Whatsoever Things Are True

Wilfred M. McClay

A Few Thoughts on Education in Modern America

There is something hollow about the blanket praise of “change,” as if change were always inevitable and always commendable. We know better, but we are reluctant to acknowledge it. Instead, we are bombarded with political oratory, editorial-page bombast, and psychological advice, stressing that one must have the courage to change, to reinvent oneself, to adapt, to move on. Flexibility is to be regarded as the chief virtue of the truly civilized. Suppleness is next to godliness.

Yet this rhetoric is often a mere rationalization for selling out, giving in to the spirit of the age, reneging on one’s commitments, and taking the path of least resistance, rather than standing fast and resisting in the name of those things that one should really care about, the things that are precious and good. There’s a dirty little secret such oratory is designed to mask: that all too often it’s change that’s easy, all too easy—and it’s continuity, or loyalty, or perseverance, or honor, or idealism, or any number of other firm and steady traits that we used to think of as “noble,” that is truly difficult. When we choose to forego the fleeting in the name of the enduring, we affirm what is deepest and most admirable in our humanity. But we also swim against the current.

A useful support for this counter-effort can be found in some famous words from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians in the New Testament. Indeed, it’s worth quoting the entire passage:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. (Philippians 4:8)

When I was still a teenager, nearly four decades ago, this sort of statement would have been regarded as sheer platitude, the sort of thing that perhaps everyone believed, but regarded as somewhat too tiresome and obvious and gassy to need to be stated. Today, it sounds almost avant-garde, a rebuke to our slack and jaded age, in which we waste an inordinate amount of our leisure time salivating over the lives and looks of celebrities, and watching gimmicky “reality” television shows whose participants make fools of themselves, and of us for watching. We may soon come to the point where old-fashioned wholesomeness is the most radical posture of all—particularly if it strengthens us to be able to say “no” to the ephemera of our popular culture, and instead resolve to stake our lives on something more solid and more lasting.

There is a philosophy of education embedded in those words from Philippians. And it’s very much at odds with the prevailing approach of many parents, educators, writers, producers, media providers, and kids. The prevailing view is that no one can really know for sure what is true, pure, and just—that such judgments are strictly individual in nature, and that it therefore would be an arrogant imposition of one’s values or tastes to assume otherwise. Therefore the only really fair and honest way to educate young people is to “expose” them to many things, as many things as possible, respect their “feelings,” and leave it to them to sort it all out.

It is an approach to education that appears on the surface to be generous and liberatory, but is in fact far from being either. For it is an approach whose liberality is really only a veil for its lack of conviction, and for its indifference to the fate of the very ones consigned to its care. Not indifference to their physical fates, of which we are now perhaps excessively solicitous, with our growing mania for physical health and safety. But indifference to their intellectual and spiritual fates, about which an attitude of neutrality is in fact an attitude of abdication.

The Philippians passage shows us a better way. It assumes that the fundamental channels of education are mimetic, that they involve learning by imitation, a process in which the choice of admirable examples to be imitated is all important: deep calls unto deep, refinement begets refinement, high ideals call forth high ideals, heroic deeds leave a deposit of noble character. It matters what we are “exposed” to, because we take on the shape of the things we contemplate. A steady diet of triviality, mediocrity, baseness, and propaganda in education leaves us far less than what we could have been. You should remember this in your leisure hours. Those things we choose as exemplary become, in the end, a window onto what we believe that it means to be most fully human. That is the belief at the bottom of all other subjects and pursuits in a genuinely liberal, or freeing, education.

And to be most fully human is always to aspire to be something more than what we are—to aspire to overcome ourselves, improve ourselves, and ennoble ourselves, by holding before ourselves images of high achievement and admirable character, to which we compare ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. No one thought more deeply about these things than Aristotle, and he offered an unforgettable statement of this very theme in the Tenth Book of his Nicomachean Ethics:

We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more in power and in worth does it surpass everything. This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of his self but that of something else. (1177b32–1178a4)

In other words, education should aspire to two things: First, it should point us toward self-control, a condition in which we come into full possession of ourselves, overcoming the tyranny of our appetites, and the even greater tyranny of the immediate, with all its nagging and imperious demands, and instead giving us the capacity to fix our eyes and desires upon the goals that matter, the things that endure. Second, it should make us eager to realize the fullest possibilities of our human nature, which means, paradoxically, striving always to transcend the “merely” human, those foibles and follies to which we all are prone, and instead to inspire us to hear and heed the call of higher things, and to realize what Aristotle called “the best thing in us.”

It is, of course, human to err and stumble, and to be pushed along by forces beyond our control. But it is even more fully human to strive in the teeth of such challenges, to push back against immediacy and necessity, to refuse a life lived entirely moment to moment, as a tumbleweed of unregulated desires, and instead to live a life of unity, integrity, principle, and purpose, a life informed by the directive force of large, generous, and enduring ideals, with a proper sense of life’s proper ends.

This is, I repeat, not the dominant philosophy of education on offer in contemporary America. Instead, training in self-esteem, group dynamics, adjustment, social usefulness, civic engagement, vocational skills, money-making, test-taking, or citizenship, are all cited as the most desirable and reasonable goals for education. And many of them are worthy things. But none compares with the goal of bringing us into possession of ourselves, and helping us catch a glimpse of the full range of our humanity. By that standard, all the other goals seem timid and useless—notwithstanding their panting eagerness to be serviceable and profitable.

There are deep paradoxes at the heart of education. It is most useful when it does not consciously strive to be useful; that is the core of what makes a liberal education liberal. It serves the goal of responsible citizenship best by teaching that there are things higher and more important than being a citizen. It prepares us for the future by immersing us in the past. And it is an unending task, because it engages us in seeking to become more fully what we already are—or rather, to become what we are meant to be, fulfilling some potentiality that is already inherent in what we are. Not that we are necessarily “meant to be” some one particular thing—an architect, a doctor, a welder, whatever. That is not what I mean. Instead, I mean that the fullest measure of our humanity is never something merely given to us. It is an achievement, as well as an endowment. We are always already human, and yet to be human, we also must be constantly striving to be ever more fully so. Education cannot guide and spur us to such achievement so long as it refuses to take a position about the things that are true, honest, just, pure, and lovely. 

Wilfred McClay is SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum. This article will appear in the spring 2008 edition of The Dartmouth Apologia, an undergraduate journal of Christian thought at Dartmouth College.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Meaning and Calling, Fri 07 Mar 2008