Seeing Things As They Are: The Subversive Pedagogy of a Christian Teacher1

Thomas J. St. Antoine

Integration of faith with one's teaching is not anti-intellectual, as some fear. Proper integration of faith and learning in the classroom is actually an intellectually honest and rigorous approach to teaching. For John Henry Newman, a true education encourages us to "see things as they are," and he suggests that removing one discipline from the circle of learning distorts our view of the remaining subjects. Proceeding from this premise, one might argue that an integrative approach should result not in an inferior education but in a more meaningful classroom experience. To truly accomplish this, however, a faculty member must often resort to teaching ideas that are subversive not only on a secular campus, but also among colleagues at the typical Christian college. Such teaching requires one to break disciplinary boundaries and to encourage students to become, in many ways, unfit for this world.

This paper will explore the disciplinary structure of the academy and issue a call to restore the circle of learning. Oddly, our academic departments are often defined by the type of job a student will pursue after graduation. Disciplines may also be defined by the subjects they deal with or the authors who make up their canon. Newman recognizes that each discipline tends to deal with specific subject matter, but he also argues that truth or universal knowledge is the subject matter of all legitimate disciplines.

Second, this essay shows that integration of faith and learning should place strong emphasis on community. I will contend that such an education does not conform in its goals and nature to what most people expect from a college course. It does not place a premium on professional training; rather, it leads to the examined life and pursuit of truth as an end in itself. It prepares students for a life of thought and service.

As a faculty member at a typical CCCU (Council for Christian Colleges & Universities) institution, my observations and recommendations are derived from and most relevant to similar colleges and universities. I begin this exploration of teaching as a countercultural calling with a brief look at the purpose and the disciplinary structure of the modern academy.

The Circle of Learning vs. the Disciplines

A Philosophy of Education

Our disagreements about faith and learning are as much about learning as they are about faith. Most discussions of integration are contingent on one's educational philosophy, and conflicts about the integration of faith and learning have their origins in disagreement about the purpose of higher education. If parties disagree on the nature and aims of an education, it is nearly impossible to agree on how best to integrate faith and learning. Therefore, questions on the purpose of higher education and of Christian higher education in particular must be addressed before the discussion can proceed. Those who expect that a college graduate be trained to perform in some profession will have a hard time cramming together universal truth and job skills. Administrators and faculty alike experience much hand wringing as they contemplate innovative ways to integrate faith with useful information. Doubtless, much professional practice is informed by one's Christianity, but it will prove difficult to train believers to act in a markedly different way without encouraging them first to think in a markedly different way.

Here is where the subversive Christian teacher flourishes. Unlike more worldly contemporary educators, Christians should be most committed to an education that helps students to see things as they are. Richard Weaver sees education as learning to properly name things (162). Newman calls a university education a "great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society" (191). This approach to education is best described as doxological learning by Arthur Holmes in Building the Christian Academy. Doxological learning leads to "broad education and a contemplative approach to life; it involves not just doing things or doing them thoughtlessly, but reflecting on how whatever we do in life relates to its Creator and Lord. It makes life and learning a continuous doxology of praise to God" (5). As Christian teachers, it is perfectly acceptable to be concerned with practical matters and to prepare our students for careers. Our primary concern, though, ought to be making our students more thoughtful people who relate all that they do and all that they know to the Creator.

Legitimacy in the Christian Classroom

Institutional theory provides one explanation for the desire of Christian colleges to offer professional training similar to the typical university. It seems inevitable that small Christian colleges will follow the lead of more powerful and well-known institutions. Christian faculty members and students work to maintain prestige even while working at "less prestigious" colleges and universities. This is often done by attempting to look like larger institutions.

Institutional theory accounts for the relationship between public discourse and the practices of colleges and universities. Organizations often use rhetoric to secure legitimacy, defined as the "rhetorically constructed and publicly recognized congruence between the values of a corporation and those of a larger social system within which it operates" (Hearit 2). According to institutional theory, for any organization to be legitimated its structures and practices must be seen as consistent with that which is valued by the larger society (Scott 41). Organizational structures and actions, whether rational or not, are often constructed symbolically to show that the organization meets the demands of its institutional environment. Opinions about higher education legitimate colleges and universities and also establish expectations and criteria for evaluating those institutions. Therefore, all colleges, Christian and secular alike, must respond to such cultural demands.

