While faculties of higher education in the United States have for the last half-century eschewed an understanding of their role in loco parentis, higher education, like all education, remains fundamentally a service of parents to their children. The truth of this foundation can be seen in the purpose or end of education itself, that is, to hand down the best truths, virtues, and insights which parents may offer personally or else provide through the assistance of others. Furthermore, education as the human transmission of acquired knowledge and habits is inherently personal.
The ancient Greek philosophers considered whether virtue could be taught. The difficulty with this inquiry is that it involves the transmission of a virtue from one person to another; however, the virtue is not known to the student recipient prior to its reception. The student is unaware of the quality of the virtue being taught, whether it is authentic gold or shiny pyrite. Eventually the student can verify what he or she has learned from the teacher through experimentation and review, but at first and furthermore on a continual basis education requires the trust of the student in the goodwill of the teacher.
Thus, Divine Providence has arranged and human societies have, for the most part, cooperated in allowing parents to educate directly and otherwise provide for the education of their children. Parents are the primary educators of their children as an enduring response in service to the natural law and divine command to be fruitful and multiply. Their service begins with the mere physiological well-being of their children, the foundation of filial trust in the parents, and extends to the education and formation of their children, which may be beyond the gifts and abilities of even the parents themselves.
To succeed as students, we must trust our parents and the teachers whom our parents, in some sense, have provided for us similar to the way we must trust our bodily senses. There is a certain status given to knowledge and insights which we acquire on our own through the use of our natural abilities of observation, experimentation, and analysis. We want to see things for ourselves. This is nothing new to the human experience. While René Descartes sought out clear and distinct ideas upon which to base his rational conclusions, St. Thomas the Apostle similarly suspended his judgment of the Resurrection until he could probe the wounds of Christ with his own hands. Seeing, as well as the other bodily senses, is quite nearly synonymous with believing, and yet we do experience illusions. The oar dipped in water bends before the eyes of Descartes. Pictures appear to move before our eyes at the cinema. The sun descends below the horizon minutes before we see the sunset. The senses deceive us, and yet we only grow in knowledge once we engage the apparent deception to uncover an underlying truth of creation.
Similarly, there are times when our human teachers including our parents may appear to deceive us and challenge our trust in them. The apparent deception cuts more deeply than sensory illusions on account of the personal willfulness behind the injury to our trust. Such crises of trust are the watershed moments in an individual’s education. These moments precede decisions either to switch teachers or schools, to stop listening to parents or teachers, or to look at the matter with new eyes and to elevate one’s understanding beyond what was previously grasped.
The parent and professional teacher both desire this last outcome which is the maturation of the student toward adulthood. The professional teacher works in the place of the parents yet without the benefit of the student’s natural disposition to trust in those upon whom he or she has long since depended. The professional teacher must therefore keep four aspects in mind while entrusted with the education and formation of students.
First, the teacher must seek out the trust of each student. It is not enough that a teacher be resolved personally to seek what is best for the student. This resolution must be made known and, indeed, felt by each student. The effective communication of this goodwill of the teacher toward each student is no little matter and may require various approaches suited to the disposition of each student.
Second, the teacher must have something to teach. The teacher must be able to engage the matter to be taught from various points of entry and analysis. The ancient dictum, “What one does not have, one may not give,” applies most appropriately here. This does not mean that a successful teacher must have all the answers; it does mean, however, that a successful teacher is a steward of wisdom and worthy of the trust of each student.
Third, the teacher must be courageous in bringing students, properly disposed, to those moments of crisis and growth. The education and formation of boys and girls into young men and women capable of bearing Christ into a fallen world is a daunting task and no place for either cowardice or temerity. The successful teacher forms the student toward this mean between extremes by having a solid plan of instruction toward clear goals and then modifying this plan to account for both external circumstances and the personal development of students along the way.
Fourth, a teacher must be vigilant in recognizing the limits of his or her office in the education and formation of each student. In other words, a successful teacher is humble, knowing that he or she has played a pivotal role in an ensemble cast. The teacher, as teacher, is neither the parent nor The Teacher, Jesus Christ. The successful teacher, nevertheless, depends upon how well he or she teaches in partnership with parents and cleaves to The Teacher, the exemplar of self-giving, sacrificial love.
Education is a personal encounter for the educator and the educated. It is not performed in a factory of interchangeable parts, rather it is an adventure, a pilgrimage, a fellowship we make with unrepeatable people who share what is true, good, and beautiful in them, in the rest of creation, and the Creator.
BetterPears 