Education as a Humanising Activity
Dr Felicity McCutcheon
Dialogue Australasia Conference
Auckland 2006
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn”
(Thoreau)
I have changed my title slightly. The change is small but important.
‘Education as a human activity’ states that educating is something
humans do. ‘Education as a humanising activity’ suggests that education
is something that helps us become human. And it is this latter meaning
that I intend to explore with you this morning. Yes, educating is
something that human beings do, but I want to claim that true education
is essential to helping us become more fully human.
I recently read an article written by a friend who, although Anglo-Saxon,
teaches in an Islamic college in Melbourne. He and a Muslim colleague
were together exploring the concept of education and role in it played by
the creative imagination.1 My friend teaches English. His colleague teaches
Religion. It was not an accident that I was sent this article for I had
mentioned to my friend that I was collecting my own thoughts on the
topic of education, in readiness for this very presentation. And I thought I
was doing okay until I read his article2. In it I encountered an idea from
which I could not avert my mental gaze. The striking idea that lay at the
heart of my friends paper was this: that true education involves nothing
more (and nothing less) than to ‘make oneself capable of God’.
Now by this I don’t mean that one has to become God or think of oneself
as godlike. I take it to mean something like this. To become ‘capable of
God’ is to become ready for and worthy of all that is designated by ‘God’;
a concept that designates Ultimate Reality or Ultimate Concern, and which
is often thought of, or approached in, secondary concepts like Hope,
Beauty, Love, Goodness and Truth. The reason this idea transfixed me
completely (it comes originally from the medieval Sufi master, Ibn Arabi)
was because I had been trying to find a way to articulate the notion that
education is the bringing to potential (the drawing out) all that lies within
the human being. And I was struck by the beauty and richness of the
central claim that what it means to be fully human is to become capable
of God.
There are many ways to make sense of such an evocative image. I am
going to focus on just two of them. I am going to suggest that becoming
‘Imaginal Transformation and Schooling’, by James Bradbeer and Abdul Ghafoor Abdul Raheem,
unpublished.
2
In preparation, I was crafting ideas gleaned from Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be and John Ralston
Saul’s The Unconscious Civilisation, with a view to identifying the defining characteristics of
humanity in its fullness.
1
1
capable of God involves two things: to become capable of reality and to
become capable of love. I am then going to look at the some of the
challenges educators face today, in the hope that identifying them will
help us address and go some way towards overcoming them.
Becoming Capable of Reality
Many of you will have read M Scott Peck’s well known book, The Road
Less Travelled. Some of you may also have heard me speak about it
before (to you, I apologise if I am about to repeat myself!) The key idea
of the book is this. That human growth (and psycho-spiritual health –
Scott Peck was a psychiatrist) is intimately tied to our ability to face
reality. Conversely, he claims that all mental illness has its origin in an
inability or refusal to face up to some feature of reality.
Scott Peck provides a very helpful framework for understanding the
process whereby we become capable of reality. He writes: “The more
clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal
with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world – the more
our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions – the
less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and to make
wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map – a map with which to
negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will
generally know where we are and where we are going. If the map is false
and inaccurate we will generally be lost”.3
[Whiteboard illustration, including distinction between embodied and
disembodied experiences, our current context, need for simplistic maps,
and generalised state of anxiety4]
“The self is self only because it has a world – a structured universe to
which it belongs and from which it is separated”5
An acquaintance wrote in an email recently, that to become human self is
to be ‘brought to the end of [ourselves] so that we can reflect on our own
understanding and see what manner of creature we are”.6 And what
manner of creature are we? Here is how Irish writer, John O’Donohue
describes us:
“The first light was born out of the dark. All through evolution the light
grew and refined itself, until, finally, a new lamp was lit with the human
mind. Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the lamp
brightened the home at night. There was one special lamp with a mirror
fitted behind it to magnify the light. If you looked into the light at an
angle, you could catch a heart-shaped light reflected in the mirror. It was
3
M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, p. 44/5
Just last week I heard that the ‘latest survey’ had discovered that 1 in 5 (20%) of year 12 students had
thought about killing or hurting themselves because of the stresses in their life.
5
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 87/88
6
Adam Andrews, Director of The Center for Literary Education. Private email correspondence. I have
misquoted him slightly as, in the context of our email, he made this claim about what it means to
educate.