Restoring the Circle of Learning

Genuine integration of faith and learning is, by definition, impractical integration of the disciplines. To achieve integration, the Christian academy must overcome the specialization that typifies contemporary higher education. Embedded within the rhetoric of higher education is strong evidence of the compartmentalization of truth. Students, for example, are disappointed if after graduation they take jobs they did not plan for and are "not using their degrees." They assume that choosing a major or course of study is tantamount to choosing a career. If planning for law school, students insist upon majoring in pre-law in spite of advice that law schools look for a much wider breadth of majors. Here we see again the assumption that if I want to be a lawyer, I must major in law, even at the undergraduate level. Likewise, graduate students and faculty in search of tenure are frequently advised to narrow their scope of research. In the norms of higher education, to be a generalist is to be an unfocused and undisciplined scholar.

This, however, is not news. Educators have long lamented the specialization in our educational system. Such debate has been ongoing since Andrew White and Charles Eliot pioneered elective systems at Cornell and Harvard and since the German research university began providing an alternative to the British residential model. What is news is the side of this debate frequently taken by educators at CCCU institutions. Even experts on the integration of faith and learning in Christian colleges and universities have sought to reinforce the pulling apart of the circle of learning (Christian). This approach reflects a desire of Christian scholars to maintain legitimacy in their disciplines and specializations while managing to introduce a faith perspective. I would call for an approach that is more radical.

Newman provides a clear instance of this form of integration. In The Idea of a University, he first proposes that the basic purpose of a university is to profess universal knowledge, which by its definition would include theology. Removing theology from university teaching is unphilosophical (80). This precisely illustrates the problem with specialization in the modern university. The fragmentation originated with the disintegration of religion and learning and has begun to undermine the intellectual merit of scholarship in general.

The intellectual value of integration does not come from joining religion with useful information or from showing graduates Christian ways of practicing their professions. Instead, our contribution is the interaction between theology and all general truth. For Newman, the university "acts as umpire between truth and truth" (415). The university is a place for the disciplines to interact and form universal knowledge. Likewise, no disciplinary interaction produces no general knowledge. Newman explains, "If different studies are useful for aiding, they are still more useful for correcting each other . . . the most extensive acquaintance with one can produce only an intellect too flashy or too jejune, or infected with some other fault of confined reading" (190). All knowledge forms a whole, and we cannot contemplate creation without contemplating the Creator. Likewise, we can better know the Creator by studying his creation. James W. Sire illustrates: "God's existence and his nature as Creator and powerful sustainer of the universe is revealed in God's prime 'handiwork,' his universe" (31).

Before proceeding, it is important to note that liberal learning is not a set of topics, but an approach to all topics. This is not an apology for excluding all subjects outside the medieval trivium and quadrivium. Instead, we should seek a liberal approach to all disciplines. Keep them in conversation with all of the other subjects in the circle of learning. Recognize a true education is more than training. Promote doxological learning. Such an education avoids the compartmentalization of thought that undermines conversation between the sciences and moves toward an undoing of modernity without slipping into a completely relativist perspective. In Weaver's words, "the separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics" (93).

Educating Students for Community

The end result of a liberal, integrated, doxological approach to all learning will take us in a radical direction. Our culture legitimates higher learning as preparation for graduates to ascend the social and professional hierarchy, to lead, to get things for themselves. Doxological learning, however, leads to increased emphasis on the community rather than on the individual. It emphasizes giving more than getting. It emphasizes character formation. Students learn to love and serve God in their study and to love and serve their fellow man in their work.

A great deal of public discourse on higher education assumes that graduates learn to be leaders in society, but education may be more about "followership" than leadership. It may be about discerning the proper leaders and examples and learning to serve them faithfully. Christian education equips students to become citizens in the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. It exists to initiate students into a shared body of knowledge and Christians and to pursue Truth for its own sake.

