I walk into the new year as one walks in the desert— not to conquer, not to hurry, but to notice. By the seventh day the path is still open, and I am still learning to say thank you.
Sunset Over The Santa Catalina Mountains After a Rainy Day — Image by kenne
Desert-Luminous
Rain darkens the foothills, but the sunset slips through a break in the clouds — a copper flare brushing the Catalinas as if the mountains were being forged anew.
I first became aware of Allan Bloom in the late 1980s. As a fellow educator and believer in democracy, I was interested in reading his then-recent publication, The Closing of the American Mind. Having read his book, I realized that he was writing about the failure of American Universities to live up to their role of educating the elite. Bloom was a self-described elitist. For Bloom, then, the university, specifically the classics, was the most essential institution of American democracy. He wrote about and taught classes on Plato’s Republic. Taking Plato at his word, he believed that the character of a society is best expressed by the people who rule it. Thus, colleges and universities, the training ground for America’s elites, had the task of ensuring that the country’s leaders embodied the basic principles of its political regime.
I’m a proponent of the classics and believe in their inherent worth. But if we are to build a more convivial society where people become educated persons, thereby gaining knowledge through experience. An educated person can and should love others. Before she can love others, she must respect herself. She must feel confident and competent in herself and her role in dealing with others. She is also rational, skilled in reasoning, intuitive, and analytical in thinking. She is compassionate and warm in interpersonal relationships. She is sensitive, empathetic, and non-ethnocentric. She is an independently motivated lifelong learner. She is a problem-seeker and solver. She is fluent and flexible in her perceptions, ideas, and feelings. She is curious and an inquirer, an avid gatherer and an organizer of information and ideas. She is a copper rather than a defender, an active seeker rather than a passive acceptor. She is a clarifier of her own belief systems and values, working to remove dissonance between the ideals she professes and the actions of her daily life. She is a person who continues to grow in wisdom, competence, compassion, and reason throughout her lifetime.
This type of educated person is ideally suited to life in a rapidly changing society. However, in a highly controlled and stable society, which some scholars propose, such a person would pose a threat. She would be viewed as a deviant and undoubtedly would be “treated” to correct her abnormal tendencies. George Orwell describes this type of society in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. In such a society, the educated person tends to have an authoritarian personality, having been taught and learned to accept their lot, show great respect for authority, think stereotypically about themselves and others, and believe in the absolute nature and truth of knowledge in academic disciplines. These persons are offended and threatened by the ever-increasing divergence in publicly expressed values and lifestyles.
I once wrote a paper titled “A Theory of the Functional Self.” Most theorists, however, would agree that the self is inseparable from the social contexts in which we exist. This is why, as an educator, I have tried to practice John Dewey’s philosophy, which holds that all learning occurs within a social environment. In this sense, knowledge is socially constructed based on our experiences. As Dewey puts it, the ‘educational process has two sides — one is psychological and the other is sociological.’ As John Donne states in his poetic passage:
No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, As well as if a promontory were: As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