4
2
as if the light wished to see itself. Of all the previous brightness in
creation, this was the new secret of the light of the mind: it was a light
that could see itself.”7
I haven’t managed to find the kind of lamp and mirror spoken of here, but
I do have a candle that illuminates within and without. I want it to burn
before us as a symbol of all the young people in our care, and as a
reminder of the reason we are here.
Suffer the children
I have suggested that the relentless over exposure to information and
imagery is contributing to a generalised anxiety and sense of
meaninglessness. This appears to be true for adults but how much more
so for children? In his beautiful article, my friend writes that ‘parents
ought to be the firmament above and the firmament below for a child.
They are the arms of love’8 A child needs an above and a below. A child
needs to be helped and guided as it steps forth into the world. This is
what it means to be shown how to make a map of reality that is true and
accurate. Plato warns of the consequence of failing to provide such
guidance:
“We know that the beginning is the most important part of any work,
especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at
which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more
readily taken…Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual
tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their
minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should
wish them to have when they are grown up?” (Plato, The Republic)
Many of the parents I meet and talk to admit to being in a kind of free fall,
in no better position to guide their children (and in many cases, giving up
all responsibility for doing so) than the children themselves. An episode of
Super Nanny affords us a glimpse of the chaotic and humanly destructive
environment that ensues when the grown ups relinquish responsibility for
their young. (Would this, could this, ever happen in the animal kingdom?)
Thomas Merton describes the kind of environment we are condemned to
when casual tales by casual persons abound: “Where men live huddled
together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing
and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only
immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and
clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without
hearing and responds without thinking…Each individual in the mass is
insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear,
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Exploring our hunger to belong, p.206.
The ‘enlightenment’ thinker, Immanuel Kant, describes enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his
self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from
another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies in lack of resolve and courage to use one’s
understanding without guidance from another” (1784 essay: ‘An Answer to the question: What is
Enlightenment?”
8
Bradbeer and Abdul Raheem, p.7
7
3
he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk; he
produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises.
He does not think, he secretes clichés.9
This is the kind of environment we are all in danger of inhabiting, but our
young people especially, I think. I recently visited the matrix capital of
Australia, the Gold Coast. I happened to be flicking through a local
newspaper and came across a story on plastic surgery. Apparently, the
fastest growing group seeking ‘cosmetic enhancement’ are teenage girls,
predominately after breast implants and botox (presumably in the hope of
acceptance, beauty and therefore love). 16 year olds worrying so much
about wrinkles that they are willing to have themselves injected with a
poison that paralyses! I couldn’t help but see this as a metaphor for a
deeply troubled mentality of refusal and denial: a refusal to accept reality
(‘paralysing’ is a form of being ‘frozen in time’…a denial, if you like, that
aging - and death - belong quite naturally to the order to things). Scott
Peck has warned us of the consequences of retreating from or refusing to
accept reality.
But as we have also seen, a young and tender thing needs to be protected
from certain aspects of reality in order to develop the ability to face it.
O’Donohoue writes: ‘If we loot our sensibility we have nothing to open the
door to welcome the world’. A child is born, full of spontaneity and
sensibility. And then the looting begins.
The task of educating (and therefore of humanising) is much more difficult
in an age where the implied assumption is that there is no objective
reality. It was easier in the days when young people rebelled against their
elders because that rebellion at least required a rejection of something.
What we have today is, as Merton described it, immersion in general
chatter and meaninglessness.
Time magazine published an article earlier this month10 exploring the life
of Gen M. Gen M apparently stands for the ‘multi-tasking generation’, (it
might be more apt to think of the ‘M’ as standing for Generation Matrix!).
A comment by a university professor, quoted in the article really struck
me. Speaking of students at M.I.T., one of America’s premier tertiary
institutions, Sherry Turkle comments, “People are going to lectures by
some of the greatest minds, and they are doing their mail…I tell them this
is not a place for e-mail, it’s not a place to do online searches and not a
place to set up Internet relay chat channels in which to comment on the
class. It’s not going to help if there are parallel discussions about how
boring it is. You’ve got to get people to participate in the world as it is”
(p.52)
You’ve got to get people to participate in the world as it is. Easier said
than done! As we have already seen, being able to participate in the world
as it is is difficult at the best of times, but how much more difficult it
9
T. Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, p.56-7
Time, 10th April, 2006, ‘The Multitasking Generation, pp 47-53
10
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becomes when I have deeply entrenched strategies, attitudes and
technologies to protect myself from having to engage with it.
