Category: Teaching

The higher learning: final thoughts on PHS

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by Michael Umphrey

Meghan Speckert, the editor of Salishian, gave me this assignment: “Since this high school is going through drastic changes, where do you think the school is going? What do you think of this educational system?” I repeatedly gave her good reasons why I didn’t want to do that. But Meghan is persistent–bullheaded, you might say.

She and I have read some significant texts together this year—a large book on John Locke, Thoreau’s Walden, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Plato’s Apology, Eliot’s The Wasteland and many other readings. We discussed these in early morning meetings, after school, a few times on weekends, and we met throughout last summer to discuss some of the big ideas in great books.

We did this at her insistence. In most cases, she made the choices as to what to read, and she set the schedule to fit her other obligations. She got no extra points or grades or credits. She has a genuine interest in what we might call “the higher learning,” and she reminds me of what I’ve always loved about teaching. I’m inclined to do for her whatever I can.

So, where do I think the school is going? If you want to predict a people’s future, your best bet is to figure out what vision is guiding them. Desire drives human history–what we want amid what we think is possible or likely. PHS has not escaped the fate of many schools in recent decades–being captured by late modernist ideology, which is a political vision. Schools have been transformed into massive factories for the production of political opinion—standardized, uniform, flat-souled. It’s not an inspiring vision, but for the winners it sometimes pays well. Meanwhile, dystopias have become the dominant genre of pop literature. People are drawn to stories of zombies—the spiritually dead driven by insatiable appetite—or vampires—creatures who live by devouring the life force in others. We sense that things have gone wrong, that the human world has been impoverished.

Powerful interests set the agenda, and “experts” market the new phrases and ideas in magazines such as Educational Leadership and at conferences such as School Administrators of Montana (SAM). Counselors get the appropriate posters in the mail and tack them up around school. New programs are rolled out and most staff adapt the new buzzwords—a few feign enthusiasm and most offer due compliance without much change in practice.

I would expect the future in the near term to be quite like the present. People with little background in history, literature and philosophy have few resources with which to critique the endless repetition of political orthodoxy. They may advocate critical thinking but they can’t quite practice it.

I have seen fewer students like Meghan each year. Late modernist thought is quite relativistic. Bit if no opinions are better than other opinions, there’s little point in putting the work into understanding what Socrates or Locke or Thoreau thought. Since I”ve been at PHS, I don’t recall ever hearing a leader justify education in any terms except self-interest and careerism. We no  longer talk about truth, beauty and justice. The new verities are race, class, gender—and material success. For students who have been taught that education is mainly vocational—a means to a higher income—the focus shifts to finding the quickest and most convenient way to get to the payoff. “How many points is this worth?”

Of course, I’m not saying that work is unimportant. Work—effort toward a goal—is the foundation of most people’s lives. How large and how good the order we build for ourselves is determined in large part by the wisdom and persistence of our effort. The young don’t always know this, which is why guidance into wise and persistent work should be the foundation of the education we offer our young.  The question is only whether we live to work instead of working to live.

We need purposes beyond what we do for money if we are to fulfill our promise. The economy is important but it’s not the only game in town—nor is it the most important. Everyone knows this. Lately we hear a lot about civic education and about character education. Eventually, we need to get beyond just talk.

A good education helps us be better citizens, better friends, better parents. It’s useful to know how to change the oil, but there are higher games.

Imagine a chimpanzee at a baseball game, maybe standing on third base. He can see the batter, the runners, and the glittering lights of the scoreboard. What he can’t see is the game itself. There is a level of reality that isn’t accessible to him. He can’t comprehend what’s involved in being in the bottom of the ninth with two out and the count 3-2. He could never figure out what a bunt is, let alone why it might be used. He can’t wake up to a reality that, for him, will never exist.

We’re all like that to varying degrees. We’re all surrounded by levels of play that are invisible to us. Things are happening that we do not see, though they are right in front of us. This is why the secret of life remains a secret even though our greatest teachers in every generation shout it from the rooftops—people cannot or will not hear it

It might be helpful to think about what religion professor James P. Carse has called “the infinite game.” He said, “a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the game.” Football is a finite game. Gardening is an infinite game. A political campaign is a finite game. A family is an infinite game.

In a finite game, winners exclude losers. In an infinite game, winners teach losers better plays.

In a finite game, the winner takes all. In an infinite game, winning is widely shared.

In a finite game, rules are fixed in advance to guarantee a single winner. In an infinite game, rules are changed along the way by agreement.

In a finite game, energy is focused in decisive contests. In an infinite game, energy is invested in the long term.

Finite games focus on how they end. Infinite games focus on how they continue. Good schools–like good communities, good economies and good families–are playing an infinite game. They may include finite games within them, but they ensure that these games don’t displace the larger play or corrupt it. We could have a sports program that didn’t harm academic studies. Carse ends his book with a statement that bears further reflection: there is but one infinite game.

The story of that one infinite game is the story that historically the best schools have organized their practices around. In the west, the main plot of that story has been the coming into the world of justice and freedom. But to a great extent we’ve lost that story.

