Forming Souls - Not Just Minds with Heidi White

But if you're only...

So talk about that 'cause I think, again, education is, especially with literature, is historically for many of us just been it's the old grab the CliffNotes, get the key ideas, put it on the multiple choice test, and you're done.

I mean, it's a very, very different way to understand r- the reading of literature.

Right.

That's true.

And I think as Christian classical educators, we have this opportunity to, to have a different kind of pedagogy in our schools and in our homes that we don't approach it as just a checklist of knowledge.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, but knowledge is, uh, is, is so much more than the acquisition and regurgitation of facts, right? Um, and to encounter a story, I think, is best experienced as an existential moment in our life.

Yeah.

Um, literature becomes this mirror to our inner life.

Um, and I think all knowledge has the capacity for that, um, even math, right [laughs]?

Right.

Um, uh, music, all of it.

Right.

Like, the whole quadrivium, the whole trivium is, uh, is this, this, um, we live in an ordered cosmos.

We live in a cosmos in which we can know, and we can encounter knowledge with all levels of our being.

Um, and so if we are to Truncate and limit knowledge the way modern education does, and so usually it does it in two ways.

One, it intellectualizes it, like you're saying.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Like, "Here's your checklist," right? Um, "Here's all the things I know." Um, and then the second way that we do that is by treating education as if it ought to serve some kind of utilitarian purpose specifically related to the marketplace, right?

Mm-hmm.

I'm gonna get a good education so that I can get a good job, right? Um, and if you don't have a vision for humanity, if you don't have a Christian anthropology, what is a human for? A human is for union with Christ, the return to paradise, our true humanity regained.

Right.

Um, that's, that's what it means to be human.

That's the purpose.