Yesterday’s Lessons for Today’s Learning

As Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics I.13, man is a rational animal. There is something deeply intuitive about this fact to many people. Our American society has at its center a time-consuming education process to form the rational part of the animal that is man. One study even put a concrete number to that process of nearly 9,000 hours over the course of nine years just to complete primary and lower secondary education. At the same time, there seems to be a continual hunt for the perfect educational process. Consider the return of classical education or the initiative of Common Core. Evidently, we are not being educated in the same way as 20 years ago, 200 years ago, or 2000 years ago. Among those epochs of education, is there one that is superior? One that may be closer to the perfect educational process? Are we as a society veering closer or further away from that ideal model? A. G. Sertillanges, a writer from the beginning of the twentieth century, shows signs of having found part of the answer to these questions in his thought-provoking work The Intellectual Life.

Sertillanges questions his reader early on, “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciatiation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work...”. There is a key difference undergirding this framework in contrast to our own; it is the concept of vocation. Sertillanges titles section one of chapter one ‘The Intellectual Life has a Sacred Call’, and if you are anything like myself, the concept of intellectual life as something sacred is both foreign and familiar. The concept of a call doesn’t seem to have entirely disappeared from our society either. It’s true that many people send their children through education as merely a means to an end, with first grade hopefully leading to the first CEO of some corporation. At the same time, you may still hear instances of calling: “I felt called to be a teacher” or “I felt called to be a professor.”

If this concept of pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake resonates with you, it should. Disraeli says, “do what you please, provided it really pleases you,” and Aquinas says that “pleasure characterizes function.” A simple analogy can better elucidate the connection between these two thoughts. When we eat, we derive pleasure (most of the time). Eating has a function— namely nutrition. Yet that basic function can still be pleasurable, and indeed it should be; what would society look like if eating was a total chore? Our minds have a function as well, and using that function can be a powerful experience.

But there still seems to be a stumbling block. Sertillanges says that “a vocation is not fulfilled by vague readings and a few scattered writings.” If we want to dedicate ourselves to this type of life, we have to become “athletes of the mind”, and being an athlete is difficult. There is certainly the joy of the game, but there is also the drudgery of the training. Even a century ago, Sertillanges addressed many of the same challenges that we are faced with in modern times, such as an abundance of books at affordable prices. This presents quite the difficulty for the intellectual, since only a few books are truly necessary, as Sertillanges rightly points out. Scattered reading will not build the necessary framework for the mental athlete. Purposeful training is instead required. An additional problem confronts us today— there aren’t merely thousands of books crowding for our attention, but also the loud roar of social media and short blog posts like this one.

Towards the end of this first section of chapter one, Sertillanges describes a troubling situation for one striving for this sort of intellectual life. He talks of an “isolated worker, deprived of intellectual resources and stimulating society, where he seems condemned to stagnate, exiled far from rich libraries, brilliant lectures, an eagerly responsive public, possessing only himself...” How do we compare to this unideal situation? Are we isolated? The answer seems to be both yes and no. With everybody bobbing their head to their own beat, headphones isolating the individual from the outside world, it is easy to become a solitary worker. But we also have the power of the Internet. With work, we can find our way out of this isolation and into a community even from our own bedroom (which in itself seems to be a problem for another post). We are certainly not devoid of intellectual resources; with a click of my keyboard, I can read nearly any book ever written. And yet, this seems to lend itself to the same problem from earlier; we cannot simply fulfill our vocation by “vague readings.” With unlimited choices, the decision of what to read becomes all the more challenging. The same goes for “brilliant lectures.” YouTube churns out nearly a million hours of new content every single day, not all of which classifies as brilliant lectures, although there are certainly more than quite a few of those available.

This returns us to the problem that is still unsolved. We are challenged by a curriculum that doesn’t seem to be serving athletes of the mind. With a quick Google search, I was able to find quite a few articles discussing new curriculums that were posted even within the hour. At the end of the first section of chapter one, Sertillanges questions, “have you two hours a day?” That is enough for this type of life. Even so, there are many challenges to such a life, and we have to sit and reflect on if we truly want to “do intellectual work.”