Education, Mildness, and Apostasy

“By the time I finished school I was an imperfectly informed but convinced socialist, pacifist, and agnostic…

I had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, liking God. He knew everything about me but was Love and he was Understanding, so it would be hard to do anything for which he would not forgive me. In the book of Bible stories from which my grandmother read to us on Sundays, he was a figure of remarkable benevolence manifesting himself in a landscape remarkable for its beautiful sunsets, and later, in the Bible itself and in Beckton Church, he was a less material, more complex development of the same spirit.

I have friends who turned their backs on the churches in which they were brought up because of the churches’ irrational rigours; I was able to drift out of mine so easily because of its mildness.”

-from “Instead of a Letter” (1963) by Diana Athill

Compulsory Learning Does Not Stick

“A little more than half way through Plato’s Republic, Socrates says something that’s bold, honest, and dispiriting enough to send even the heartiest of high school teachers on a two-day bender: “Compulsory intellectual work never remains in the mind.”

He means exactly what you think he means. You can’t force someone to learn anything they don’t want to learn—or you can force them to “learn” it for a test, but you can’t force them to remember it for more than a few minutes after classes let out for the summer. Any lesson which is forced on students won’t stick. You can’t force someone to remember the moral lessons of Pride & Prejudice, or the metaphysics of Anselm’s Proslogium, or the acrobatic hermeneutics of Gregory of Nyssa. You can deliver a heartbreakingly beautiful lecture on Till We Have Faces, but if your students are only listening because they have to, they will forget everything you’ve said in a few days.

You know Socrates is right.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

The Enduring Appeal of “The Grinch”

“The Grinch can’t steal the thing that bothers him most about Christmas, which is the singing, but he can steal everything else—and in stealing everything else, the Grinch is fairly sure he’s going to steal their singing, too. He’s going to prove them all a bunch of hypocrites. While the Grinch never makes a wager with God, he still reminds me of Satan in the book of Job. If the Whos lose all their stuff, they won’t be singing anymore—or so the Grinch believes.”

-from The Enduring Appeal of “The Grinch,” my latest for CiRCE