Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

The Task Of The Modern Educator

The Task Of The Modern Educator

C.S. Lewis believed that the task of the modern educator was simple.

It is to lay the ethical foundation for rigorous analysis and opinion.

Of course, many would disagree, but the older I get I am not sure you can (long-term) do it any other way.

Is (properly) teaching one how to think close – by its very nature – to teaching one what to think?

For like we just said: Can the sentiments we promote really be based on nothing?

Ugh. Deep stuff.

I like what Alan Jacobs had to say on all this in his book How To Think.

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

The Importance Of Ordo Amoris

The Importance Of Ordo Amoris

Ordo Amoris means “the order of affections.”

In short: It’s another way of saying “priorities.”

The thing is that the priorities that one has in this life have to be mostly taught.

Children have to be shown that kindness should take a front seat to malice, charity should be prized above greed, and love should be preferred to hate.

One does not start out with an instinct for selflessness and virtue.

But misplaced priorities can easily manifest later in adults too.

A preference for spending and accumulation (instant gratification) over savings and wealth can lead to financial strain and bankruptcy – and a priority of lust, over parental/spousal responsibility can lead to broken families.

Again, this all feels hard to put a finger on without ethics as the unmovable root.

This all tips a hat back toward the necessity of classical education:

So we have returned once more to Lewis and Maritain and Weil and before all of them Augustine: the necessity of seeking the ordo amoris, of training the emotional responses before training the rational ones. But for Eliot this is vital not just for the young, but for all ages; and the instrument distinctively suited to such training is poetry.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell