Reading Augustine: on Education, Formation, Citizenship, and the Lost Purpose of Learning
The Lost Purpose of Learning: An Interview with Joseph Clair
Dr. Joseph Clair serves as Director of the William Penn Honors Programme and Acquaintance Dean for the Liberal Arts at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Students in the William Penn Honors Program fulfill the core requirements for their degree by reading over 100 of the best books ever written and engaging them in discussion seminars.
Kyler Schubkegel, a current pupil in the William Penn Honors Program, had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Clair about his recent book On Education, Formation, Citizenship and the Lost Purpose of Learning (Bloomsbury, 2018). That interview is excerpted below.
KS: Dr. Clair, what did yous envision when yous sat downwardly to write this book?
JC: This book on Augustine and pedagogy is very much unlike my offset book on Augustine, which was also reviewed on [Cana Academy's weblog by] Andrew Zwerneman, who's a good friend. That book grew out of my interest in Augustine'south ideals every bit they were practical in his messages and sermons, and it was a scholarly work in the field of Augustinian studies, which touches on a few different realms of theology, philosophy, history. Merely this volume is very different in the sense that, since graduate school, I was hired to constitute a Peachy Books Honors Program, and... I realized in doing that that I had a very helpful friend and mentor to help me call back almost the programme and the projection, and his name was St. Augustine. He happened to be dead since 430 AD, but I realized that in many ways Augustine is the first truly classical Christian educator. I mean, he was at the height of regal liberal arts education every bit the professor of rhetoric at Milan earlier his conversion, and, you realize, what he does after his conversion in 386 is...he starts in: he writes something on music, 1 of the four arts in the quadrivium, and he has other things on dialectic and logic he was working on. Unfortunately, he never finished this project, simply we see that the master thing he wants to do afterward his conversion is take his work and function every bit an educator and build it into a truly Christian liberal arts or Christian classical curriculum... I mean, he'southward always masterfully thinking about how to educate people. And I think he is the strongest early Christian phonation that starting time brought classical learning and tried to reconcile information technology with a Christian worldview.
KS: Do you run across Augustine helping you in your own educational activity process?
JC: Yes, very much. One of the things I betoken out in the book is that, for Augustine, a human soul is made upwardly of this very interwoven triad of faculties: the intellect, the will, and the memory. Especially relevant for instruction are the intellect and the will, the volition representing the seat of the affections, and the intellect being reason in the classical sense. So, when I think about teaching, I think about how Augustine idea about education and how he educated others, and that is knowing that insofar every bit you're training minds, yous're too training angel and training hearts. You're not only trying to teach people to rationally empathize what the adept is but how to love the good, how to be drawn toward the good, how to move toward it. And that has to do with subtle habits of the mind and the center. Augustine was also a master rhetor; I love reading his sermons. There are so many of them, and you can just feel the vibrancy of the manner he communicated with his audience. One of my favorite sermons is where he's play-interim an argument between ii characters, and he's pretending to be each of them. And then you get the sense that he'due south massively learned, intellectual, but he too fully knew his audience.
Dr. Joseph Clair
KS: And how did y'all come to know a saint from the fifth century so well?
JC: Yes, I've been stuck in the 5th century! Or no, hopefully by the second volume I've brought a 5th-century saint into the twenty-first century; that was the goal. You take those moments in your Christian walk where you might feel dry out or lost or out of bear upon with God, even though you know you're a Christian and you've given your life to God in faith. I had i of those in college and on the recommendation of a friend I picked upwardly Augustine's Confessions. I was in a period of dryness and doubt; I was a philosophy major going through deep questioning. And in the Confessions, I had what I can only describe as a kind of second conversion, where I truly constitute a friend and mentor in the saint who was clearly someone who I could never outthink and who had already asked all the almost challenging questions. And at the center of [Augustine's] book was i uncomplicated moral and spiritual thought—and that is, God Himself is the highest good, the skilful that created the world and shares his goodness with the earth. So all the little adept things we love—from books and friends and cups of tea and cedar trees—are all goods that participate, mysteriously, in God'south goodness. And the challenge of the moral and spiritual life is learning how to love those goods properly, in the right order, and to permit for those goods to describe usa back to God himself, who is the source of all good. That's a very compressed version of his idea of the order of love. But that in some way totally inverse my understanding of the spiritual life and of my journey as a Christian and has stuck with me and is something that I have to exist core to my life of faith as a Christian. In fact, I was just looking at my copy of the Confessions that I bought in 2001 at Wheaton Higher that's held together by Scotch Record on the bounden and I was thinking, "What a wild thing it is to have a conversation with someone who'due south physically expressionless simply and so alive in the communion of saints and the cloud of witnesses and to feel like they've been such a approving to y'all in your ain journey as a Christian from so many hundreds—thousands—of years ago is really a really wild thought. I mean, that actually makes me call back that we are in the cloud of witnesses!"
KS: Thank you very much, and every bit we shut, I'1000 wondering if you take anything to add regarding how Augustine might exist able to brand his way into more of our lives today?
JC: Yeah, I know we had talked before—a lot of us alive in the soundbite era, where nosotros get bits and pieces of great thoughts and quotes coming at usa through social media and otherwise. And I think Augustine was so eloquent that's not a bad thing. I mean, he'southward a principal of the one-liner, like many of the nifty authors, so getting just a bit from him can really mean a lot. But I call up ane thing that struck me most, and I talk nigh this in the volume, is his theology of reading. And yous know, there are other aboriginal authors who write a bit about the importance of reading for the moral life and condign a skilful reader, but Augustine takes it to a new level, and, as I say in the volume, he shows you how to read past depicting his own experiences equally a reader in the Confessions. So in many ways, to follow Augustine'due south spiritual and philosophical journey in the Confessions is to see him narrate that for y'all in terms of his encounters with books... I think what nosotros can learn from that is the tiresome, difficult fine art of reading difficult but important books—certainly Scripture but even pagan classics about pursuing wisdom. And I mean, there are and then many neat books and nosotros live in the era in which these books are so attainable and cheap from Penguin Classics, or maybe fifty-fifty on a Kindle. But what does it mean to acquire the habits of patience and attention and listening to the words, the slow work of bringing the words off the page into your own heed and recreating meaning? Augustine…thinks that at that place'due south a lot at stake in learning to get a good reader, learning cocky-knowledge, learning how to see yourself in the mirror of the text, learning how to hear from God or to hear the phonation of wisdom... So maybe nosotros should all buy a copy of the Confessions and slowly read information technology and and so go discuss it with a group of friends, like they do at Cana Academy.
KS: Well, thank y'all very much, Dr. Clair, for your insights and your suggestions and I look frontwards to discussing the Confessions with y'all—over again and once again!
JC: Indeed! Likewise, Kyler. Thanks so much.
Kyler Schubkegel is a student in the William Penn Honors Program at George Play a joke on University. This is his commencement Open City mail.
Paradigm of On Teaching, Formation, Citizenship and the Lost Purpose of Learning courtesy of Amazon. Prototype of Dr. Clair courtesy of Dr. Clair. Header image of Pennington House (headquarters of the William Penn Honors Program) courtesy of Kyler Schubkegel.
Source: https://www.canaacademy.org/blog/the-lost-purpose-of-learning-an-interview-with-joseph-clair
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