By Dr. James Christie, Ambassador-at-Large, Canadian Multifaith Federation
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“Education is the process of becoming confused at a higher level”
It is a delicious irony that I sit at my desk and pen (literally) this reflection on education in our fragile world, a world teetering on the brink of a fog-shrouded abyss.
You see, my first day of school was one of the worst of my life. Gault Institute; established 1898; a grey block house of a building: that is where it all began. Grade One, Mrs. Eleanor Cooper presiding. Mrs. C had welcomed my father on his first school day in September 1930. A quarter of a century later, she welcomed me. Well, almost. There I was, a freshly minted 6 year old. Polished black brogues, grey flannel trousers, white shirt, clip-on bowtie, knit vest, dark jacket, and the school boy beanie with a brim (a thankfully long-forgotten relic of a bygone day). The finishing touch, a brown leather shoulder-strapped school bag.
I was ready for the great adventure. I strode confidently into the classroom. The coat hooks were nestled behind gigantic black boards, fitted to raise up and down like primitive garage doors. I hung up my George Bailey cap over my already-hooked jacket. I took a seat at the vacant front row desk. I looked around, and shrank in horror. The teacher, staring at me in puzzlement, wasn’t Mrs. C. None of my fellow students were familiar to me from my half-day kindergarten of a few months past.
I was in the wrong room. At the wrong desk. My coat and cap were dangling from the wrong hook. And the earth didn’t swallow me. I begged it to.
The rest I leave to your imagination and your charitable instincts.
And yet, here I write, at the other end of a life-long love affair with learning. Four university degrees in hand; twice a dean (Theology and Global Relations); extensive scribbling attributable to my efforts; and now a Professor Emeritus of my university.
And this I know: education is not enough.
Education and Catastrophe
In the closing years of the 19th century, novelist and futurist Herbert George (H.G.) Wells observed that humanity was “in a race between education and catastrophe”. His perspective remains common courtesy in our own much-troubled era. Scant weeks ago, I and my partner attended the funeral of a much-loved Holocaust survivor, who had attained 99 ½ years of life. And what a life. A mid teen during WWII, he escaped Nazi internment and embarked on an epic story of survival.
A refugee to Canada after the war, he built a successful and thriving career in the financial services sector; a thriving family of generations; and garnered love and respect in his community and beyond. Isaac was a mensch.
In his retirement, he grew into a whole new career as a Holocaust Educator, speaking to thousands upon thousands of students, rendering his life a testimony and inspiration.
At his funeral, he was lauded for his contributions as an educator, and as one who believed in education. Isaac was, and Isaac did. Thank God.
The Achilles Heel
Education is a critical life necessity, ranked with health, and makes life worth living. Socrates was right when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Wells was also right.
And yet, to heed a couple of other Greek sages, Aristotle observed that “the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Plato provided further nuance. In the Republic, he writes:
“The well nurtured youth is one who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill made works of man… and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly…”
And therein lies the Achilles heel of the idealization of education as salvific: the fine line between education and propagation. Let us recall to mind one of the irrefutable truths of human civilization: Education, even in the so-called hard sciences, is dependent on history and language skills. Neither is written in stone; both are easily weaponized. Dr. Goebbels of the unlamented (at least by the sane) third Reich provided ample evidence of these truths.
Education is premised on building upon the past, and employing the past as humanity’s sole basis for anticipating the future. History is written by the victors; language weaponizes history in favour of the victors. The instances of this are legion. Currying favour with the Tudors, William Shakespeare villainized and vilified Richard III and MacBeth. Pope Julius II made monstrous caricatures of the Borgias: great drama, flawed documentation. Roman Emperor Nero was portrayed by his political and Christian enemies to be as mad as any numbers of autocratic “wannabe’s” in this current era. And let us not even begin to enumerate the traditional defamation of bygone peoples and cultures from Africa to South Asia to both Meso and Latin America, to the Indigenous nations and peoples of North America (Turtle Island). Novelist John Dos Possos is long credited with the observation that those “who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” We must, for example, never forget that in the early 20th century, fear, anger, and deprivation across Germany (among the best-educated cultures in Europe and the world) gave way democratically to the Nazis. No, education alone is never enough to guarantee a just, honest, vibrant and sustainable civilization; least of all globally.
Essential Supplementation
Education is foundational, but it must be supplemented by a number of interesting and symbiotic endeavors. Education, to be true to its Platonic ideals, must be exercised under the rule of law, from the municipal to the global and at every level in between. And, dare we suggest, even to our incursions into space. We watch with alarm the legal institutions established since the end of WWII be degraded, undermined, and dismantled by brigands of every political persuasion.
A free press–comprising all platforms–is essential to restoring global civilization. But increasing corporate control and publication; unregulated and unsupervised social media; and an Orwellian perversion of language? Language can deceive even the best-educated and astute citizen.
Politics, in essence a noble calling, seems to be little more than vain jockeying for power and pandering for votes.
The arts in every expression, from craft to cinema, is less dedicated to beauty and truth in the style of Keats than it is to message and manipulation.
The academy is rapidly undergoing a transition as a refuge for universal knowledge and reflection to a sharply-focused trade school. The latter is of infinite value, but of limited objective.
Religions and spiritualities, in their deep philosophical and ethical commonalities, are oriented towards a harmony of the human community. Increasingly, the potential of this immeasurably powerful human project is gaining recognition. The IF20 itself, which sponsors this and myriad other essays, articles, webinars, and conferences, is but one iteration affirming this newly emergent phenomenon. Yet surely there is no human endeavor so easily perverted and weaponized than faith.
Drinking Deep
So, education, on its own, in a silo is never enough. Alexander Pope, an 18th century English writer, wrote, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; drink deep or not at all of that Phyrgian stream.” Education, superficially applied or weaponized for political ends, can work against itself to tragic result.
But when we harness the critical necessity of right learning to law; a free and responsible press; integrity in politics; vibrant arts of every genre; a free-thinking academy; and right religion, we are capable of transforming this lovely little space rock of ours into Marshall Mchuhon’s “global village,” or better still, in the vision of the late great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, or the universalist Arthur C. Clarke, “a global neighbourhood.”
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Dr. James Christie is the inaugural Ambassador-at-Large for the Canadian Multifaith Federation and part of the G20 Interfaith Forum Board of Directors. For 15 years, Christie served at the University of Winnipeg as Dean of Theology, Dean of the Global College, and Director of the Ridd Institute for Religion and Global Policy.