One of the worrying, although completely understandable survival
strategies developed by young people is the demand for oversimplification. When your world is full of chaos and confusion, you are in
need of clarity and order. In the Time article, Claudia Koonz, from Duke
University describes her students thus: “They demand clarity. They want
identifiable good guys and bad guys…their belief in the simple answer, put
together in a visual way, is, I think, dangerous” (p.52). It is dangerous,
because as we have already seen, reality is essentially complex and
ambiguous. Learning to encounter it necessarily demands of me the
capacity to accommodate complexity and ambiguity. The more simplistic
my understanding, the greater injustice I do to reality. Fundamentalist
systems of thought are the best example of this. In applying a simple map
to a reality that transcends it, I reduce that reality and thus harm both it
and myself.
Koonz goes on to analyse the aversion her students have to complexity:
“it’s as if they have too many windows open on their hard drive. In order
to have a taste for sifting through different layers of truth, you have to
stay with a topic and pursue it deeply, rather than go across the surface
with your toolbar”11 Recall the whiteboard. What else can these students
do if they are not in a position to ‘meet and make sense’ of the world?
There is probably nothing new about university students attending
lectures by some of the greatest minds and chatting to each other about
how boring it is. Perhaps the lecture is boring (not all great minds can
teach well!)What concerns me is not that students are being typical
students, but that a dangerous attitude lurks behind such behaviour, an
attitude that must be challenged by educators if we are to help our
students develop a stance towards reality that it not governed by
ignorance and arrogance.
I encounter the same attitude in my own classes (and I suspect you do,
too). Of course they are too polite to say this but my students carry the
assumption that anything I know, they can look up on the internet when
they need to know it, so my presence in the classroom is pretty much
irrelevant. They might as well be doing their mail.
And it would be much easier to let them! But as teachers, we too, should
be the firmament above and the firmament below, for our students. If we
are to help them become capable of God then our responsibilities are no
less great than that of a parent. And it does take effort. Becoming capable
of reality, learning to deal with complexity and ambiguity, is both an
intellectual and an ethical achievement. It requires work of mind and spirit.
It is why, as my friend and his Muslim colleague claim, ‘the well-argued
essay is an instrument of transformation, and it has this instrumentality
precisely because the students can’t produce one until they have
overcome specific difficulties within themselves” (p.17) The difficulties to
11
Time, 10th April, 2006, p.52
5
be overcome, as anyone who has struggled to order and clarify their
thoughts, construct an argument and communicate truth will know,
include silencing the ego self…listening to…and being held accountable to
standards of truth and accuracy that lie outside oneself.12 As the Muslim
teacher remarked “we are used to believing in our own realities, but the
argument of the essay has to come from another reality” (p.17). Refusing
the standards of good thinking (or refusing to put in the effort required to
achieve them) amounts to refusing the existence of another reality, a
reality other than my own. And this is why Simone Weil describes all
genuine learning as an act of love because to truly learn, I must pay
attention to another reality. “Although people seem unaware of it today,
the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object, and
almost the sole interest of studies. Every time a human being succeeds in
making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of
truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it even if his efforts
produce no visible fruit. The other true purpose of education is to inculcate
humility – not just a virtue but the condition of virtue”.13
‘The argument of the essay comes from another reality’. That other reality
speaks to us in all kinds of unexpected ways. It happened during an
interview I was listening to on the radio a couple of months ago. Nick
Cave was talking about his involvement in that extraordinary film ‘The
Proposition’. The interviewer, unaware perhaps, of the kind of being he
was interviewing, made some fairly unfavourable comments about Kylie
MInogue and Cave’s work with her a few years ago (you may remember
they sang some duets together). The interviewer implied that Cave had
somehow trivialised his creative genius by collaborating with ‘the singing
budgie’. Cave’s response to the interviewer’s bait (intended to be a kind of
joke a Kylie’s expense), which I can still hear, was not to chuckle and
agree. He paused and then in a voice, gentle, deep and true, he said “How
little you know of a person”. It was a most moving moment. (I couldn’t
help but think that if only we could truly hear his voice, no-one would ever
again, pick up a gossip magazine).
Cave was speaking on behalf of another reality.
‘The time is out of joint’
John Cougar (now Mellancamp) once sung “If you don’t stand for
something you will fall for anything”.
What we stand for should decide what is called for in education (and is
intimately tied to what we think education calls forth.) Do we believe in
objective reality and objective value or not? The ‘educational problem’ is
wholly different as you stand within or without of ‘The Tao’, the belief that
12
I am sure you remember as well as I do, senior school (and perhaps university days) when we
desperately wanted to include quotations that simply delighted us, whether or not they had a proper
place in our essay. The discipline of giving up those favoured words, developed not merely mind but
will.
