Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I really like the ole, pseduo-Chinese proverb:

He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student; teach him.

He who knows and knows that he knows is a teacher; follow him.

He who knows but knows not that he knows is asleep; awaken him.

He who knows not, but knows not that he knows not is a fool; fear him.

This proverb has come to mind quite a bit recently. I have been commiserating with colleagues lately about a number of issues that range from the students that we teach to the catechists that we are trying to form. Both have given us much room for discussion. In one enterprise, we have developed a new online catechetical formation program that we have directed toward students. catechists and catechetical leaders. First, I must say that we have been gratified by the response of those who have an intense desire for learning their faith. However, for everyone of these there are others who believe that all learning should be easy, entertaining, and an opportunity to emote with what they “think” (read feel) about that with which they are presented.

This is the response from not a few students of undergraduate age. That is to be expected. However, when similar attitudes are presented by the much older adult catechists and catechetical leaders who have taken it upon themselves to help teach the faith, one becomes a bit more jaundiced about the prospects for a springtime anytime soon.

Thus, when Shawn forwarded me this post by Barbara Nicolosi I decided that I would have to share it. After all, misery loves company. Here are some snippets:

I’m always pretty sharp in my critique of the Boomer Generation. I think they inherited a pretty good world and then selfishly screwed up so much that it will take a hundred years to even figure out where they left us. But, just to keep things balanced, it’s time to set the penetrating gaze on Gen X. (Of course, Gen X’s problems can mostly be laid at the feet of the Boomers, but whatever…) As somebody who has been teaching undergrads and twenty-somethings for the last decade, I have a lot of observations here. Maybe in a subsequent post I’ll flesh them out.

But let me start with one of the most serious issues that I see in Gen X. Let’s call it, “Defiantly Ignorant.” Simply put, one of the things that marks Gen Xers is the way they apprehend attempts to educate them as an assault on their personal dignity. Not everybody, but it is a generational trend. My experience with my students is that they are nearly incapable of debate, because every time you disagree with them, you suddenly find yourselves in a battle with their emotional survival. It makes many of them invincibly ignorant, I’m afraid.

An example of this comes up every time I teach Gen Xer’s this class I’ve got on the nature of beauty. Invariably, after I have gone through the three elements of the beautiful from St. Thomas - wholeness, harmony and radiance - one of the undergrads will prop a limp elbow into the air - what is it with this generation that even asking a question in class has to be a statement on how ambivalent they are about even being there? - and then he or she will issue forth, “I don’t agree.”

And then I respond, pretending all the while that this is the first time I’ve heard the astonishingness, “You don’t agree that there are elements to the beautiful? Okay, cool. Give me an argument.”

“Well, I think, you know, that any body can just decide what, you know, they like.”

“That’s not an argument.”

“I don’t need to give you an argument. It’s what I think. I have a right to my opinion.”

AHHHHHHHHHHH. There it is. The “rights” thing. And the abuse of the word “think.” There isn’t thinking going on here. There is resentment and petulance and the need to assert one’s existence. But it ain’t thinking. A huge inhibitor to great art coming out from the young generations today is that the assertion of knowable truth (including all of the skills that go into excellence of craft) comes off to Gen Xers and Millenials as an assault on their autonomy and personhood.

This is exactly on target. The intellects of young people these days seem to made in mush-melons with this deficient pedagogy that promotes the idea that everything a student says must be affirmed. Correction (unless it is a politically incorrect locution) is absolutely verboten. I would argue that this arises from the late-modern (aka post-modern) fantasy that one can create his own reality through the force of his will (ala Nietzsche and Sartre) combined with the sixties era confusion that supposes the solution to all the world’s problems is to be found through self-affirmation. But that is what we are left with.

Some have said that those involved in my enterprise today at the undergraduate level are greatly encumbered by being delivered with minds which are tabulae rasae. I would that this were the case. One could build from a blank slate. The problem today is that one has the problem of first dismantling a world view that confuses concupiscent emoting for critical thinking and before he may cultivate thinking skills. The latter takes effort and time, for neither of which does the hyperstimulated generation of today have much patience. Barbara would agree with this I suspect:

So, the two-part cause of the problem that is keeping Gen xers from adding anything really profound to the lasting cultural canon, is first that they have been so abysmally educated, that they live in chronic, probably insurmountbale double ignorance. They don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. A reflection of double ignorance in Gen Xer storytelling is that they tend to say profound and then banal things back to back, and they really don’t know the difference. They don’t know when they are actually skirting and even ripping off great ideas that have been out there for three thousand years. And reciprocally, they don’t know what “obvious” means. (When I was in college, it was a funny insult to say that someone had “a keen sense of the obvious.” Today, I would kill for a room of students with that quality.)

[snip]

Secondly, they have been so wounded by the flailings around of their Boomer parents, that they are often simmering pools of resentment with the craven idol of their own hurt feelings relentlessly jerking them around. So, they don’t know, and it HURTS THEIR FEELINGS THAT THEY DON’T KNOW. When I correct my students for bad grammar, they tell me it hurts their feelings. When I call a young employee into my office for not doing her job well, she complains that it is a violation of her feelings. When I gave a student a completely unemotional notice that he had already missed his requisite three unexcused classes, he became pouty and petulant and told me I was harsh and didn’t understand him.

Yes, well sometimes reeducating these young (and unfortunately also the not so young) minds seems like a Quixotian enterprise. One is sometimes tempted to give up. It is then that I remember Mother Teresa reminder that God calls us to fidelity, not success. Then it becomes much easier to live with the marginal impact one gets to see that he makes and it becomes less burdensome to fear the masses whom we attempt to serve as they continue in the ignorance of what they do not know . . .