"The only thing which the mind can never exhaust...."

From T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King”; here the wizard Merlyn is smoking his pipe, and speaking to Wart (the young King Arthur):

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that, you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

What's interesting to me in this passage is - aside from the truth of the central premise - that there's not a bit of denial of reality in it.  There's no pretense that fear, loneliness, horror, despair, and torture won't and don't occur; there's no denial that we won't be afraid, lonely, horrified, or depairing.  There's merely (merely!) a desire to look reality in the face - and then to overcome the things that corrupt and destroy by the use of a surprising and indirect means.   Learning doesn't change the facts of reality; it changes you.  Learning, when you think about it, is nothing more or less than the transformation of the mind and soul.

Well, yes.

"Almost ubiquitous liturgical chaos," and more

From a John Milbank article in the Australian abc.net.au, "After Rowan:  Priorities for the Anglican Communion":

But perhaps even more urgent for the Church in England than addressing this issue [same-sex relationships] is the need to amend the growing incompetence and theological incoherence on the ground. There are three crucial elements that stand out: 

• Almost ubiquitous liturgical chaos, where many evangelicals and liberals alike have little sense of what worship is for. 
• The increasing failure of many priests to perform their true priestly roles of pastoral care and mission outreach, in a predominantly "liberal" and managerialist ecclesial culture that encourages bureaucratisation and over-specialisation. This has often led to a staggering failure even to try to do the most obvious things - like publicising in the community an Easter egg hunt for children in the bishop's palace grounds! To an unrecognised degree this kind of lapse explains why fewer and fewer people bother with church - though the underlying failure "even to try" has more to do with a post 1960s ethos that assumes decline and regards secularisation as basically a good thing, or even as providentially ordained since religion is supposedly a "private" and merely "personal" affair after all. 
• Perhaps most decisive is the collapse of theological literacy among the clergy - again, this is partly a legacy of the 1960s and 70s (made all the worst by the illusion that this was a time of enlightening by sophisticated German Protestant influence), but it has now been compounded by the ever-easier admission of people to the priesthood with but minimal theological education, and often one in which doctrine is regarded almost as an optional extra.

Later,

If we are to come together, then we need increasingly to learn together - which means both to study and to wonder in concert. What should this mean in practice? I suggest at least three things:

• The Church of England needs to make higher education its top priority - especially given that it can no longer necessarily rely on the universities providing theological courses if they are given no ecclesial assistance. In Britain, we need excellent divinity schools and an enhanced church role in the existing universities of Anglican foundation - from Oxford and Cambridge and Durham to the smaller and more recent institutions. (It should be noted that already the life of Oxbridge chapels and churches, like that of cathedrals, is showing strong signs of recovery, alongside the beginnings of a theological and vocational revival.) It would be a good idea also, as Rowan Williams himself has often suggested, to supplement this with an equivalent role for South Africa, which provides a vital link between the African world and that of the "western" nations. In such institutions new inspiration and old learning could creatively mix. And the elite future leaders of global Anglicanism trained there would preserve a natural love for their alma mater and its cultural and political setting.
• The Church of England needs some sort of equivalent of the Catholic cardinalate. This could be supplied - not by the superfluous creation of an equivalent super-elite - but rather by reinforcing the collective international authority of Primates who are globally some thirty-eight in number. Currently they meet infrequently and in various locations round the world, but perhaps they need to assemble more often and usually in Canterbury, so that they can be given a more consistent role in shaping a new policy for the whole communion. This would at once enhance the "enforcing" role of Canterbury (without which no polity of any kind ever stands) and yet also increase the influence of Anglicans in other countries. For at present, the periodical Lambeth summit of all the world's bishops is simply too infrequent and too unwieldy - and this has been a considerable part of the problem. The archbishops might also be given special links to particular dioceses or even specific parishes in England so that they would have a sense of another home in that country and a stake in English affairs.
• The Anglican Church needs to increase the effectiveness of its teaching office, since this is an essential aspect of priesthood and episcopacy. While the operation of the Catholic magisterium is still (whether fairly or unfairly) regarded as too draconian by many Anglicans, there is little doubt that Anglicanism has gone way too far in the other direction, and offers its members pitifully little guidance and only partial and sporadic leads on doctrine and practice. Again, the work of the doctrine commission in England has recently lapsed and needs to be revived, but in a new international guise and a more thoroughgoing fashion.

