Dangerous Humane Letters
Humanities teachers at a classical school labor between the “already” and the “not yet.” It’s a stressful place to live. It’s a dangerous place to work. The classical tradition seeks to repair something that has been ruined. Or, to rebuild something that has been lost. Both metaphors are used widely and both have value. When humanities teachers agree to teach in a classical school, they should be given a bullet proof vest and the key to a private study. Because if you are doing this job correctly, shots will be fired and you will need a place for uninterrupted contemplation.
True humanities teachers will agree to submit to the text they teach. That doesn’t mean we agree to present all the ideas in the text as true and the author as inerrant. Rather, it means that we agree the text is a great book—it has endured and therefore it is valuable. We agree that it has something to teach us about what it means to be human, and we agree to guide our students through the text with reverence and careful attention, but the books we read with our students are dangerous. They produce fear by revealing chaos. They point to redemption by showing brokenness. They open minds by closing mouths.
Students become more human by studying the humane letters only when their teachers are students of the texts themselves. Teachers who are students of the text will bring the text into the classroom. With the text comes all of its raw, sharp ideas; powerful and strange ideas. Ideas that must be considered, discussed, and evaluated. However, not all ideas are equally valuable nor do all claims share the same truth value. A humanities teacher teaches her students how to run ideas through a filter, but she is doing more than that. She is creating that filter in the minds of her students. She is modeling how to get to the bottom of what something really means by helping her students see how things fit together. Helping her students see how things fit together is the process by which she creates this filter in the mind of her students.
The humanities teacher regularly structures her lessons and discussion so that she is asking students questions like these: Does this idea agree or disagree with that one? Where does this idea uphold or deny other principles within the Western Tradition? Would this idea be endorsed by your pastor or priest? If you made the same claim the author is making at the dinner table, what would your parents say?
Humanities teachers must do this if a school really wants to produce the graduate they promise in their marketing literature: a student who can “change culture” who “has a biblical worldview” who “knows not just what to think, but how to think.”
Most of what I am hearing these days from high school humanities teachers is not encouraging. Too many parents have sheltered their children from pain and difficulty, rather than raising them to suffer well by perseverance and prayer. These parents have retreated from the world into Christian communities of complete control. Exposure to non-believers is minimal and in most cases non-existent. Neighborhoods are carefully curated and friendships are tightly monitored.
This Christian cloisterism has created students who are almost impossible to teach. Because they have been inundated by the idea that all things secular are bad. They have no ability to read a secular text and run it through a filter. They don’t have a filter at all, but rather a swinging door.
I once observed a high school English class where the students asked the teacher, before reading the text, if the author was a Christian so that they would know whether or not to believe what they read. These students didn’t want to do the work of determining if the ideas in the text were orthodox. They wanted the teacher to tell them whether they should open or close the swinging door of their minds.
The mission statements of classical Christian schools promise a commitment to the pursuit of truth. To faithfully execute that mission, humanities teachers must be encouraged to do the dangerous yet essential work of removing the swinging door and creating the filter. The swinging door will not produce students who know how to discourse with real people in the real world. Nor does it help students learn how to love sinners.
Humanities teachers need more support and fewer classes. They need the protection of administration and the benefit of the doubt from parents. And they need to be encouraged to lavish their prep periods on reading and thinking.