13
Simone Weil, Waiting on God: Letters and Essays, Fount Paperbacks, 1977, p. 53
6
certain attitudes and values are true/false, ordinate/inordinate to the kind
of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
I recently came across a very helpful description of what is at stake here.
In his fascinating article on AN Whitehead,14 Colin Wilson writes:
“Postmodernism15 is based upon the simple assertion that ‘meaning is an
illusion that can be analysed into its constituent parts. Look at a
newspaper photograph of a smiling girl through a magnifying glass; it
dissolves into dots. This, say [the postmodernists] proves that the smile is
constituted by the dots [it is only dots]. But look at the photograph from a
distance and you see that the smile is genuine, and that the photograph
captures an essence. Try to break down the essence into the property of
the dots and you fail utterly. It was there, in the smiling girl”.
Do you believe the smile is real? That it captures an essence? How would
you present an argument to a student who claimed that there are only
dots and you make of them what you like?
“I will make reality whatever I want it to be”
One of the most chilling insights in M Scott Peck’s study of the nature of
evil (People of the Lie) is his claim that life diminishing acts spring from a
narcissistic orientation towards reality. Narcissism is essentially selfabsorption – to be self-absorbed is to reference reality to me, rather than
myself to reality. It is the result of a kind of collapse of the relationship
between self and non-self; the ‘structured universe to which it belongs
and from which it is separate’. When we are self-absorbed we are
estranged from an objectively structured universe, to which we belong
and in which we know our place. And this has disastrous consequences for
our humanity:
As Tillich describes it, “Self-loss is the loss of one’s determining
centre…things no longer speak to man; under the control of hubris, the
self can approach the state of disintegration. Both self and world are
threatened. Man becomes a limited self, in dependence on a limited
environment. He has lost his world; he has only his environment”.16 To
lose my world is to lose my humanity.
Hubris, so central to much of Greek tragedy, is the arrogance or pride of
assuming the place of the gods. It is really the condition of not knowing
one’s proper place. Knowing this requires a universe that exists
independently of my making. It is discovered not made.
The default position for a self that does not have a ‘determining centre’ is
the residual Freudian ‘id’, the anonymous ‘it’ that unleashes itself on the
world, expecting to get its own way, expecting instant gratification,
expecting to avoid all pain and unpleasantness. On the surface it can
14
Originally published in the Georgia Review, Winter 1993, (47:740-8). Brackets mine
‘Postmodernism’ covers a wide variety of positions. The definition given by Wilson here is just one
of them.
16
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol II, p, 71
15
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appear quite ‘tolerant’ and accepting. But inside it is often rigid and
inflexible. I am amazed at how narrow and judgemental my so-called
‘tolerant’ students often turn out to be. Just last week a year 12, whilst
pontificating on how ridiculous it was for Muslims to get so upset about
the Muhammad cartoons, in the exact same breath, said that the person
who threw the beer bottle onto – and happened to extinguish - the
eternal flame at the Melbourne shrine ‘should be killed’. Such rigidity is
often unconscious!17
Which brings me to a point I want to make about our values and life skills
programs. They are hopeless if they simply present the student with a
series of facts about, for example, the effects of drugs or the possible
physical consequences of casual sex. Facts themselves are irrelevant in
the face of the forces of the psycho-spiritual mechanism of self. As the
Greeks knew, “Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is
powerless against the animal organism”18 The difference between the
student who binge drinks every weekend and the one who doesn’t is not
that one listened in class and the other one didn’t. Knowledge is useless
unless we also have the will and desire to act on it.
When Nick Cave spoke on behalf of that other reality, he didn’t present an
argument to the intellect. He whispered to the human heart. He called
upon it to be become better and the way he spoke awoke in it the desire
to become so.
To become human is to become capable of God. But as the Dalai Lama
commented after Sept 11th; when we ignore godly ways, we do ungodly
things. How are we awakening in our student’s hearts, the desire for godly
things? How are we nurturing the sensibilities of spirit that open up the
channels of graciousness and kindness? Tolerance, that is not felt by the
heart as compassion and held in the mind as understanding, is empty.
The impasse we find in world events today suggests to me that the
rhetoric is empty.
