I am in the middle of Berry ’s A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. I found something in his essay on Discipline and Hope that is simply too good to pass by without commenting in the blog. He is commenting on how our culture has become horribly short-sighted in it living, education, farming and community life. This shallowness, he rightly claimed, comes with a terrible price. Our places—the places in which we live—are degraded because we have lost the ability and the sensibility to care for them. By living in degraded places, we ourselves become corrupted people. He applies it directly to, my field, the field of education pointing out what the real motive for real education must be. Here it is:
It is the obsession with immediate ends that is degrading, that destroys our disciplines, and that drives us to our inflexible concentration upon number and price and size [in opposition to quality and value]…The real teacher does not teach with reference to the prospective job market or some program or plan for society’s future; he teachers because he has something to teach and because he has students.
Too often, I fear . . . .
Too often, I fear, our society and the schools in our communities lose any value for their communities by losing track of what they are doing. They are not built to serve a national economy—or at least Christian schools and particularly classical Christian schools are not—they exist to serve families and by assisting families and providing a superb education they are conferring massive blessing on their students, the families involved in the school and the communities that they inhabit. (They are also a blessing to the economy of the community, state and nation.) If our goal as educators and parents is to pass along the cultural inheritance that helps our children (along with us) to understand our place and responsibility within God’s calling for our self, our family, our churches and communities; if we impart the disciplines that it takes to uphold, pass on and preserve our place, our faith and our communities; then, and only then have we begun to see the true end of education. This end aims not at test scores and scholarships, but at faithfulness and usefulness.
Earlier Berry notes, speaking of the myopia of present “educators” intent on publishing rather than educating,
Look at the state of Kentucky, and it is clear that, more and any publication of books and articles, or any research, we need an annual increment of several hundred several hundred competently literate graduates who have some critical awareness of their inheritance and a sense of their obligation to it, and who know the use of books.
I pray that we would do this same work here in Lancaster County .
PS—Sorry about the irregularity of the blog recently. We have been out an about in
Indiana New Jersey and (I have been to Atlanta ). I will have more to say on this soon. But for any readers, I will aim to return to more faithful updates.
Indiana New Jersey and (I have been to Atlanta ). I will have more to say on this soon. But for any readers, I will aim to return to more faithful updates.
