[An introductory lecture given to my humanities students at Logos Online]
Good morning, my students. If
you were trying to get into Mr. Goode’s class, you are in the right place. If
you were trying for someone else, you’re lost. Get out of here, and good luck
on your hunting.
For the rest of y’all, you come
here knowing at least one thing. You know where you are—you’re in my
class. That is the sort of knowledge our age excels in—scientific knowledge.
We like to observe the world around us and find out that water is wet, that
Mars is in orbit around the sun, that cactus poke you if you touch them, and
that seeing your surroundings actually tells you where you are. This is great
news, because otherwise we couldn’t know much at all. But there is a danger to
this type of knowledge: it is perilously easy to assume that if you know the
scientific data about something, you know everything you need to know.
But I challenge you to begin our
time together by pushing further and deeper than mere scientific knowledge. I
want you to ask, “Why am I here in Mr. Goode’s class?”
Of course, some of you think you
know the answer to this question. “I’m here because it’s the next course Logos
Online requires in their degree plan.” “I’m here because I want to be able to
get into a good college.” “I’m here because the course description sounded
fun.” And of course, there is the ever-popular, “Because my parents made me.”
These may all be true reasons, but I think they are weak, insufficient reasons.
They are reasons that will not be enough to get you through the late nights,
and the hard work, and the reading, and the writing, and the tough questions I
am going to throw at you in this class.
Of course, some of you have
already pushed this to the next level, past the mere scientific fact of hard
school work. “Why,” you ask philosophically, “do we have to do all this?
Isn’t there an easier way?”
The answer has to do with the
liberal arts.
I asked many of you what the term
“liberal arts” meant on the entrance survey. I got lots of answers:“The act of
painting and playing music, but displaying the beliefs of mask-wearing liberals,”
or “The study and practice of things outside of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics, such as language, literature, history, rhetoric, theology, and
music,” or “Something to do with literature or maybe college.” These are not
quite right. Part of your confusion stems from the fact that these words mean
something different in our day. Liberal is usually defined though
politics, often as the opposite of conservative. Arts are what
“creative types” do as personal expression—painting, theater, sculpture, etc. But
long ago when the liberal arts were named, liberal came from the Latin
word liber—literally, “a free man” which meant anyone who was not a
slave. The arts were any skill or work produced well—a shoemaker or a
baker had his “art” just as much as a painter did. So the “liberal arts” meant
“the skills and work of a free man.”
To the Greek and Roman world, this was an important
distinction. Slaves are people who just do what they are told, when they are
told to do it. Most of the ancient necessaries of life—clothes, shoes, food,
and the like—were made by slaves. In modern terms, slaves had all the jobs and
had all the training (or education) they needed to be good at them. Free men,
however, did not usually “make stuff.” Instead of makers, they were to be
leaders throughout the various spheres of government—their family, their business,
their city politics. A free man needed the type of education that would train
him to be able to think, evaluate, implement, and persevere in his actions; he
could not merely “do his job.” That type of education became the liberal
arts. Eventually, they were divided into seven major categories. The first
was the trivium of grammar (the study of words), rhetoric (the study of
persuasion), and logic (the study of thinking). The second was the quadrivium
of arithmetic (the study of mental numbers), music (mental numbers in time),
geometry (numbers in space, what we could call “spatial” number), and astronomy
(spatial number in motion). Thus you can see that the modern distinction
between an “artsy” or “bookish” person and a “hard-science” person is rather
new: a free man back in the ancient or medieval world had to both know books and
how to use them for everything from building an aqueduct to drafting a new law.
Writing from that ancient world, in the book of
Galatians, Paul notes several times that Christians are to be free men
and women, not slaves to various things. 1st Peter says in a similar
fashion, “Live as people who are free” (2:16). So part of my job, as your Christian
teacher at a Christian school, is to train you up into freedom. The rest
of my job, as a classical teacher at a classical school, is to do
it in a rather old-fashioned way. The liberal arts are how I’m going to
grow you up into the Bible’s commands. If you need a modern catchphrase for
this, we could call it “Freedom Training.” In short, I’m here to make you
better human beings by learning about the things of humans, which is why this
class is called humanities.
“Mr. Goode,” some of you are probably thinking, “this
is boring. Please get to the point.”
Ah, but this is the point. If I’m here to make
you a better, free human being, what should you have to do?
First, a
good human being should have self-control and perseverance—which is why I will
march you through long, dry books that are not at all what the modern world
calls “fun” and I will expect you to actually pay attention to them. “No
discipline is pleasant at the time,” teaches Paul, and I need to train you in
intellectual discipline. When this class is difficult and perplexing, you’re
going to be tempted to complain that something is wrong or unfair. Not at
all—that is what this class is all about; not all of the time of course, but
some of the time.
