As the
school year commences, we might do well to recollect – bring back to our
attention – what we are about simply as educators, let alone as Lasallian
educators. Our purpose dwells more in the realm of virtue and its emergence
than in the realm of utility and its application. Our context is more a web of
relationships than an org chart of job descriptions. Our daily world includes
both sets of realities perhaps, but our intentional focus habitually differs
from that of most organizations. This is as it should be, because we are about
the shaping of souls.
De La Salle
writes: “You have committed yourselves to God in the place of those whom you
instruct. By taking upon yourselves the responsibility for their souls, you
have, so to speak, offered to him soul for soul. [Ex. 21:23]” (M 137.3) This is
a religiously intimate responsibility. It is one “that requires you to touch hearts, but this you cannot do except by
the Spirit of God." (M 43.3) "You must... imitate God to some extent,
for he... loved the souls he created." (M 100.3) The imitation of God
becomes incarnated in the teacher's daily relationship with students.
"Every day you have poor children to instruct. Love them tenderly...
following in this the example of Jesus Christ." (M 166.2) Through such brotherly/sisterly
devotion and deep attachment to the good of their students, teachers are able
to draw down God's graces upon those entrusted to their care. This is a foundational
perspective within our Christian tradition, as expressed through our own
Lasallian Catholic lens of over three centuries, and it persists.
Such a
foundational perspective on education has been at work throughout human history,
lying at the root of multiple valued traditions. It is well described by C.S.
Lewis in the little book, The Abolition
of Man. He says that it is a basic human conviction that truths lie
embedded in particular things themselves. Education is an introduction, an initiation,
into the engagement with those truths; i.e., it is the cultivation of genuine virtue.
Aristotle held that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike
what s/he should. Common to Greek philosophy, the Hindu Rta, the Oriental Tao, the
Confucian Analects, the Jewish Law, etc. “is the doctrine of objective
value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really
false, to the kind of things the universe is and the kind of things we are.” According
to Augustine, virtue is “ordo amoris,
the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that
kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.” In Lewis’ words, “the task
is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate,
whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of
[hu]man consists.”
What does
this mean for us? “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles
but to irrigate deserts.” Perhaps one of the sad consequences of today’s
pervasive paradigm of scientific materialism is an absence of the capacity to see
and develop genuine virtue, much less value its often difficult pursuit. Our
mission, if we decide to accept it, involves the training of those attitudes, perspectives,
and relational experiences by which “emotions [are] organized by trained habit
into stable sentiments” so that our students are guided and accompanied into
their best and surely most demanding selves, precisely according to how that
“best” has been experienced, described, and known throughout the greater part
of human history.
This is what
the shaping of souls is about, both theirs and ours.
