There are many reasons to be concerned about the state of education and the university, perhaps even to despair. And yet, to educate, fundamentally, is to hope. For the educator, it means believing that the person entrusted to me can become a complete human being who is fully alive. If you are reading these words, it’s because you still hope.
I’ve never quite understood William the Silent’s famous claim that “you don’t need to hope to undertake.” But perhaps we should understand it in this way: beyond a situation that seems hopeless, we need to find the inspiration that allows us to undertake the fight in spite of everything. The foundation of hope lies beyond these passing times. A difficult situation monopolises our attention and hides the reasons for hope, which are nonetheless real and powerful.
In the case of education, this is an essential lesson. We must fight to save education in the West. But what, precisely, is the education we wish to save? Rather than provide some kind of pithy definition that is sure to seem like an oversimplification to some readers, I wish to reflect on education and its power to change history beyond the disheartening appearances of our era.
Socrates and the grandparents of philosophy
When considering the nature of education, it is useful to turn to the man who is sometimes called the father of Western philosophy, Socrates. But who were Socrates’ own educators? Surely Socrates himself did not emerge from nothing! We ought not forget about his parents, whom we might call the grandparents of philosophy, which itself helped to shape European civilisation. The question is an important one: who were Socrates’ parents? We learn their occupations from Plato’s Alcibiades. Socrates’ father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor; his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife, which is often better known. By a happy coincidence, the occupations of Socrates’ parents represent two very different approaches to education.
Like the art of the sculptor, the work of education can be seen as the imposition of a form that comes from outside. The sculptor takes a block of raw material, such as marble, and chisels away the excess material, creating a bust of Caesar or a Pieta. In the same way, the teacher, according to his own idea of human perfection (or what his pupil should become), may seek to conform to it by his injunctions, by the imposition of constraints, and by various techniques employed on purpose.
The art of the midwife consists in facilitating childbirth, which, although a natural process, often needs to be assisted. The midwife does not create the being that comes into the world; she facilitates its emergence and is at the service of a vital dynamism that she does not produce. She enables the woman she accompanies to give birth to the being with which she is pregnant.
We know that Socrates himself compares his art as a philosopher in the city to that of his mother; just as his mother Phaenarete gave birth to bodies, Socrates gave birth to minds, through the art of questioning or maieutics. And it is no coincidence that he does not compare his art to that of his sculptor father. Socrates is well aware that in dialogue he accompanies his interlocutor’s own dynamism, and that maieutics does not create a form but facilitates its birth.
When Socrates refers to ‘maieutics,’ he means the nature of teaching. Teaching, however, seeks the true, while education aims at the good. Socrates may have been more interested in teaching than strictly in education. But is that so different? In the case of education too, it seems to us that it is first and foremost a question of accompanying a vitality of one’s own (the spiritual vitality of a person capable of knowing, loving, and choosing), but that at the same time the exemplary action of the sculptor is sometimes necessary, depending on the age of life. In reality, the two models I proposed above are not always at odds. Both are needed in education, though the art of the sculptor is ordered to that of the midwife—Socrates was undoubtedly lucky to have benefited from both influences. If the educator is more akin to a midwife than a sculptor (otherwise education would be more akin to training), it might be more appropriate to compare him to a gardener: if the gardener facilitates the development of the seed by choosing the right soil and the right time for sowing, he is also required to provide a framework, to prune what is not bearing fruit, and to guide growth with the help of a stake—in short, to provide a certain number of external conditions to ensure the proper development of life, whose principle of movement is always intrinsic.
