Julie Ooms 3
Introduction Julie Ooms
This past, pandemic-complicated semester, one of my Honors students called Socrates a “soulful Greek philosopher” in a paper about the purpose of argument and thinking. I love this endearingly awkward little phrase; I know exactly what she means. Socrates, as a philosopher and interlocutor, was deeply concerned with the soul—both his own and others’—and whether it was allied to virtue or ensnared in vice. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that no human work can be truly an art, can truly advance truth and justice, unless it first considers how and whether it affects the shape and welfare of the human soul. Thus, the makeup artist, whose work only enhances the surface appearance, merely performs a knack; the gymnastics instructor, whose work actually strengthens the body and renders it more beautiful, practices an art. The rhetorician, who seeks to persuade others for reasons of political expediency rather than truth, performs a knack, and twists the soul; the philosopher, whose first concern is the truth, practices an art, and perfects the soul by training it in the pursuit and practice of virtue (27). Teaching, rightly viewed, is not a knack but an art. Instructors at Christian institutions of higher education must be, at root, concerned with the shaping and welfare of our students’ souls. We are committed not only to training them in skills but to shaping them in their pursuit of virtue toward “deeper moral reflection and self-examination,” as Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung writes in Glittering Vices (10). But our commitments are often at odds with the spirit of our age, a spirit that emphasizes what is expedient over what is true and encourages students to pursue successful lives as if they are the same as good ones. This phenomenon is hardly new, or even phenomenal (Socrates’ dialogue partners, in the Gorgias and elsewhere in Plato’s work, articulate similar views). What should give us pause (at the very least) is how often Christians— particularly Christian institutions of higher education—lose sight of the pursuit of virtue in order to pursue success. Last year, a month or two before the reality of the COVID-19 set in for Americans (and American higher education), I interviewed David Kinnaman, the president of Barna, about current trends in Christian higher education for an article on “The Promise and Paradox of Christian Higher Education” for Christianity Today. His research has shown that Christian students and parents do not differ much from nonreligious students when it comes to the reasons they choose to come to college and where they choose to attend. Rather than being drawn to Christian higher education because it will help them strengthen their faith, seek truth, or take classes in a variety of subjects from professors committed to the integration of faith and learning, they are instead eminently, understandably, and mercilessly practical. Higher education is, for them, motivated primarily by earning potential and leadership opportunities; their imagined future is that of the successful wage-earner. And while there is nothing