And:

Here it should be noted that the Anglican legacy is perhaps more crucial and coherent than is sometimes realised. With English Catholics, Anglicans share common pre-Reformation roots that stretch back to the Venerable Bede. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has recently stressed, it was Bede who gave to the English a strong sense that they were another chosen people who would enjoy God's favour only if they obeyed his laws and sought justice. It was the same Bede who continued the originally Celtic concern with geography, history and the study of nature.

Likewise in Anglo-Saxon England, boosted by King Alfred's translation of the Christian neo-Platonist Boethius, there developed the most impressive early vernacular literature in Europe which, through Alcuin, helped to sow the seeds of the revival of humanistic learning in the Carolingian empire on the continent.

These four elements - Christianity, constitutional justice, empiricism and Platonism, along with the careful but imaginative use of words -- have ever since characterised the English legacy. Yet for all Bede's veneration of Celtic spirituality and practice, he insisted (and the British inherited from him) on a fervent loyalty to Rome and Roman ways, so that up to the time of the Reformation English characteristics were inseparable from the English people's interpretation of the Latin legacy, including Latin Christian art and architecture. It was perhaps the breaking of that link which helped to give later England at her worst an imperial arrogance, serving only herself rather than the transmission of European values, and a Promethean recklessness in the treatment of nature and human labour.

"A Moral Education, Not Just an Excellent One"

A terrific article from the Spring 2012 edition of The Episcopal New Yorker, via Sed Angli.  My bolding below; I especially like the thing about "muscular virtues like grit and integrity" requiring "exercise to grow."   Well, there's a lot I like actually....

A Role for Episcopal Schools in Meaningful Educational Reform

by Robert M. Pennoyer II

This article was published on page 6 of the Spring 2012 issue of the Episcopal New Yorker.

STUDENT disengagement is more than a classroom problem; it’s a civic one. When students cannot make the connection between the work they do in school and the lives they lead (and will lead) outside of it, they are deprived of that which schools should seek most to impart: a passion for inquiry, discovery, and debate; the ability to think critically and to exercise moral and intellectual judgment; the tools and ultimate desire to live a meaningful life. Disengagement in any individual classroom leads to boredom, apathy, stress, and even truancy; it steers students towards shortcuts and lets atrophy those muscular virtues like grit and integrity, the sort that require exercise to grow. On the individual level the symptoms of student disengagement may be “not an important failure” (to borrow Auden’s iconic phrase), but, writ large, the social costs of an increasingly disengaged generation of students cannot, and must not, be ignored.

To a disheartening degree, however, the desire to promote student engagement seems secondary (or absent altogether) in many discussions of educational policy. New outlets seem never to tire of airing vituperative debates about standardized tests and teachers’ unions. The quieter story of students slogging through work they find meaningless wouldn’t sell and might hardly quality as news: disengagement is so pervasive as to be thought an intractable fact of adolescence. William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, calls student disengagement “[t]he most pressing problem in education today.” In an article published in Independent School Magazine, he reports, “With the exception of a relatively small proportion of students (in the diverse national sample of my recent study, about one in five), young people in our country do not see the link between what goes on in their schools and their aspirations for their lives.”¹ Not recognizing a link between one’s work and one’s life exemplifies a typical manifestation of student disengagement in the classroom, and Damon goes on to illustrate its effects. He describes students working hard on activities they find meaningless, resulting in “a pervasive sense of emptiness, boredom, or apathy; for others, a debilitating anxiety; and for still others, an ensnarement in the lures of hedonism and cynicism.”

Education reformers who fail to connect their reforms to students; ability to find meaning in schoolwork risk advocating for change that may be ultimately insignificant or, worse, counter-productive. The most inviting trap for the well-intentioned is the seductive notion that education needs somehow to catch up to the strong winds of modern culture, whose progress has left school curricula irrelevantly bobbing in its wake. Yes, schools should equip their students with tools to collaborate, to use technology productively, to understand the globalizing world or to interpret facts and figures—all crucial priorities for modern schools. Central to their scholastic mission, however, must also be the moral imperative to engage students in the quest for meaning and purpose—even in the midst of a culture that makes them harder to find.

