The majority of my posts thus far have been about teaching and learning and the crucial engagement between teacher and student.  Hopefully, then, I have been clear that I believe the purpose of education—especially a liberal arts education—is not merely the “filling” of minds, but the “formation” of minds.  So as important, as crucial, as these matters are—intellectual development, knowledge and skills, the forming of connections, exploring the broad questions that form the bedrock of an informed citizenry—in this post, I want to turn to another side of the matter.

Because not all of education is about the life of the mind, narrowly defined.  Some important connections are made in the heart—meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge.  In Parker Palmer’s words, as I have noted before, “. . .the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight.”  In liberal arts education, so much more is involved than “facts” and “abilities,” more than the sorts of things that can be easily defined, counted, or measured.  Which brings me to the second indispensable matter, where, in the spirit of paradox—living in the “ceaseless tension of opposites”—I want to spend the balance of these reflections.

Some of you may remember Maria in Rogers and Hammerstein’s famous play and movie, “The Sound of Music.”   I know it belongs to my generation, but if you ever saw it, you may recall that, in some wonderful lyrics, the nuns of the convent ask about this frisky young novice:

How do you solve a problem like Maria

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down

(How do you) keep a wave upon the sand?

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

How common in all our lives are such elusive matters as character, values, friendships, dreams—easy to say, terribly important, but devilishly difficult to define, to capture, to “hold in your hand.”  And yet, the pursuit of knowledge and skills is chock full of “problems like Maria”—so many “moonbeams” that  influence, out of all that has been available, what is learned, how it is learned, how much it is worth, and what one does with it.

There have always been those who have thought that such slippery matters cannot and ought not be addressed in formal education, and even some “hardliners” who dismiss them as sentimental luxuries, too expensive in a world of tough realities.  Could it be that they are right—that education, even life itself, is for the “head and hands” but not for the “heart?”  I am convinced that they are wrong! 

As David Brooks observed in a recent op ed,

“We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains” (Students Learn From People They Love, NY Times, January 18, 2019).

But then he notes that cognitive science has shown that rather than emotions being the opposite of reason, they are crucial to reason. “Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.”

 One of the things that cemented my bonds to the institutions I was privileged to serve during my career was their celebration of the right and need to wonder alongside a commitment to know—the belief that attitudes and values are as important as facts and skills. 

That tradition is not only a very old one, it is also supported by studies of highly creative and productive professional people.  These people appear to be characterized by two things:  an informed intelligence, and a set of personality traits that determine whether that intelligence will be used—such things as persistence, motivation, living up to one’s potential, and an internal sense of excellence, stability, and maturity.

These are persons who have refused to engage in “either-or” and have chosen to achieve the appropriate mix of facts and feelings, of information and attitude, of knowledge and wisdom—of what I have called “minds” and “moonbeams.  Now the $100 question is: can those things be taught?  I don’t think so, at least not in the simple instructive sense.  But, the $1,000 question is:  can those things be learned?  Oh, my goodness, yes! 

And so from the spirit of “both-and” comes the recognition that, while the business of education demands a strenuous mind, there is more to learning and to life than intensity.  There is also richness of mind that comes from a different skill—simple, intentional hospitality to those things we cannot get at by vigorous effort and critical analysis: what we inwardly possess by appreciation, insight, and responsiveness to the human spirit, and to the gifts with which we have been blessed. 

The kind of learning I’m talking about happens in different ways for different people, but I think it happens most often when there has been an encounter with a teacher—sometimes a teacher in fact if not in name—where the student is invited to learn in a relationship that is personal and calls for encounter and introspection and change. 

Let me offer two examples.

The first comes from the blog of my friend, Guy Sayles, in which he wonders how he can inspire his students to see their college years as more—not less—than preparation for employment. “They’ve been trained to view their scores on standardized tests as evidence of education more than they’ve been invited to think expansively, imaginatively, and critically. . . . No doubt, they need to acquire and hone skills for the world of work. How, though, can I urge them to see education as more than job-training—to view it as a lifelong search for meaning, an ongoing exploration of human flourishing? At their core, these are questions about how we help each other, not just students, to ‘live for more than bread alone,’ since most of us are susceptible to sacrificing matters of the spirit on altars of success” (“I Don’t Know , , , and I Know,” From the Intersection, February 24, 2019).  I can’t say it better and I devoutly hope for more teachers like him.

My second example is personal.  My most vivid and significant memories of my college days are of a handful of teachers who challenged me, whom I found to be persons worth trusting and listening to, and with whom I could risk both my certainties and my doubts.  The most important was a professor of philosophy, although at the time I had no particular interest in the field and it would be many years before I even considered being a teacher of philosophy myself.  There was nothing about him, at first glance, that should have resonated with me.  I grew up in a very strict Baptist family and church where the motto was: “Keep yourself unspotted from the world.”

By the standards of my upbringing, this guy had spiritual measles!  He smoked a pipe, he went to Hollywood movies, he condoned dancing on campus, he was known to use an occasional swear word, and it was whispered that he might even have a glass of wine now and then. 

Now that all seems pretty tame now, but 60+ years ago, they were all high on my “don’t do” list.  But in the providence of life’s surprises, all of that was pushed to the periphery, and the semester I spent in his class became the most significant turning point in my college career. 

He forced me to think for myself; he pushed me to confront things I would rather have avoided; he never demanded that I agree with him, but he never allowed me to substitute a thin veneer of glittering generalities for lucid thinking and sound reasoning—he taught me that, in Elton Trueblood’s words, “holy sloppy is still sloppy”; when I wrote an “A” paper, he gave me an “A,” and then he “bled” all over my paper with extensive comments that extended my boundaries and pushed me to do better. 

I must have met the knowledge requirements of that course, since my transcript shows that I passed it but, in all honesty, that is not what I remember most and it’s not what had the most lasting effect on my life.  Through the content of the course, this teacher challenged my character, my values, my determination, my imagination, and he modeled a teaching style that was the major influence on my own.  The information was important, and later became the subject that captivated my “mind,” but with this teacher it was the “moonbeams” that got me! 

And so, finally, I am pleading for the importance of holding in creative tension knowledge and wisdom, reason and passion, knowing and wondering, doing and being—minds and moonbeams.  We need them both.  Minds without moonbeams are power without direction—we’ve got the message but don’t know what to do with it.  Moonbeams without minds are intentions without substance—we know where we want to go but have no message to deliver.  We need facts and great ideas; we also need the inner vision to recognize them, to incorporate them into our spiritual core, and the character to use them wisely.  May it be so for all of us.