NewWorld

Verification of a
Living Proposal
A college professor in Kansas overhauls his approach to teaching. In Minnesota, a medical physicist goes in search of something more from life and discovers a new vitality, gratitude, and peace. Two modern verifications of Fr. Carrón’s recent insistence that “The charism will fascinate us ever more only if it becomes this greater humanity”

by James Madden

My first solo attempt at teaching was a summer course in natural theology. At the time, I was under the typically modern impression that a good instructor was one who presents material “objectively” by appearing to be utterly neutral regarding the truth of the claims being discussed. The point, so I thought, was nothing more than to present facts and give the students complete autonomy to “decide for themselves.” I led my first students through a rigorous treatment of the arguments for and against the existence of God while conscientiously leaving my own views out of the discussion. At the end of the course, I polled the students as to whether they believed their instructor to be an atheist or a theist and, to my great satisfaction at the time, I found that they were evenly divided on this issue. I succeeded in the tedious feat of speaking to young people about life’s most pressing question for weeks on end without revealing my own position.

Parenting: A shift from neutral
Today I think differently, because today I am primarily a different kind of teacher, a father. When I teach my four little pupils, the point is not to leave them to decide for themselves, but to teach them the truth. I am not neutral with respect to the truth when I teach my children; my role is to offer them a proposal for living a human life in light of the true principles I have come to accept through my own lived experience. Objectivity for the parent is not neutrality, but honesty regarding the truths of human existence and their implications for our practical lives. I now know that even if the students in my first natural theology course increased their factual knowledge and skills, I utterly failed them by that standard. I have no reason to believe that any of those students were changed fundamentally by that course. I did nothing to offer them a concrete proposal for living in light of the positions we discussed.
Giussani articulates the pedagogy of parenthood well when he teaches us that education must be provided in terms of a proposal for a certain kind of life, a living in light of a claim to truth. By remaining neutral with respect to the truth and thereby withholding one’s own life, the teacher leaves the student with nothing more than a shadowy play of disparate positions. If the educator instead acts as would a caring parent and invites the student to come along and think and live the way she does, the student is not offered an empty abstraction but a living example of the implications of a certain truth.

A Living proposal
Thus, I offer the thinking of Aquinas, Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, and other luminaries of the tradition not as two-dimensional collections of propositions, but as the living, breathing principles that ground my own approach to existence. The offer of one’s life as the embodiment of a proposal radically changes one’s relation to the practice of teaching. I am now required to invite my students to friendship founded on our common project of living the truths we discuss. I must live as a representative of a tradition, whose ideals I can never completely fulfill in my lifetime. In short, the teacher is led to invite the student into his life in order to provide a view of the truth from the inside out. It would be easier merely to teach facts and skills, but this is not the way of setting young people on the path of wisdom.

Refreshed, not oppressed,
by a claim to truth
Our students today have been subject to objectivity as neutrality for most of their lives. They are bored by its endless streams of halfhearted proposals. I have found that young people, even those who sharply disagree with me, are refreshed, emboldened, and engaged by a claim to truth. It gives them a position from which they can begin. The student is not typically offended by the claim to truth, for it gives her something she can finally evaluate through her own experience, even if it is ultimately to be rejected.
Moreover, as Giussani outlines in The Risk of Education, proposing a truth doesn’t preclude us from engaging in criticism, even relentless criticism. A good parent does not shelter the child entirely from error, but actually allows the wisdom she imparts to be put to the test. Otherwise, the child’s commitment will be undermined the first time trouble arises. A child will forever ask his father, “But why?” and a father’s response should both answer the question and foster the development of an even more sophisticated and pressing query. Through this process of critical questioning, our parents teach us to think, reflect, and learn. Likewise, our work in the classroom is not conducted through rote procedures of indoctrination. To offer the proposal is to invite the student into a critical conversation, in which the very status of the truth is at stake. Failure to engage in criticism of our own proposal is a failure to provide the student with a rational means for accepting it, and certainly our most sophisticated students, just like our precocious children, will notice a conspicuous absence of critical concern when it occurs.

Education, hope, and friendship
As Giussani’s own lived example taught us very well, our students are not just those who occupy our classrooms or share our homes. Education is a duty and a risk we all are called to take, whether or not we are parents or professional teachers. My wife and I work in a crisis pregnancy center, and that experience has shown us that our first priority in addressing many of our most pressing human tragedies must be to educate. One of our greatest vices is hopelessness. The proposal must then be made always, everywhere, and by all of us. We must offer truth, answer criticism, and live as a joyful example. The pedagogy of living the “Culture of Life” is what will do most to educate the hopeless among us.
Benedict XVI called our attention to a “dictatorship of relativism” that dominates contemporary popular and academic culture, and his predecessor John Paul II did much to restore the prestige of the self-giving parent in the minds of many. Msgr.Giussani’s work in The Risk of Education serves as a means of using John Paul II’s valorization of parenthood to alleviate the illness diagnosed by Benedict XVI. These three men call us all to be teachers who have the courage to love our students and neighbors as our own children, whatever the costs may be. This is the dual courage: both to propose the truth boldly and to offer our friendship to those whom we hope to teach. By doing so, we may restore authentic objectivity to our culture and provide the truth as grounds for hope among our most vulnerable fellow humans. Our neighbors, especially the young, are just as hungry for the proposal as our own children; we need only have the courage to offer it to them.

James Madden lives with his wife, Jennifer, and their four children, in Atchison, Kansas. He teaches philosophy at Benedictine College, where he received the Distinguished Educator of the Year Award for 2006.