The Risk of Education

Recently a provocative question came up: "What would a classroom like that look like?" I have been wondering about the answer ever since. The that under question is clear and specific, so that is easy to explain, but the question itself is impossible to answer. This is how the question came about: I was with a small group of teachers discussing Giussani's book The Risk of Education, and one of them wondered out loud: "Imagine how marvelous it would be if all teachers actually taught the way Giussani proposes." Then from another person came the question: "Yes indeed, what would a classroom like that look like?"

Those of us who admire Giussani can make the mistake of idealizing him, and regard his book on education as the solution to all the problems we have in our schools today. In a general sense, it is, because the book analyzes our educational situation accurately and gives the correct directions we should go in. However, the book is no quick fix. Our concrete educational problems are infinite in variety and depend on the right use of personal freedom on the part of all involved, especially teacher and student. That is why no book in itself could resolve our educational problems. 

Giussani's slim volume is the distilled wisdom of a lifetime in the classroom and presupposes that teachers accept the living martyrdom they must necessarily endure as they risk themselves trying to communicate truth to their students. While Giussani states the risks of educating accurately and concisely in the book, he also says that the heroic sacrifice of real educators is the only road to success. Such dedication will not guarantee success that is absolute, however, since not all students will be open to the gift the teacher is giving them.

 

Giussani's message could be taught and applied as a technique. His method could be reduced to a formula, an ideology, or a closed system. But teaching is not a matter of learning the Giussani technique,  and then communicating it in bits and pieces to students till they have digested all the information offered. Teaching, or education, from Giussani's perspective aims at opening students up to all of reality. Reality as a whole? How many students have teachers who see reality that way?

Also, teaching and learning are an joint experience. It should be a truism to say that an experience can only be lived. In the teaching, truth come alive, the student's mind and heart come alive, and this lived experience occurs when the teacher communicates not just data or information but something of himself.

 

Himself? (Or herself?) Why? Why does a teacher have to communicate himself? And what of that self exactly? Why not just the material he (or she) is teaching? Why is the person of the teacher so important? Because of the relationship that only persons can have, a relationship with one another and at the same time with Goodness, Truth and Beauty that is greater than they are. No matter how ably the specific material is communicated, if the link to the "greater than" is not present in the teacher, the teacher does the student an injustice. 

Suppose I am a music teacher. I can teach a child what a scale is, and how to play the scale correctly on the piano. I can then move on to teach the student how to form chords, how to read notes on a staff, and also keep time. But scales and notes and chords are boring. These are all "bits and pieces", or rudimentary information a student must have to play music, just as a student must learn how to write the alphabet, print words, and write sentences. As an educator, I can teach the skills involved in writing, or in piano playing, but I have to have a love of music, or a love of language , to inspire passion in my students and wake them up to what miracles language and music are. If I don't communicate the passion I have in me for what is greater than I am, if that passion is not in me to begin with, what right do I have to be a teacher?

The personal relationship between teacher and student is the context in which Truth, Goodness and Beauty are communicated to the student in the present moment. Where the teacher has no relationship to this totality, he has no calling to be a teacher.

Body and Soul

Disciple: Master, is it true that the soul is in the body, like a center is in a circle? And, is it true that from this center deep within us we are able to speak to God?

Master: Yes, but there is more. This also is true: That the body is in the soul. The soul is like a spiritual skin that holds the body within.

 

Disciple: Do you mean that the soul contains the body, just as I can carry different things in a sack? Do you mean that my soul carries and moves me, every part of me?

 

Master: Yes. The soul is also what opens you to reality, to all that is, all of you , your entire being, to all that is, including God.

 

Disciple: Master: If that is true. why am I so stuck inside myself? Why do I feel isolated and alone, as if only I were here? Why do I have a hard time connecting with others, and God?

Master: The pores of your spiritual skin are clogged, my son.

 

Disciple: How do I unclog them? What do I do? Tell me, please!

 

Master: The answer will take a lifetime, but now is always the time to begin. Begin by taking the time to wonder,  at Beauty,  at Goodness,  at Truth as they enter your soul from all that surrounds you. Let your soul be stirred,  let your mind and heart be moved. Listen to the promptings your soul receives. This will unclog your spirit and start to move you outside of yourself, and you will begin to grow.

       

    " Faith is certainty of a 'great Presence' that allows the building of my relationship with reality, of my work, and of my involvement in society, that allows my work to become something useful and beautiful before my eyes. Beautiful because if it doesn't become a work of art, man's accomplishments are not human. The touch of art introduces an ideal reverberation into the mechanical manipulation of the real: 'art that is the grandchild of God'  Dante said, since true beauty is derived only from the One who saves beauty, the one who doesn't fear time, death and pain."

Luigi Giussani: Is It Possible to Live This Way? Vol.2, p.98

      "A theologian who does not love art, poetry, beauty music, and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: The Ratzinger Report, p.130 

      

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man." 

Dostoevsky

Carron: Faith and Hope in Christ

                                         In His Name We Find Hope

 If the judgment called faith dominates life, you see it in the fact that this being seized is what comes forth in the way we face all the circumstances of life; it comes forth by default, as they say, as when one, no matter what experience she has, no matter what happens to her, is invaded by the memory of something she cares about, a presence she cares about. So then, you see that the relationship with this presence dominates because it reappears with evidence in every experience; I do not invent it when I need it. I do not create it when faced with the dramatic circumstances of living. It comes to mind, imposes itself on me, in front of all the circumstances, be they beautiful or ugly. At times they are more meaningful when they are beautiful because they are less at risk of "being invented"; when they are ugly, since there has to be some meaning, one can run the risk of inventing a meaning. When life is full, this risk lessens: that acknowledgement imposes itself and that memory arises, because I cannot watch the sunset, or an evening together, without the emergence of that urgent need, the strong pressure to say his name.

Fr. Julian Carron, Magnificat magazine,  July 2013, p. 284

Peguy on Grace

      "Grace is even more mysterious and more profound than beauty. Grace is even more arbitrary, more free, more sovereign, more perfectly illogical (outside the realm of logic, without reasons, beyond the scope of every calculation); it is also disturbing,  as is everything that is given gratuitously, (that which is given gratuitously is disturbing because it calls our attention to something we had not thought of, that we would never think of, that above all we would not want to think of). The powerfulness of grace.  The eternal powerfulness of the eternal Blood, of an eternal Blood, the Blood of Jesus Christ."  

quoted by Luigi Giussani, in He is if He Changes,  pp.31,32

Amazing! Wonderful! Could never have been written by the hand of man except under the inspiration of grace!