In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates goes even further in comparing the act of teaching with the art of midwifery. Here we draw four analogies: First, the midwife detects the pregnancy; similarly the teacher must be attentive to what the pupil is carrying, his thirst, his dispositions, his gifts, his intuitions: he must know the pupil and love him. Second, the midwife tries to ease the pain; in the sometimes arduous path of intellectual life, the teacher must also provide the methods for learning to work and overcoming difficulties. Third, the midwife accompanies childbirth, but is not the primary cause of the birth of a being; just so, the teacher is not the primary cause of understanding and scientia (knowledge) in the pupil, instead he serves the vitality of the pupil’s own intelligence—he is an instrumental cause. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ work, De magistro, is helpful for understanding this point. It is a magnificent work by the teacher who collaborates with what in man is particularly like the Creator: his spirit. Whatever the difficulties, we should always remember that the main cause of teaching is in the pupil himself, and that his spirit is therefore always central to the success of this endeavour! However necessary he may be, the teacher is only an instrumental cause of learning. Fourthly, the last way in which the midwife’s art helps us think about teaching is this: if the woman being attended is not pregnant, the midwife can create the conditions for a pregnancy to occur. I’d say she can be a matchmaker! Well, the teacher also has to awaken his pupil’s intelligence, make the science he teaches desirable, so as to awaken the vitality of the pupil’s own intelligence and allow him to be surprised and amazed. As Plutarch says: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”
To be a master is to be at the service of the vitality of the pupil’s own intelligence, transmitting the requirements of his discipline to enable him to progress in his quest for truth. And this allows a true culture to blossom—’culture’ in the sense defined by Henri Hude as “the growth of the inner life through the workings of the mind.”
There’s something exhilarating and great about this—it is a real work of charity. But at the same time it is difficult and sometimes discouraging: pupils are not always eager; not all make effort and pay attention; many lack the basic knowledge the teacher wishes to take for granted; and there’s such a weight of technological conditioning that the activity of a life of the mind sometimes seems unrealistic. The desire for truth and free research seems to be underdeveloped. And yet the main cause of scientia is already present in our students.
Capernaum, or the hidden power of education and teaching.
This is the natural basis of our hope. I want to show here that this hope is not disembodied. Education has a profound and determining influence on the history of civilisation, even if its means seem derisory compared to the strength of powerful men.
The most significant revolution in the last 2,000 years, at least in Europe, has been the advent of Christianity. It is often said that European civilisation has drawn on three primary sources: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. We can identify the respective contributions of each of these great centres. But we are only dealing here with ideas, cultural forms, social organisation, and even the anthropological and metaphysical foundations that are commonly shared, which is certainly essential and highly instructive. However, what we are missing is the existential foundation on which European civilisation was built. I would like to suggest another city as the epicentre of the European form: Capernaum!
It was in Capernaum that Christ settled after Nazareth and was able to train his disciples for three years, counting his comings and goings in Galilee, Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. And it was his disciples who, strengthened by the testimony of Christ and the training they had received, were able to spread his teaching. By dying in Rome, Peter and Paul made the eternal city the centre of Christianity to come, and Christian thought was able to begin to infuse the Roman legal system (and vice versa). As Christian revelation spread throughout the Roman Empire and initially the Mediterranean basin, it came into contact with Hellenistic thought, thanks first and foremost to Saint Paul and then to the early Fathers of the Church. In short, the genesis of European civilisation, which brought together in an original way the influences of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, was only possible thanks to the existence of people trained in the school of Capernaum, Christ’s disciples.
It behooves us, then, to spend time examining the ’school’ of Capernaum. Perhaps the most glaring oddity of this ’school’ is how seemingly insignificant the resources deployed in Galilee were, during the A.D. 30s, compared to the historical consequences of what went on there. Indeed, to this day what happened in Capernaum has caused an earthquake with no end in sight.