In recent decades, people have focused on gaining power over the natural world, mainly through science. This has been tremendously successful, and we are all blessed by what we have learned. Our trouble today is that the large systems we have built continue operating but no longer seem under our control. We have elaborate processes of change which are increasingly disconnected from human purposes. We see everywhere the constant agitation of people adjusting to some directive from afar—coping with changes that experts say are needed has become a way of life in most of our institutions. So, many of us learn to comply without really knowing or believing the changes make life better. We abdicate responsibility for what, day by day, we are doing.

In schools, we endure constant disruption and endless new programs engineered to comply with such directives as No Child Left Behind or the Common Core, but test scores stay flat. Meanwhile, we neglect the great topics that once lay at the center of a general education for young people: freedom and justice. The liberal arts not so long ago focused on stories of heroes in history and literature  who lived in a moral universe where death was the horizon but the quest was driven by love as fierce as that homing instinct that drives millions of birds into annual migrations over thousands of miles. The great stories helped us understand the practice of honesty, hope, gratitude, courage and other virtues. We consciously taught our youth that it mattered whether or not they were the sort of people who could be trusted and reliable partners in business, political and personal undertakings.

Much of that is gone now. The modern world is full of miracles, and yet in some ways it is harder than ever to be young. PHS hallways featured suicide prevention posters all year, for good reason. Many young people do not know how to form and preserve enduring relationships. The two most important education books of recent years, Our Kids by liberal researcher Robert Putnam and Coming Apart by conservative researcher Charles Murray, both drew on the same mountain of research and reached similar conclusions: the main cause of our growing social pathologies is the collapse of marriage culture, leaving many kids without the support of strong families. Loneliness is a national problem as we isolate ourselves in individual autonomy and a web of virtual ghosts. We make little effort to teach young people the real basics of living a good life. Instead, we decorate our schools to look like the Capitol in Hunger Games, with banners proclaiming POWER! and PRIDE!

The good news is that anyone who wants to can begin living by different rules. We can choose to pursue the higher learning. We can make the great books our most important peer group, replace a desire for autonomy with a commitment to loyalty, practice making and keeping promises, and act to rescue the others we see hurting around us. You can choose to live among the society of heroes. It turns out to be far easier than the alternatives, and much more fun.

What I didn’t learn in school

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Sometimes “prey” can be as heroic and transcendent as “predator.” Predators exemplify focus, locking in on one thing. But the hunted exemplify a wider awareness, scanning the Surround for threat. Sometimes, the hunted seek high perches so they can see farther, enlarging their awareness of what is out there rather than simply cowering in a concealed place.

The question was “what was the most important thing you didn’t learn in school?” My immediate response was “how to steal fire from the gods.” School has interfered with my education at least as much as it has contributed to it. All that time—all those annoying assignments wasting time, the essence of life, in ways that might have a point in some totalitarian dream. One of the more important things I’ve learned has been how to steal fire from the gods—a task I haven’t heard explicitly mentioned in any classroom.

Eric Voegelin is best on how that works: great artists perceive in the metaxy some cosmic order. We all have glimpses of the eternal way things are, but our greatest artists give those glimpses tangible form in an artifact that others can experience. This brings the divine order within reach of people who are building an earthly order.

Such glimpses occur in proportion to the amount of time we spend in nature, trying to see. Nature is the great text of this world. But it is not a simple text, and we see much farther into it when we study the heritage of great literature that we have. The history of humanity has been a long process of waking up, and we latter-day have more riches available than we have time to access.

A simplified formula: All civilizations are formed around a core of great literature. The source of all great literature is divine revelation from the Beyond.

To be fair, I have done a lot of reading in response to school work, and that reading has been vital to all my most important learning. In my best classes—those taught by professors who enthusiastically knew more than they could say—I read many more book than I was assigned.

But it has been writers who have been my primary teachers. From Solzhenitysn I learned that one person who refuses to lie can bring down a corrupted regime. What vitally important knowledge! The old tyrannies of this world will all burn in God’s holy fire, when we have learned what it is and how it work. Such things have not been talked about in the schools I had access to.


An autumn frame of mind

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In a sense, nature has no endings. Things repeat and repeat in patterns large and small. Through all that humans are a trajectory that gets higher and broader., if we will hear and see.

In a sense, nature has no endings. Things repeat and repeat in patterns large and small. Through all that commotion and continuity, a person may choose a trajectory that speaks of permanent things.

I’m paying more attention now than I ever have to bird migrations—the scale of which is staggering—at the same time I’m feeling a deepening discontent with where I am, intellectually and spiritually. I sense unseen movements taking form around me and being answered within me. Because I’m at work during the days, the most vivid parts of my life now seem to be sunsets in a world becoming more autmnal by the day.

At work, the officialese about change has become a habit for many people, a way of nodding off or going with whatever flow the guy at the front of the room is peddling. It gives an illusion of having mastered what we have not mastered and do not, I suspect, even see. It feels a bit stultifying.

But outside toward evening the geese in small family flocks rehearse flying in formation, from wetland to grainfield and back. Hundreds of geese in groups of 8 or 9 or 20 in constant commotion. Much of the summer they’ve been at nests in families, feeding on shoots, unable to fly due to the molt. Soon they will form up into larger flocks for a thousand mile trip, probably to Utah or Nevada or Arizona. Their great migratory flights almost define the seasons.

