THE DALLAS INSTITUTE
OF
HUMANITIES
AND
CULTURE’S
Cowan Center For Education Dear Friends and Colleagues, The end of a year often inspires a look forward, but because of exciting new prospects (and some that have been years in the making) coupled with the sad passing of one of my most beloved teachers, these last days of 2013 have seen me looking back, too. I often hear or see firsthand how current trends are diminishing education in our country. Too often, I hear from PreK—12 educators how their time with us is a “breath of fresh air,” a “change of pace,” an “oasis,” a “renewal.” And what are we doing? Have we discovered a new brain synapse that will unlock the secrets of intake and retention? Have we invented a new teaching method, a cutting-edge strategy that will turn every child into a brain trust, or at least into a skilled worker? We do none of these things. Grounded in great literature, we study the humanities, immersing ourselves in the stories and philosophies and histories in which great minds and hearts wrestle with the most complex human issues. And this is a “change of pace”? This kind of learning is an “oasis” (not the norm) for those whose very work is to nurture, build, and inspire the human mind and soul? The irony of this never ceases to amaze us, but today, as I said, I’m looking back, and in this I am finding comfort. The fact is, humankind has always been a glorious, foolish race of beings. Shakespeare’s Puck famously says, “What fools these mortals be!” We know that this applies to us as much as those lovers in the woods. From what I can see, at least in the Western tradition, in our drive for progress we tend to rush from one extreme to the other. Sometimes, the “rush” takes a thousand years, but technology seems to have significantly speeded up our ability to pass from age to age. I often ponder with concern the lemming-like quality of this rushing. Like the proverbial mindless rodents, we can rush after one trend or another, often over a cliff to our unwitting doom. But looking back in history, I see that as often as we rush after that which ends up dehumanizing us—as we seem to be doing today in our misguided attempts to make our culture “scientific” and efficient, including education—there seems to be an equal desire in us to strive for, to rush after, if you will, what makes us more fully hu-
Newsletter Winter 2014 • Volume III, Issue I
From the Cowan Center Director man in all the best senses of the word. Throughout Western history, an age of tyranny has been followed by an age of liberation, by the oppressed rising up with a desire to live in dignity and to enjoy the nobler features of the human condition. Unfortunately for us, the “What fools these mortals be” part of our nature also tends to accelerate liberty’s degeneration into decadence. For some reason, considering the lessons of history, we like to think that something as pleasant as freedom should be easy. But ignorant liberty leads to disorder and the need for a firmer grip, which, of course, leads to oversight that devolves again into tyranny. This explains our rush from one ideology to another since the 1950s, which includes, of course, our tsunami-like rush toward standardization and accountability in education. But in the midst of the increasing state of tyranny endured by educators in these last decades, I can also see from those who come to our programs that there is an increasing desire to be released from the tyranny of a dehumanized profession and, furthermore, an awareness that we must be released to lay the foundation for a future better than the one to which we seem to be currently rushing. If historical trends hold, this seemingly unconquerable age of tyranny, our time of controlling and measuring everything, will be overthrown by what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature,” by that which is not merely efficient and “scientific,” by the parts of us that not only are okay with mystery but relish the very nature of the complexity of life. (I want to pause for a moment to explain that I keep putting the word “scientific” in quotation marks because although its proponents claim otherwise, the current “scientific” standards of evaluation are
neither good science or math. I certainly don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think that science is a villain. All of the disciplines and subjects are needed to provide children with the kind of education that will allow them to live full lives, as citizens and as human beings.) But although I do believe that the desire for true human excellence will ultimately triumph over this age that is diminishing our humanity in so many ways, apart from a purely divine intervention, change will not occur if we do nothing. It may feel as if one age simply tumbles into the next, but for good or ill, people are usually behind it, making change happen. According to the testimonies of those we serve, the role of the Dallas Institute’s Cowan Center is to provide muchneeded opportunities for Pre-K—12 educators to remember and then to renew their commitment to the “better angels” that they are being called to sacrifice in the current system. In 2014, we are committed to doing more. With your support, we can. Help us seed a thoughtful revolution in 2014, one that seeks to replace a dehumanizing tyranny with an educational philosophy fostering a vision that holds up the noblest purposes of humankind for all.
In 2014, we are committed to doing more. With your support, we can.
To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center link on the homepage of the Dallas Institute’s website: dallasinstitute.org.
