Associate
Professor, University of St. Thomas, Houston
Background:
From Plato to Christ
My inspiration for teaching comes
from my own college experience.At
Cornell College, there was a small cadre of extremely gifted
individuals who
mentored students into a life-long love of learning.There was also — and this was equally
important — a large group of students who were absolutely in earnest
about
reading a wide variety of classic texts, discussing important ideas
together,
and arguing until the early hours of the morning over fundamental
issues.
During my freshman year, I took a
course in which we read Plato’s Gorgias.After reading Plato, my life was never to be
the same; not because I became a devoted Platonist — I am not — but
because I
saw modeled in Plato’s character Socrates a dedication to clarity of
thought
and a love of Truth, Justice, and Beauty that awakened my admiration
and my
desire to be like that great “lover of wisdom.”
What reading Plato’s dialogues gave
me was a new self-awareness and a new sense of freedom.I felt as though, during the time before I
went to college, I had been only half-awake: merely “sleep walking”
through
life or, worse yet, living out a script written by someone else.Plato’s dialogues gave me a sense of what it
was to examine my life with respect to the kinds of choices I was
making, and
to ask myself the fundamental question: Why?Why am I making the choices I am making?Are the choices I’m making, making me happy?Are they making me better off and more
fulfilled as a full and complete human person?Reading Plato made me consider such questions for the
first time.And I began to understand that
Socrates meant
when he said at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth
living.”I didn’t want to go back to
“sleep-walking”
through my own life.I wanted to become
more and more aware of myself as a human agent, responsible for my own
choices
and especially the choice of the kind of life I would choose to live.
Eventually, during my senior year of
college, I made the choice to enter the Catholic Church.It seemed to me then, as it still seems to me
now, the only viable choice I could have made.I had developed a deep respect for the great intellectual
tradition that
stretched from the Greek philosophers and tragedians down through the
Fathers
and Doctors of the Church up to the present day.For
a person such as myself who admired
Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, there really
seemed to
be only one community I could join. The only place where such thinkers
seemed
to be taken seriously — “taken seriously” in the sense of providing a
serious
existential challenge to one’s way of life and view of the world — was
the
Catholic Church.Describing my
conversion in this way, however, makes it seem entirely too
“intellectual.”In truth, I believe no
conversion is entirely
intellectual.Such existential choices
are always a matter of responding with one’s whole being to the
fundamental
human need for wholeness and meaning.
Approach
to Teaching
One of the ideas that especially
appealed to me then, and has ever since, was Socrates’ statement that
he was
merely a “mid-wife” who helped give birth to new ideas in his students.I remember as well how profoundly inspiring I
found this same idea enunciated by the famous Danish philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard, when he spoke of the value of “indirect communication.”“Direct communication” means taking the truth
as I know it in my head and trying to put it into the head of another.
Direct
communication of truth is fundamentally untenable for human
interlocutors,
because my truth (the truth as I
understand it) does not become the truth for another person unless he
or she
understands the thing on its own terms and accept it by means of their
own act
of both intellect and will.A student
cannot simply “take” my ideas.At best,
they can only be “prompts” for greater consideration.For the student to hold something as true, he
or she must go through his or her own process of consideration and
acceptance.My job is to help my
students ask the right sort of questions — that is to say, important
questions:
questions that have to do with life, human flourishing, and the nature
of
existence itself — and then guide and coach them to reason well, think
clearly,
and be absolutely truthful with themselves and others.
Another fundamental principle that I
learned from reading Plato was the admonition “Know Thyself.”It was a statement that I only began to
appreciate more fully, however, later in life, when I saw it at the
head of an
encyclical by a Pope who was to have an immense influence on my life
and my
teaching.Pope John Paul II wrote in the
opening lines of his encyclical Fides et
Ratio that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human
spirit
rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human
heart a
desire to know the truth—in a word, to know Himself—so that, by knowing
and
loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about
themselves.”Reading this encyclical
caused me to want to inspire my students to become more self-aware —
that is to
“know themselves” — in much the same way that I was given the
opportunity to
come to a greater self-awareness during my college years.I wanted my teaching not only to inform
my students, but to inspire them.I wanted my students not only to see the
world more clearly, but to understand its importance.And I wanted them, by understanding the
world’s importance, to love it more truly and care for it more
faithfully.
Reading Fides et Ratio made me re-think
my fundamental approach to teaching
theology.I came to believe that the way
to critically reflect on any religious tradition — including one’s own
— was to
view it as a collective cultural response to what Pope John Paul calls
“the
fundamental questions which pervade human life,” questions such as:
“Who am I?
Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is
there
after this life?”These are questions,
says the Pope, “which have their common source in the quest for meaning
which
has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given to
these
questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their
lives.”I want my students to have the
self-awareness
to see the direction in which their lives are already headed and the
courage to
face the fundamental questions of meaning which pervade human life,
precisely
so that they can make free choices about what direction they wish to
give to
their lives.
An important part of my pedagogy,
therefore, involves making my students aware of themselves as free
agents
engaged in the process of learning.I
want them to be aware enough of themselves as learners that they can
engage in
fundamentally reflective acts of “meta-cognition”: that is, I want them
to be
able to think about their thinking and be aware of their own process of
learning.For teaching not to be mere
propaganda or manipulation, students should understand what they are
doing, where
they are headed, and why.They should choose to learn, understanding (at least
implicitly) both the goal and the process.
One of
Socrates’ greatest strengths, we are told, is that he, unlike many of
his
countrymen, “knew that he did not know” things.An awareness of one’s own degree of knowledge or ignorance
is essential
to the process of learning.It can also
be essential part of creating a love of learning.
And creating a life-long love of
learning, as well as coaching students effectively so that they will
develop
the tools for life-long learning, is
another one of my fundamental goals.Such tools include the ability to read analytically, to
think
critically, and to write clearly and with passion about what is most
important
to them.Developing and perfecting those
skills is, I am convinced, another crucial way in which students can be
empowered and provided the possibility for personal freedom.
Nature
of Pedagogy
Even when I am presenting basic
information, I stress skills.I teach
skills by teaching content.For me, the
two are inextricably intertwinedWhen my
students read, it is very important to me that they learn to read
analytically:
that they see the connections, appreciate the author’s arguments on
their own
terms, and understand the relevance and potential importance of what is
being
said.I want them to appreciate the
beauty of well-crafted words, as well as a well-crafted argument.I want them to begin to appreciate the power
of language.
It is also important to me when
students read that they begin to see connections: connections between
premises
and conclusions, connections between cultural presuppositions and
premises, as
well as connections between different world-views and cultural
presuppositions.I have also been
profoundly
influenced by Pope John Paul II’s assertion that what drives history is
culture and especially the ideas that
inform culture.Thus, as part of
educating my students’ “self-awareness,” I want then to come to a
greater
understanding of their own culture and the ideas that have informed
their
cultural self-understanding.At the same
time, it is also my goal to reveal to them the ways in which the
Catholic faith
is a living response to the fundamental questions that inform culture.
In the end, however, I believe
analysis must culminate in appreciation.The intellect is fed by a greater and greater appreciation
of the truth,
but the intellect’s journey is also one that must be animated by love —
ultimately, by the love of one another as God has loved us.My ultimate goal, then, is for the students
who have become co-learners with me to find that they have become
better
prepared for living a life dedicated to the search for wisdom and
consecrated
to the love of God and neighbor.