Watching them gives me an odd feeling of kinship, seeing a group that allows a kind of individuality in which all take care of each. The birds stay in family groups all year, feeding and nesting and migrating together. This year’s babies will return to this place next year with their parents.

If one goose goes down along the way due to injury or illness, two others peel off and accompany it, staying with it until it recovers or dies, then rejoining whatever flock is passing. Geese are intelligently social, and they allow others to join their flocks, though the original pair, which mate for life, remain in charge and the current year’s youngsters remain their priority.  They maintain hierarchies, one of which is visible in their flight formation. It’s not a rigid hierarchy and leading is more a burden than an indicator of superiority. The lead goose changes fairly often. When the leader gets tired, it drops back and another goose, male or female, takes the lead. The unity is gorgeous and it keeps them safe.

Right now all this year’s youngsters are in full flight, and they are everywhere, highly visible out on open water and in the sky.

Some birds have already left. I don’t see the osprey anymore. The blackbirds—both yellow-headed and red-winged—are still here but with the nesting over they are no longer territorial. They move about in flocks numbering in the thousands. What I’m appreciating this year about migrations is the deep focus on moving on. A tern will fly right past a savory mess of fish offered up for free (though gulls, which are going nowhere, erupt in a noisy contest for a morsel). The birds suddenly ignore the normal temptations and distractions because they are filled with a larger purpose.

The great human migrations have often been like that. In America, the great migrations of black people from the south to the north and people from all over the world, including those of my tribe, into the West display a similar focus on a vaguely grasped promise of something that must lie ahead.

At work, when I escape the change agents, I’ve been reading in preparation for a Holocaust unit I teach to sixteen-year-olds. I’m approaching it by analyzing the two cultures that were in conflict: the Jews and the modern social Darwinists. One feature of the Jews that caught my attention was that they are the first nation ever that came into being while on a journey. Abraham was going toward something and, later, so were the followers of Moses. What they left mattered less than what they looked toward. Their nation did not develop slowly over ages in a fixed place like the English or the French. They were formed around some words and a covenant that bound them to each other and to a shared purpose, and they inhabited change like their truest home.

For people of the Book, the real migration was a spiritual journey, from one state of being to something harder to understand and more liberating to live. We now live  at a time when many people are finding kindred experiences. Things once vital wither. The green turns gold. Things fall apart.  And yet there is something ahead, something worth preparing for, something worth heading toward.

Escaping the mundane

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Hudson Smith receiving a pass at Polson High School.

Sports offer moments of transcendent action and beauty to people otherwise deadened to all the glimpses of eternity which flood through the matter of everyday life.

There, above the mundane world, he’s transfigured in a moment of pure longing and effort, suffused with the beauty of athletic strength and agility. Sports may be the closest some moderns come to the transcendent—to the realm of metaphor where we glimpse spiritual realities through the facts of the material world.

The receiver rises above the horizon, the earthly world of gravity and shadow, into a magically-hued sky, reaching out in the throes of intense effort and intense longing for what might descend from above. It’s not just a football, but also a signifier of glory and meaning.

The story also includes a defender, momentarily hapless, and a referee, judging events by the low standard of rules, which in only necessary, making the game possible. The game itself—that partakes of a different realm. Both the defender and the ref become irrelevant to the hero at that brief moment of success, all power and grace.

Hawthorne branches in blossom...

Emerson: nature and words

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Hawthorne branches in blossom...

An English Hawthorne in May. The boughs were popular for May Day decorations before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, after which the trees did not bloom until mid-May. The ancient Greeks carried hawthorn branches in wedding processions, as emblems of hope.

I intended to start summer by reading Voegelin on Plato. I’m interested in what they both say about the metaxy–the inbetween of the immanent and the transcendent, where we experience being. For young people unfortunate enough to have grown up under the influence of a deconstructive culture which drowns out reality with propaganda, replacing God’s kingdom with their own, their most sacred feelings and emotions are reinterpreted within a bottomless self endlessly chattering amid legions of desires and fears.

I want to think more about today’s language wars, which lie at the heart of modernity’s global contests to replace Creation with Ideology.
I’ve been re-reading Emerson’s “Nature” –or at least listening as I drove the old truck to Missoula for a couple yards of compost. I was surprised at how prescient Emerson was in his discussion of language. He begins his chapter on language with three statements about nature and language:

1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

I read these words when I was in college, but I don’t remember them making any particular impression on me. Today they seem precisely the needed counter to the chorus of antichrists substituting myraid uncertainties for every natural fact. They would destroy such words as male, female, marriage and family by positing endless expanding tangles of meanings, as though the tree of life were a bramble thicket.

Emerson understood nature as language, a way of thinking consistent with Genesis, where God speaks our world. Words refer to realities–to categories that actually exist in Creation, and we can speak truth:

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

It is from nature that we get the images that allow us to think about such things as hope and majesty. Our words are true to the extent that they evoke things as they really are.