“The Teacher as Mentor: the Storied Life”
L. Daniel Russ
THE FOLLOWING COMES from a chapter in the Dallas Institute Publications’ latest offering: What is a teacher? Remembering the Soul of Education Through Classic Literature. In this chapter, Dr. Russ explores some of the complicated, nuanced attitudes and traits of the teacher in the mentoring mode.
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uch has been said about the concept and methods of mentoring, some of it very insightful. We must remember, however, that mentor was not originally a concept or a method but a person. So I invite us to return to the origins of mentor as originally rendered by the epic poet Homer in the second of his masterworks, The Odyssey. Homer gives us the original image of the mentor when he describes the story of the warrior/king Odysseus questing to return home to his family and subjects in Ithaca, the Greeks having defeated the Trojans after ten years of war. As the story opens, the gods are holding a council to discuss Athena’s desire to help Odysseus return to his wife, Queen Penelope; his son, Prince Telemachos; and to his rightful place as the ruler of Ithaca. However, having offended Poseidon and led his men on a number of misadventures, Odysseus alone survives in the throes of the goddess Kalypso after almost twenty years of war and wandering. Many of us know this part of the story, retold by Odysseus to the Phaiakians, an island people who rescue him from shipwreck, offer him hospitality, and eventually transport him home. The reason so many of us know this part is that it is the excerpt found in most anthologies. But The Odyssey only takes up this central action in the life of the immortal hero in Book Five of the twenty-four books that make up The Odyssey. So why does Homer wait so long to get to the “real story” and what is so important as to delay his getting there?
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He did so, I suspect, in order to enable us to understand the moral order for which Odysseus and his fellow Greek kings and warriors risked their lives against the Trojans and why the love of a wife, a son whom he left as an infant, and the household and kingdom he cherished surpassed the promise of immortal passion with a goddess. These opening four books focus on that son who has never known his father, his mother besieged by suitors who presume Odysseus long dead and who want to marry her and seize the patrimony that belongs to Telemachos. He is angry, frightened, and impotent to drive out these
“...mentor was not originally a concept or a method but a person.” suitors who daily violate the hospitality of the household, devouring its food and wine in pursuit of Penelope and the wealth that should someday be inherited by Telemachos, this wouldbe prince who has never witnessed or been taught princely manners and courage. Enter Athena in disguise! At first the goddess of wisdom disguises herself as Mentes, a king of the seafaring kingdom of Taphos. Mentes comes in the middle of one of the daily revels that the suitors demand, during which, in the words of Telemachos, “they use our house as if it were a house to plunder.” Mentes admonishes the prince to find a way to rid the house of these aristocratic thugs as his father would. Telemachos replies that they would be sorry if his father ever returned. Mentes, aka Athena, tells him that Odysseus may be alive, that he must go in quest of
his father, and that whether or not Odysseus is alive, he must purge the household and kingdom of these gluttons. Telemachos at first responds to Athena’s challenge with words that reveal how deep are his wounds and doubts: “My mother calls me the son of the man. But I myself do not know. No one has ever been certain of his father.” Mentes assures him that he looks like his father and that he must act like the prince, that “you are a child no longer” (20). Mentes reminds him that young Orestes, whose father Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, won glory by avenging his father and killing both his mother and her lover. Such an act raises in most of our minds the valid question of why Mentes uses Orestes as a model for Telemachos to follow. Killing one’s mother seems to be a heinous act, and the Greeks agreed. Indeed, the great tragic poet Aeschylus wrote the only surviving tragic trilogy, The Oresteia, to describe how Orestes was stalked by the Furies seeking revenge upon a son who would kill his own mother. In the end, Orestes takes refuge in Athens where the Furies’ intention to kill him is put to a vote and he is saved only by Athena’s intervention, which many readers have understood as the myth of democratic justice superseding tribal justice. Because of his bold action to seek justice for his father, Orestes became as a young man a hero who made himself a name in story. Mentes then comes to his point: “You are a fine, smart looking fellow; show your mettle, then, and make yourself a name in story” (Butler translation). In short, Mentes says, go in quest of your father not merely to further his story or inherit his kingdom but in order to seek your own glory that “men in times to come will speak of you respectfully,” or, as Butler rightly paraphrases, that you will “make yourself a name in story.” The storied life is what all human beings desire: to be a hero in my own story, to live a life of such honor, integrity, and sacrifice that those around me, and perhaps more important, those “in times to come,” will
