So, we are off … and I thank you for joining me. Here is a focal question for this week.
In our attempt to reconstruct the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Which is primary? or Ultimate ? Does it matter?
Our Crisis : Not all, but many young people are literally falling apart and unable to function. Occasionally I’ve met young people who walk around as ‘thugs /barbarians’-( immediately assigned to special education) when I sense an inability to find their ‘being’ in any discipline of knowledge/ scientia. As a front seat witness to hundreds of young lives, it seems true that part of what it means to be human is a primary need for unity/oneness/ wholeness. ( which Jesus confirms in John 17) Our separated disciplines of knowledge doesn’t fill the need.
Our task in true education, then is to restore the universals/ transcendentals. But what are they?
I found Plato to be brilliant. I was fascinated with his [pre-christian] understanding of ultimate concerns or ultimate reality. .. . for it felt so ‘comprehensive’. Through his discussion, we see his search includes the ‘whole picture’ in searching for oneness: pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful … at times virtue and justice. He perceives a world that was brimming full of divininty; AND– that human beings can thrive only by living in harmony with the cosmos and the gods. But he doesn’t stop there.
For Plato: understanding higher concerns must by extension be carried out into the classroom/ academy, and by extension, into the community. He perceived a city-state run by a philosopher/king that understood that ‘knowledge’ alone was fractured and insufficient. Humanity must be drawn up into a higher order of things. Fascinating. He understoood a “meta-physical” reality.
The paradigm for Classical education then, is something totally different; it is not concerned merely with a skill set to find a job or created a career. It is the enterprise of sculpting a young person around a higher order of things– like attributes and rationality.
By contrast, we today live within a post- Christian culture where disciplines of knowledge have been divorced both from philosophical categories and from the fulcrum of the Logos– which destroys any possibility for rationality. To restore the framework: we will need to place academic disciplines back into appropriate philosophical categories, and those categories must be re-attached to the fulcrum.
Classical Christian education then, is attaching philosophical categories not to rationality but — BEING… the Logos. ( but that comes a bit later with Aquinas.)
As you reflect on the confusion of our post-modern culture around us, which seems to be most naturally operative within people : the pursuit of the true or the good?
To answer this question : This week I will be reading Plato The Republic Book 5-7
Join me ! If you have time or care to… which most likely will not be many of you. .since I know… you are BUSY!!
Either way;— I plan to be back to parse it out.
The Great Conversation taken Captive 