Communicating With Wisdom and Grace

“For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edges or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education – lip -service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botch and piecemeal job of it.”  - Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

Excellent teachers of the art of rhetoric would require that, before one may argue against an opponent’s viewpoint, one must state that viewpoint in terms which one's opponent agrees accurately portray it. It’s said that the best debaters are capable of arguing the opposite side’s views better than the opposite side itself. The art of rhetoric - the winsome expression of all the knowledge and know-how gathered up in the years before - being the crowning stage of a classical and Christian education, those of us in this movement should have a better handle on this than most.  

Unfortunately, one need only open any social media app to see that not only has the American public “sent our young men and women into the world to fight mass propaganda,” but we have required them to become the propagandists themselves. It seems that with every arising issue, more and more we are called on by every 18-year-old commentator to “take a stand,” most often between two solidly wrong or misrepresented ideologies or positions. This is not just a problem with the young people of our day, as the elders of 2020 are now the children of the youth addressed in Sayer’s article. Turn on any news outlet or political debate and you will find that the conversation among the older generations largely consists of mantras, of ad hominem attacks, of straw men arguments, of terms loosely or never defined – everything but clear, wise, and succinct interaction with disagreements. As a culture, we don’t know how to argue, research, or filter out truth from often-misleading news articles. The constant, exhausting stream of new information renders us worn out or scrambling to appear current, and often leaves our elders and their outdated ideas “cancelled” and panting in the dust of our “enlightenment.” Not that they are any less to blame for the current climate than the generations they raised, but deference for age seems to have gone the way of aggressive workplace feminism (as I am informed by a recent NPR interview) and low-rise jeans. America (and with ever-expanding globalization, the world) is left at each other’s throats, increasingly self-segregated into smaller and smaller groups of similar, approved, or enlightened thought, with greater and greater fringes of outsiders who simply cannot (or, perhaps wisely, choose not to) keep up. Our Great Commission is no longer to disciple the nations, but to keep up our own image whatever the cost.

Thankfully, Sayers’ response to the educational process of her day applies nicely to our current communication issues (which provides some relief – if there are age-old answers there must have been age-old problems equally as nasty!). Her response is not just better Sunday schools, not better preaching, not better learning of Catechism. These things, of course, matter, but I believe her rather unexpected response can be condensed as this: Instead of teaching each subject at varying levels of difficulty throughout a child’s education, teach children how to think and ultimately how to communicate by altering our methods and materials to follow the natural bent of a child’s brain at various points of development. Use subjects, use Theology, “the mistress science,” but remember that the goal is students who know how to apply wisdom and grace in their interactions, not students who have the approved list of facts rattling around in their brain by age 18 to be hurled at an opposing viewpoint. It is precisely the “fact-download” mentality of education which has, in my opinion, led to the collective lack of credulity and prudence in our culture – clearly these were students who were taught not how to think, but what to think.

This brings me to my own Grammar-level classroom. How do I see each facts-and-rules subject, each day in (as Miss Sayers would put it) the Poll-Parrot Stage, as a means to an end, the end of my students becoming wise and circumspect disciples of Christ, rather than a list of objectives to be checked off as the year progresses? First, I must use my students’ natural bent and use it well. I must encourage curiosity and wonder, collections, finding out together, must realize that my class is not nearly as bored with saying this jingle for the twelfth time this week as I am and, if I project my boredom onto them, I’m ruining their Grammar-level fun. Second, I must know that I’m not working hard to integrate and relate these seemingly disjointed “subjects” – they already work together to show aspects of God’s nature, and it’s up to me to allow them to flow together in a way that helps the student to see this truth as well. I don’t have to reveal the order which flows from God in my Math lesson, or how it connects to our study of astronomy and navigation as we learn about the Visit of the Magi in the Gospels and read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It’s there, just waiting to be pointed out, and it’s my job to draw attention to it. Finally, I must allow that mistress science of Theology to creep into every bit of my teaching. I must show the students that there is nothing which exists outside of God’s power and that can be excluded from His principles. He is the Word, and He has created us to communicate in His love with Him and with each other, no matter what we are discussing.

If I, as a teacher approximately midway through the K-12 education of these students, can work diligently to build on the foundations already laid and toward the next phases of thought and maturity in their lives, surely I can make a small difference in tomorrow’s propaganda, and perhaps recover a few more of the lost tools of learning.

-By Grace Anne Vrazo, GCCA 5th Grade Teacher