Second, a good human being should be able to
accurately state what he is thinking to others—which is why I will make you
speak and write again and again and again, until you can say exactly
what you want, no more, no less.
Third, a
good human should be curious. Remember the “why” question I urged you to ask
earlier. All of you with siblings in the toddler years know that this is one of
the fundamental human questions. This class will encourage you to become askers
of questions—both in school and out—in order to become richer, deeper people. “Where
there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much
writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making,”
wrote John Milton in Aeropagitica. Do you believe him? You should.
Fourth, a
good human being should know what other human beings have argued is right, good, and true—which is why I will make you
deal with the modern assumption that “everything old/different is bad” by
working you step-by-step through arguments thousands of years old, both stated
and implicit. You will be forced to question their assumptions, and by doing
that, you will hopefully be able to get a better look at your own ignorance. If
you don’t know what people have already said, it is very easy to enter an
ongoing conversation and appear an idiot. This, by the way, is one of the
besetting sins of our time. Moderns like to act as though we have developed
answers to everything. But some problems are just as old as people—and so are
some of the answers. Which ones are right?
Finally
and ultimately, a good human being must know God—which is why we will be
evaluating all the ideas of this year through what God loves, and not just what
we love. For “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD
require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
your God?”(Mic. 6:8)
Now, with such an ambitious program (the building of a
good human being) there will be all sorts of places we can fall short. I may
fail you, or you may fail me, or both. I will focus on three common ways
students can fail their teacher; don’t worry, there are others who will
evaluate if I fail you!
The first way to fail your teacher is not trying.
Francis Bacon in “Of Seeming Wise” put it this way: “Some,
when a thing is beyond their reach, will seem to despise or make light of it as
impertinent or curious, and so would have their ignorance seem judgement.” This
year we will study things out of your comfort zone. Scoffing and claiming “This
is stupid,” or “I’m never going to need to know this stuff,” misses the
point—we are making free people, not training for a job at a bank or a factory.
Remember, be curious. In addition, the works we will read were written by men
who have been judged much, much smarter than you. In two thousand years, every
one of you will be long forgotten, but people will still be reading
Plato. Do not be so quick to dismiss. Humility is also a virtue.
Another is stressing out over
grades. Now, I am not telling you to ignore your grades, but there is a
type of student that does everything with the grade in mind. This applies to
both really good grades and really bad grades, and it misses the whole point. Grades
serve a dual purpose of telling the teacher how well his students are catching
what he is throwing, and of motivating students to actually do the work. Let us
be honest, if I did not grade assignments, many of you would not do them. But
“getting good grades” is not the point of this class—your life will not be
graded once you get out of school! If you focus instead on loving what you
learn, and learning what you should love, your grades will largely take care of
themselves. And if you have done your absolute best and get a “C” that is
nothing to be ashamed of—your best is your best. Just make sure it actually is
your best! The question, “Will this be on the test?” is related to this. While
tests are important in some ways, it is far more important for you to
learn how to think well than how to test well. Loving Cicero or Beowulf
or Aristotle will get you a lot farther than getting 100% on a test on Cicero,
Beowulf, or Aristotle.
The last is particularly
important to point out to you homeschoolers: You must learn to match your
schedule to someone else’s. In the rest of your life, it will not matter if you
somehow “forgot” to pay your taxes on time, or if you “had too many other
things to do” to make it to your parent’s funeral, or if you are “already exhausted”
when the baby starts crying. You will still be in trouble. In the same
way, deadlines for assignment submissions are not “suggestions” to be completed
when you feel like it. You must learn to discipline and manage your time to get
done what must get done. Picture, for a moment, a fable about a man with a
task, who knew everything he needed to do, and had all the equipment needed to
do it, and was perfectly capable of doing it—but chose to do it later or not at
all! Do you really want to be that person in a story?
Some of you will hear this and
immediately start panicking, scared that I will fail you without a moment’s
grace. Don’t be silly—I’m a teacher, not a slave driver. My job is to help you,
not hunt you. I will be happy to give generous aid in the truly hard times. If
you are faced with a situation you truly cannot help, then please, ask for an
extension or anything else you hope will aid you. But I would not be doing my
part in your training if I did not hold you to the standard—even if it is a
standard that you feel you cannot meet. Would you respect a sports coach if he
let you get away with just walking during wind sprints? In the same way, learn
to push through to a higher standard, until you discover new things to love. Of
course, if you are having trouble, ask for help—that is what a teacher is for.
You do want me to do my job, right?
So I welcome you to Freedom
Training—our journey of excellence. It will not be a journey you can finish in
just a year, or even in a decade—we are aiming for bigger things than that. My
hope is that maybe, in thirty years or so, you will be able to look back and
say you finally know now why you had to be in this class, because each
of you will have begun to learn how to be truly free in a moment that really
mattered.