glorify me in story. If this is true, then Homer’s Mentes suggests that the role of the mentor is to enable and to encourage the fearful young person not to be afraid to seek his father, his origins, to confront his present enemies, and to hope for a future in which those in times to come will retell the story of one who dared to become himself. Telemachos, like all young people, lives in the tension between merely being his father’s son, a naïve image of a glorious hero, and wanting to be someone in his own right, a prince worthy of someday ruling Ithaca. Or as Kierkegaard’s prayer puts it, “Lord, with your help I will become myself.” The ultimate goal of any authentic mentoring on any subject is to encourage and enable students to live storied lives. Of course they need to know how to read, write, think, calculate and reason in various ways. They need knowledge, skills, and wisdom to contribute to the common good and to make a living and to compose a life. They need all of this to become more fully human and, in particular, to become themselves. We humans do not aspire merely to survive; we aspire to live a life that matters: to our peers, to ourselves, and to a generation not yet born. We want, in that modest British expression, “to do my bit.” There is no greater joy for a teacher than to hear from a student taught decades before that not only is she a successful professional but a happy wife and mother, a caring neighbor, a participating citizen, and an interesting human being. Likewise, there is no greater sadness to a teacher than to hear that her student has done extremely well at his business despite betraying spouses and children, ruining the financial lives of fellow citizens, and being otherwise a boorish human being. Part of what can sadden a teacher is that she helped him learn the knowledge and skills he has used to exploit and betray others. Alcibiades was such person in classical Greece. Handsome, privileged, and educated by such wise men as Socrates, he quickly became a hero of Athens before he fled her in disgrace to become an advisor to her enemies in Sparta. If Socrates could
not make Alcibiades use his education for the good, we teachers must realize that we can only point our students in the right direction, but they must keep on choosing to do right. Sadly, such boors also live storied lives, but the stories are accompanied by anger, derision, and mockery. They rehearse with contempt the hypocrisies and exploitations of a life lived for the pleasures and self-preservation of such people who worship at the altar of their own egos. The storied life that Athena calls Telemachos to seek is quite the opposite. Invoking Orestes, who risked his life and honor to avenge his father’s murderers at Apollo’s command, the goddess is calling Telemachos to awaken to the reality that he is the son of the godlike Odysseus, whether his father is alive or dead, and that he must cleanse his household of the suitors, with or without his father. The awakening is slow but real, as he journeys with the aid of Mentor to see himself the way other warrior-kings see him: as a prince, the true son of a brave father, and as a leader. Along the way he gains knowledge and skills in seafaring, courtly manners, hospitality, generosity, horsemanship, and strategic thinking, but he gains these as part of a journey to glory, so that men born in the future will praise him. Such are teachers: gifted persons who use their gifts in the service of enabling children and young adults to live into their own stories. Many of those young people come from backgrounds that tell them they have no future, much less a storied future. And then one day a teacher gives them a new start. In the case of Howard Hendricks, one of my former professors and by his own admission a mischievous lad, it was a teacher who said to him, “You are Howie Hendricks, aren’t you? I have heard about you, and I don’t believe a word of it.” We teachers are a hopeless lot who never lose hope that every student we encounter is somebody and can become someone who matters to the world. To do so we often abandon other possibilities: to become wealthy, famous, influential, and otherwise “successful.” We deal at the deepest level in passing on to these young
ones the knowledge, skills, and wisdom that makes possible the flourishing of persons and of cultures, and we often do so in poorly maintained buildings, through under-resourced programs, and with those lives that society ignores or has deemed hopeless. It is hard work and offers few of the material and social rewards that our culture counts as significant. However, when our students as adults meet over dinner years later or over drinks at their twentieth class reunion, more often than not, they regale one another with stories of Mrs. Hathaway’s English class, where this diminutive woman with a fierce spirit put the fear of God in her students, taught them with passion and love, and became St. Hathaway as they grew into maturity and recognized what she had done for them. Often they tell the stories of Mr. Farrar in his math class with chalk all over the back of his jacket and a smile on his face as he patiently taught them the mystery and discipline of mathematics. You can name such teachers in your life. Indeed, many of us cannot remember a birthday or family reunion that our parents recall so fondly, but we remember vividly the scolding we all received in the third grade, the laughter at the corny joke told by our 7th grade history teacher, and the transforming moment when a professor’s comment or question began the whisper that led us to our life’s callings. As countless interviews and surveys have revealed, when famous and successful people are asked who the five most important people in their lives are, two or more are teachers. Teachers themselves do live lives “that make a name in stories,” told by our students whom we have encouraged and enabled to live storied lives. In the online edition, click here for the full text of this chapter. Dan Russ is a teacher, writer, and academic dean at Gordon College. A Fellow of the Dallas Institute and Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, he’s published on classical and biblical literature, and academic leadership. His book Flesh-andBlood Jesus is in its second printing. 3