In the new edition of Reasons for Being: The Culture and Character of Episcopal Schools,² headmasters, chaplains, and leaders of Episcopal schools describe the challenges of resisting the cultural forces that engender the disengagement noted by William Damon. There are over 1200 schools and early-childhood education programs affiliated with the Episcopal Church³, and they are diverse in make-up and model. It is probably unwise to make generalization about them beyond what Episcopal educator Ann Mellow writes in her introduction: “Regardless of their history or constellation… Episcopal schools continue to live out the vision of Episcopal school founders… to provide a moral education as well as an excellent one.”⁴

That common thread binds Episcopal schools—their mission “to provide a moral education as well as an excellent one”—means that, according to St. Andrew’s School [Del.] headmaster, Tad Roach, “if true to its mission, [an Episcopal school] affirms, expresses, and enacts a faith, a set of values and principles—indeed a way of learning, thinking, and living counter to the culture of twenty-first-century America.”⁵ Roach explains that in their commitment to service and social justice, reverence for silence, reflection, and study, and celebration of diversity, Episcopal schools provide a counterweight to a culture that seeks to entertain rather than edify, celebrates exclusivity rather than equality, and ignores rather than engages the problems of the world. In “The Inefficiency of Episcopal Education,” [the] executive director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, Daniel Heischman, echoes Roach, proclaiming, “We are called to muster the courage to define ourselves in ways that are often at odds with prevailing social norms. In other words, Episcopal schools today must be intentionally counter-cultural.”⁶

Unencumbered by the legal restraints on public education and united by a mission to promote faith and learning, Episcopal schools have the freedom and the responsibility to be leaders in meaningful school reform. “Meaningful” may be the operative word; it is “meaning” that former dean of Yale Law School Anthony Kronman finds almost entirely absent from higher education’s aims. In Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,⁷ Kronman argues that, with extreme academic specialization, political correctness, the rise of sciences, and the decline of the humanities, universities have lost sight of their former aim: to help students find meaning in life. Instead, students obsess about their future professions, never gaining the ability to “develop the habit, which they will need later on, of looking at things from a point of view outside the channels of their careers.” He adds, “More deeply rooted even than the dogma of career is our addiction to technology and the equation of truth with science. We live today in a narcotized stupor, blind to the ways in which our immense powers and the knowledge that has produced them cuts us off from the knowledge of who we are.”⁸

Finding meaning in life and grappling with the “knowledge of who we are” requires teachers who will help students engage with ethical and existential issues, a practice that not only pays off in terms of students’ moral lives but in their intellectual ones as well.⁹ Without understanding the ways their studies connect to the lives they lead, students are left with only the hollow motivation of competition and careerism. If the question “Why do we have to learn this?” is met with a persuasive and personally meaningful answer, students begin to see their education through a lens of purpose rather than apathy. This is not a radical observation—others have urged educators to incorporate moral issues intentionally into their teaching¹⁰—but it remains a counter-cultural one. Teachers at schools that judge themselves by test scores and college placement lists may experience the pause to engage with moral questions as a debilitating restraint on their efforts to complete their curricula. Students (and their parents) who see education as a commodity to be consumed and traded for a diploma or a degree or a job may resent teachers’ efforts to plumb essential questions whose subjective answers won’t appear on an AP syllabus. Episcopal schools may be free from public oversight and empowered by the opt-in nature of their communities, but even they operate within a broader educational system that is defined in large part by the priorities, assumptions, and culture of colleges and universities.

Schools must take a counter-cultural stance in order to provide truly meaningful educations, and Episcopal schools are not only well suited to do so, but, if they are true to their missions, they must do so. The challenges are great: the anxieties about college admissions trickle down to secondary and even elementary programs. But so is the reward: students who yearn to do good in a world that tells them to do well; a community of faith and learning, eager to engage with issues that are meaningful, lasting, and real; and an example for others of the transformational work schools can do when they “provide a moral education as well as an excellent one.”

Pennoyer serves on the editorial board of the Episcopal New Yorker, is a member of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, of the faculty of St. Bernard’s School in New York, and is a postulant for the priesthood.

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<sup>1. William Damon, “Education and the Path to Purpose,” Independent School Magazine (Fall 2008): 61-64.
2. National Association of Episcopal Schools, Reasons for Being: The Culture and Character of Episcopal Schools (New York: NAES, 2010).
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Ann Mellow, “A Brief History of Episcopal Schools in the United States,” Reasons for Being, 28.
5. Daniel T. Roach, Jr., “The Episcopal School Head,” Reasons for Being, 36.
6. Daniel R. Heischman, “The Inefficiency of Episcopal Education,” Reasons for Being, 45.
7. Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
8. Ibid., 257.
9. Much of my thinking on this topic is informed by the work of Katherine G. Simon, specifically her book Moral Questions in the Classroom: How To Get Kids Thinking Deeply About Real Life and Their Schoolwork (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
10. See, for instance, Nel Noddings, Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).</sup>