The fruitfulness of Christ’s teaching in Capernaum is quite simply extraordinary and unequalled. However, it can be said that all the schools that have been created since Greek Antiquity (e.g., the Academy and the Lyceum) right up to the institutions that exist today—via the monasteries, the cathedral schools, the mediaeval universities, the Renaissance colleges, the polytechnics of the industrial age, the management schools of the last century, and many others besides—have all been the source of fruitfulness in history. It is often said that ideas rule the world. In a sense, no doubt this is true. But no one has ever met an idea. It only really exists in a person who has accepted or rejected it, and who has integrated it into a kind of more or less conscious personal system of thought that was formed mainly at a school and that continues to shape itself in the course of life, in rupture or continuity but without indifference. This way of thinking means that people orient their lives in particular ways and make choices that commit society to certain paths. In short, it is more than anything else what happens in schools that is the source of transformation in the world and therefore really governs it. Our institutions exert a spiritual causality, in the natural sense of the term, a very hidden causality that seems derisory in the face of military, economic and political power. They may not seem immediately effective, but they are a determining factor in the fertility of a nation and a civilisation.
So the question is: how do we create a new Capernaum? This cannot be done mechanistically, but there are seven conditions I see as essential to the rising of any new Capernaum. I have never heard the term used in other European languages, but in French a “capernaum” euphemistically means a happy mess. Capernaum, at the crossroads of nations, is a place of intermingling and trade, where colourful populations converge in disorderly fashion. Upon walking into a teenager’s bedroom, one might exclaim: “What a mess (a Capernaum) this place is!”
Capernaum was, at the time of Christ, a crossroads of the nations from which travellers could reach the Decapolis, the ten pagan cities on the borders of the territory of Israel, in Syria and Jordan in particular. A second condition has also been met: all our institutions that are part of a globalised network are located at the crossroads of nations. Therefore, if one of these institutions becomes more like that first Capernaum in essential ways, these changes can, in principle, ripple across the world.
The third and most important condition has also already been met: the fuel that will feed the fire of a renewed civilisation is already present. This is the spiritual vitality of each student, which, as we have said, is the main cause of education and teaching. And although it is sometimes very hidden, it is nonetheless a very powerful agent of transformation.
The fourth condition then concerns what I have called the ’instrumental cause’ of teaching: the existence of masters, in the sense of magister (and not dominus), i.e., teachers who reveal to their pupils that more (magis) is in them. Thus, these are teachers who are akin to Phaenarete, the midwife discussed earlier. They are masters who embody what Bergson said about the good man: “they don’t need to exhort, their existence is a call”; masters who are both nourished by the tradition of the humanities and capable of confronting contemporary issues with courage and discernment. Through who they are and what they teach, these masters reveal spiritual interiority to their students, the joy of knowing, and the happiness of being able to judge for themselves, having been nurtured by something greater.
The fifth condition concerns the institution itself, whose role is more akin to that of Sophronis the sculptor. The institution must create the external conditions to enable teachers and students to grow. Its rules and customs shape student life and also help to shape the students themselves.
The sixth condition also concerns the institution, which must fight with and for the professors so that the disciplines taught are not mercenary. The truth must be sought first and foremost for its own sake. It can be tempting and reassuring to look for an immediate result. In reality, this reveals a technical vision of education which forgets that the educator and the teacher collaborate in the spiritual vitality of the student, who has his or her own vitality. By agreeing not to seek an immediate effect, the institution makes possible a longer-term influence, the time it takes for the labour of giving birth to students to bear fruit when they are out in the world.
Finally, the seventh condition lies in the true autonomy of our institutions. To defend the primacy of the search for truth and goodness and their independence from passing ideologies, schools must jealously guard their autonomy. This is easier said than done. It is undoubtedly made easier by the existence of independent councils of vigilance, by the variety of sources of funding, and also by the collaboration between establishments sharing the same spiritual line and able to carry more weight in the public domain. But here too, spiritual power comes first.
Faced with the countless challenges that we will probably have to face in the coming years, economic, political, and military responses will have to be found. But the visible face of history is not necessarily the most important or the most real. Creating a new Capernaum, or reforming existing academic and educational institutions to restore them to their original vitality, is in some ways even more crucial. Europe, which saw the birth of the first universities, must first draw on its spiritual resources to meet the very challenge of civilisation. “Seek first the kingdom and the justice of God, and all these things [the necessities of life] will be added to you” (Mt 6:33). This is not a pious wish, but a question of realism.