Athena Living In Our Midst: Remembering Dr. Dona Gower On November 18, 2013, when Dr. Dona Gower lost her battle with cancer, a light was lost in the world of education. Known by thousands of school teachers for her passionate dedication to ennobling and championing the profession, Dr. Gower was an Athena living in our midst. She was founding director of the Dallas Institute’s Teachers Academy and her own organization devoted to the development of teachers, The Athena Foundation. Dr. Gower’s professional career, her life, were given to the conviction that teachers make a difference in the world. There are too many words that could be said about what Dr. Gower meant—and means—to too many people to write them here. At the Dallas Institute, we offer up grateful hearts to her for the strong foundation she created in the Teachers Academy, a scaffold on which a Center for Education was built. A memorial Mass is scheduled for January 11th, 2014 at St. Monica’s Catholic Church, 9933 Midway Rd. Dallas, TX. 75220 at 10:30 AM . Visit www.northdallasfuneralhome.com for updates. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the charity or non-profit of your choice. What follows are passages excerpted from Dr. Gower’s chapter called “Athena and the Paradigm of the Teacher” in Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority.
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e begin this Principals’ Institute with a look at the teacher in a divine light. Who better than Athena herself could manifest those characteristics that have in the past elevated the teacher to the highest level in the human understanding of a true hierarchy? One of the characteristics of the paradigmatic teachers to be found in the works we are studying is that they intervene, taking direct action to inspire and instruct.
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. . . as teacher. She is the goddess of wisdom and knows that one must be a seeker, not a mere passive receiver. But she also understands that without inspiration few human beings can find their way—or even start to look for it. Telemachos’ boyish daydream is typical of a sense of destiny from which, by and large, most young people suffer. . . . It is the job of Athena the teacher to make him see his own place in the scheme of things. This recognition by the teacher of the potential for greatness in a young person is essential to the transformative function of both teaching and learning. It is important to our notion of teacherhood that a divinity seems to be at the source of the kind of inspiration the teacher provides. The goddess speaks through the human form and encourages the young man to be heroic, . . . and to be eloquent in spite of his feelings of inadequacy. The boy who had not known, except by his mother’s word for it, who his father was becomes the “true son.” This son has a courage and imagination of which the unawakened and unenlightened boy could hardly have dreamed. It is through Athena’s tutelage that Telemachos develops his full potential so that old friends of his father comment when he comes to their courts seeking news of him that he resembles the older hero in every aspect of his character. First, Athena inspires him to think imaginatively about the pursuit of knowledge so that he will not set out blindly. At Sparta, the teacher removes herself from Telemachos’ side, symbolically suggesting that the purpose of teaching is to turn the pupil into a master. This course is a liberal one for Telemachos, one that does not appear immediately relevant to the task at hand, yet which forms the patterns of his own imagination that will allow him the flexibility of judgment in any situation to use ingenuity and clearsightedness. And Athena oversees it all. When the teacher ceased to be regarded as a vessel of wisdom and model of
judgment, the profession lost its substance. As education relinquished its immediate value as a means of selfpreservation in a complicated and sometimes hostile environment, the role of the teacher began to seem less critical than in the past. Hence, society began to place less value on the content of the teacher’s mind and imagination and more on the gratification of the pupil and the development of skills for which there appeared no demonstrably earthshaking importance. Russell Kirk once wrote that men read and write only because there is something worth reading and writing about. He knew that literacy alone was not enough to keep culture alive and that the old verities of which Faulkner spoke in his Nobel Prize Address were far more important than learning to form letters or read words. When the teacher opens the student’s mind and imagination to that great world of the best that has been known or thought or made, those intellectual and imaginative skills become comfortably associated with an encompassing desire to form letters and read words that can shape the destiny of civilizations as well as private lives.
“Then she caught up a powerful spear, edged with sharp bronze, heavy, huge, thick, wherewith she beats down the battalions of fighting men, against whom she of the mighty father is angered, and descended in a flash of speed from the peaks of Olympos, and lighted in the land of Ithaka, at the door of Odysseus at the threshold of the court, and in her hand was the bronze spear. .... And there she departed like a bird soaring high in the air, but she left in [our] spirit determination and courage” From The Odyssey Book I, Lattimore translation