In his Confessions, Tolstoy describes what it must be like to lose your
world and have only the dots (the dots of immediacy): “Without
remembering when I had been put into it, I found myself in a boat that
had set off from some unknown shore. The direction to the opposite shore
was shown to me, oars were put into my inexperienced hands, and I was
left alone. I rowed as best I could and moved forwards, but the further I
rowed towards the centre of the stream, the faster the current became
that was carrying me directly away from my object, and I kept meeting
more oarsmen like myself, who were being carried away by the current.
There were lone oarsmen who continued to row; there were some who
had discarded their oars; there were large rowing boats and enormous
ships full of people, some struggling with the current, others abandoning
themselves to it. And as I looked at the flow of those drifting downstream,
I found that the more I rowed, the more I forgot the directions that had
17
Bradbeer and Abdul Raheem. Returning to the earlier image, it was as if this boy had two completely
separate ‘windows’ or files open…As such, he had not been able to make the connection between them.
18
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.13
8
been given to me. In the middle of the current, amid the crowd of boats
and ships being pulled downstream, I lost my directions and abandoned
my oars. From all directions people were being carried downstream by sail
and oar, shouting for joy and assuring me and themselves that there
could be no other direction. [There are only the dots!] And I believed
them and flowed with them. And I was carried a long way, so far that I
could hear the noise of the rapids which were bound to shatter me, and I
caught sight of boats that were already being smashed against them.
Then I came to my senses. For a long time I could not understand what
had happened to me. I saw nothing ahead of me except the destruction
towards which I was rushing, but which I feared, and I could see no
salvation anywhere, and I did not know what to do. But looking behind me
I saw countless boats that could not stop but were defiantly pushing
against the current, and I remembered the oars and the direction of the
shore, and I began to struggle back against the current, towards the
shore. The shore was God…and the oars were the freedom given to me to
row towards the shore. In this way, the force of life rose up within me and
I started to live once again”19
And what if I am a young person who has known only the casual tales told
by casual people and have only a dim awareness of the shore? What if I
have been born into the boat already drifting with the current? What hope
have I got?
There is much to glean from Tolstoy’s powerful description, but in closing,
I want to pick up on the image that striving for the other shore
(‘becoming capable of God’), requires two things: 1) a commitment to, or
awareness of, that distant shore and 2) a defiant struggle against the
current or tide of our times.
Striving for the distant shore requires courage and effort because the tide
of our times is strong and flowing fast with the following assumptions:






Reality is whatever you want it to be (there is nothing beyond the
dots, there is no distant shore)
The outer world is more important than the inner world (there is no
smile)
Suffering is an aberration to human life, (rather than being an
essential constituent of it)
Computers are more intelligent than humans (and the more like
computers we become, the better)20
Efficiency is the same as effectiveness
Certainty is more important than uncertainty21
Tolstoy’s Confessions, Penguin, 1987, p.66
Ralston Saul, “Once in possession of enough equipment [schools] can line up a classroom full of
students behind machines where they are educated in isolation by something less intelligent than a
human”. The Unconscious Civilisation, p.140
21
Tillich elaborates on the attraction of certainty (and the terrible price we are prepared to pay for it):
“Doubt is based on man’s separation from the whole of reality – so it can be overcome by surrendering
his separation and fleeing from his freedom to fanaticism – a situation in which no further questions
can be asked and the answers to previous questions are imposed authoritatively. The fanatic surrenders
19
20
9



The heart is simply an organ of feeling (and not an organ of
knowing or understanding)
Management and control are more important than creativity and
spontaneity
Our students’ happiness is more important than their humanity
Let me briefly comment on this list. When Jung claimed that
‘consciousness is a precondition of being’, he warned against mistaking
narrow self-knowledge for consciousness22. Paul mentioned at the start
that spiritual education tends to get lost or forgotten when we divide the
person into their constituent parts. He is right but let us not fall into the
trap of thinking that we can just add another component to education and
call it ‘spiritual’, or worse, think that the Religious Education department
can take care of it. The spirit is not another component of the self. It is
the essence of the self. It is the force that integrates all others. “The
unique human capacity we call spirit can also be called freedom. It is the
capacity to transcend our biological, social and political conditioning. It
can never be discovered by science since it is not allowed in the
laboratory”.23
Jung also claimed that neurosis was the result of a refusal to suffer. As
Ralston Saul puts it “the examined life makes a virtue of uncertainty…the
virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea…the acceptance of psychic
discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness”.24 The more we model the
human on the machine, the more difficult we make it to become human. A
machine knows nothing about doubt, or suffering, or having one’s heart
broken, it knows nothing of pathos or imagination or creativity. It has no
world or self. And when you sit in front of your screen, despite its cheery
greeting to you each morning, it knows nothing of you. The difference
between a human and a machine is this: a machine cannot doubt, it
cannot suffer, it cannot love. It neither knows nor can it become capable
of God
I have not said enough explicitly about love, although in a sense, it is the
theme in everything I have said.
