue. Education is the formal cause of a nation, or as Chesterton put it, "education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." This understanding of education is nowhere to be found in modern schools.
It's no small irony that leisure and "leading a student forth" are now conspicuously absent from the very institutions we call "schools." Th...
Sitting atop his ivory wall, the pedantic egghead Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that any word he uses means "just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." Humpty Dumpty deflects: "The question is. . . .which is to be master – that's all." Humpty Dumpty means master in the sense of ruler, the one who holds power over the word. But "master" carries an older sense that he has discarded: the ancient term for teacher (magister), whose authority ought never to be power, but the conformity of his mind to reality.
In this scene with Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll gives us a portrait of a certain kind of Oxford academic: pompous, contemptuous, and confident in his own authority. He subordinates the true source of speech, which is reality, to his will. Humpty Dumpty is the prototype for a veritable army of modern professors, convinced that in controlling the meaning of words, they control the world. Sit through an accreditation review, or a staff development day, and you'll encounter Humpty's prolific progeny. The radical abuse of speech is no isolated phenomenon; it is the new norm in "education."
What Carroll conveyed through Humpty Dumpty has now proliferated throughout the entire profession. Even the most vital words in teaching, "school" and "education" have lost their grounding in reality, a crisis academia fails to address.
We ought to follow, instead, St. Augustine's thought in De magistro "On the Teacher"; a word's meaning is never ours to invent. Augustine gives us a dialogue with his son on what a teacher's words can actually do when they pass from one mind to another.
Augustine demonstrates that words cannot put truth into another human soul; they can only prompt the hearer to accept or reject the truth of what is said. He asserts that it is only the "teacher within," the Logos Himself, who is the one true teacher. In Augustine's own borrowed wisdom, we are "not to call anyone on earth our master because there is only one Master of all who is in Heaven." A teacher who arrogates to himself the right to have his words mean whatever he wants them to mean has abandoned the source of all truth.
We are apt to think that "school" is a building where children go for instruction. Our modern notions of "school" differ radically from ancient exemplars like Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, or the gymnasium where bodily discipline accompanied the contemplation of philosophical truth.
The word "school" once conveyed a surprising meaning. In antiquity, school meant leisure, not in the modern sense, but as an interior disposition of the soul: at rest, still, and yet wide awake to receive all of reality as it truly is. School, or leisure, is the proper interior state of being to hear a good lecture or to receive from a master teacher what is real and true. In past ages, if one was gifted with leisure time, it was the proper response to spend that time cultivating the interior life.
The word "education" is as much abused as "school." A few years ago, I interviewed top teachers, school leaders, and county administrators to ask them to define the word "education." The answers were noteworthy in at least two concerning ways.
First, I received as many different definitions as the people I asked.
Second, none of the answers conveyed a concept of education rooted in reality.
In the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, to educate has always meant to educe, to lead a student forth, out of the darkness of error and sin, and into the light of truth and virtue. Education is the formal cause of a nation, or as Chesterton put it, "education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." This understanding of education is nowhere to be found in modern schools.
It's no small irony that leisure and "leading a student forth" are now conspicuously absent from the very institutions we call "schools." Th...