“Christ reproached the scribes and Pharisees because they took the keys
to the kingdom of heaven, but neither entered themselves, nor permitted
himself in order to save his spiritual life. Meaning is saved but self is sacrificed. The regained certitude
is fanatical self-assertiveness” (The Courage to Be p.49/50),
22
“Much modern therapy trains people to be rigid observers of themselves. They never sleep on the job.
Like heroic cowboys they manage to sleep with one eye open. It is, then, extremely difficult to let
yourself become a whole-hearted participant in your one, beautiful, unrepeatable life. You are taught to
police yourself. When you watch a policeman walk down a street, he does it differently. He is alert, his
eyes combing everything. He does not miss anything. When you police yourself, you are on the beat
alone…when the usual suspects surface, you will put them through the full process: identification,
arrest, conviction. You know how to ‘deal’ with them…We need to rediscover the wise graciousness of
spontaneity” (O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes, p.333).
23
Sam Keene, Hymns to an unknown God, p.65
24
The Unconscious Civilisation, p.195
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others to” (Tolstoy, Confessions, p113). What Jesus came to show us was
that to become capable of God is to become capable of Love.
Are we, as educators, perhaps a little too like the Pharisees? Well
intentioned but missing the point? We, too, hold the keys to true human
potential. Are we, however, preventing our students from fully realising
theirs? C S Lewis worried about this over 50 years ago, claiming that such
would be the inevitable consequence of what I am calling the ‘ideology of
dots’ (an ideology that rejects the Tao). “Are we cutting out of their souls,
long before they are old enough to choose for themselves, the possibility
of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority have held
to be generous and humane?”25 There are certainly echoes of Plato here.
Lewis distinguishes between education that ‘initiates’ the young into
human life and education that merely ‘conditions’ them. One [‘deals’] with
its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to
fly: the [other] deals with them as the poultry keeper deals with young
birds – making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know
nothing”.26 There’s an idea. To become capable of God is to learn how to
fly! I sometimes think that crimes against humanity27 are being
committed in schools, on a more than occasional basis.
So, as we come together for the next two days, to engage and learn, to
struggle and strive to understand the responsibility we have as teachers;
let us have, in the forefront of our minds, the ultimate aim, and not
merely the instrumental goals, of being truly educated.
Helping our students become capable of God involves helping them
become capable of goodness (Professor Wainwright will speak on this),
helping them have the courage to hear and respond to the call of
transcendence (Peter Vardy and Kierkegaard will help us on this), helping
them harness what is unique to human minds and hearts – our creative
and critical intelligence – and make no mistake, a computer can be
neither critical nor creative (Dr Rod Girle and Prof Whitehead will address
this). Professor Gillett will show us ways of becoming more able to deal
with complexity and ambiguity in the field of medical ethics, and Dr Ryan
will remind us of why silence and stillness are crucial to our humanity and
to our endeavour to both become, and to help our students become,
capable of God. This is our true calling as educators. It is also our calling
as human beings. May our time together help us all become more worthy
of it.
I have already referred to The Tao. Let me finish with a Taoist poem, a
poem that provides a vision of true education in more concrete terms than
I have perhaps achieved.
25
C S Lewis The Abolition of Man, p.7
Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.13
27
A phrase I picked up from the Bradbeer/Abdul Raheem article
26
11
The Woodcarver
Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand
Of precious wood. When it was finished,
All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be
The work of spirits.
The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:
‘What is your secret?’
Khing replied: ‘I am only a workman:
I have no secret. There is only this:
When I began to think about the work you commanded
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.
‘By this time all thought of your Highness
And of the court had faded away.
All that might distract me from the work
Had vanished.
I was collected in the single thought
Of the bell stand.
‘Then I went to the forest
To see the trees in their own natural state.
When the right tree appeared before my eyes,
The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt,
All I had to do was to put forth my hand
And begin.
‘If I had not met this particular tree
There would have been
No bell stand at all.
“What happened?
My own collected thought
Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;
From this live encounter came the work
Which you ascribe to the spirits’.
Chuang Tzu
fmccutcheon@ozemail.com.au
12
13
14