Assembling the Individual Utilitarian Rhetorical Vision

To understand the values embraced by a culture and the values that legitimate its institutions, it is useful to examine the rhetoric produced by that culture. A highly individualistic utilitarian vision of higher education emerges when one examines twentieth and early twenty-first century American public discourse. The heroes of this vision are the graduates who use their degrees to become independent and successful. Such people are revered for their determination, and an education further empowers them to survive in a competitive world. Additionally, educators are honored for attempting to provide expanded access to higher learning, and elitists are the villains of the individualist vision. In 1989, UCLA President James M. Rosser criticized colleges for "educating the sons and daughters of the already elite, or the already able to aspire" (368). While educators who provide practical training are granted heroic status, the vision condemns professors who are disconnected from the real world or who pursue studies that do not have tangible, material benefits. Robert A. Lutz of the Chrysler Corporation complained that students often get a "dumb" education from "silly classes based on trendy theory and from curricula that look like they were designed by a TV game-show programmer" (650).

Narrative construals provide additional evidence of the individualistic vision. The vision regards the establishment of America's earliest colleges, the private colleges of the colonial era, as an attempt to provide an education only to the most elite students and to offer an impractical classical curriculum. Therefore, one of the most significant narratives in the history of higher education has been the establishment of large public universities. The establishment of these land grant universities was celebrated by utilitarians because, unlike the elite colleges, they provided expanded access to higher education and provided research and instruction in practical subjects such as business, industry, and agriculture. University of Texas president Homer P. Rainey, like many others, identified this as a landmark story in higher education: "In the thirty years between 1830 and 1860 there was waged in this country the battle for free public schools." According to Rainey, the result was "the finest system of public education that any society has ever known" (461). Likewise, the founding of Cornell University, which pioneered the elective system, was a story often heralded as a victory for practical education. Cornell claimed to offer instruction to any student in any subject and was seen as a landmark in the struggle to develop curriculum based less on the classical liberal arts and more on the basic needs of contemporary society. Finally, the G.I. Bill was a popular narrative for individual utilitarians. This federal program was credited with making higher education available to the masses. When Bill Clinton proposed increasing educational funding for working families, he called it the "G.I. Bill for American workers" (260).

The core values of this vision embrace learning as the acquisition of skills for survival, and they eschew any intellectual experiences that cannot be shown to make students more employable or independent. For example, graduates are expected to find employment related to their degrees. Faculty research is expected to discover useful information. The vision would also privilege academic disciplines and curricula that can be clearly linked to practical benefits.

Assembling the Communal Idealist Rhetorical Vision

A more communal vision of higher education also exists in public discourse. While not practical or legitimated in contemporary culture, this vision calls for the reclamation of a more communal approach to higher education. The discourse honors those who approach higher education as a community of scholars left to contemplate and to teach students to serve. The communal vision is critical of the individuals who are interested only in self-gain. In the 1930s, Princeton President Harold Willis Dodds remarked, "All history teaches that struggle for power and influence divorced from unselfish ends is self-destructive and in the end unsatisfying" (137). More recently, Willard C. Butcher of the Chase Manhattan Corporation contended, "A total commitment to personal gain-'meism'-at the expense of society's overall well-being, even if it gets you to the top, will ensure you are not a leader" (623).

Central to the communal vision are many of the same narratives that the utilitarians dramatized. Yet those narratives take on a decidedly different form. The communal idealists edified the founding of the colonial colleges. This was seen as a story in which the success of the American Revolution and the establishment of a democratic government were due to the availability of citizens who were trained in American colleges (Roche 73). In 1938, Harvard President James B. Conant recognized the ongoing role of those early colleges in preparing the elite to be leaders: "Thomas Jefferson in the early days of the last century spoke of the necessity of 'culling the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue from every condition of the people, and educating it at the public expense for the care of the public concern.' In the great wave of enthusiasm for universal schooling, this principle of Jefferson's has tended to become submerged" (420). Because it values the establishment of the colonial colleges, this vision is highly suspicious of the establishment of the land grant universities and the G.I. Bill. These events represented a move away from the style of education that best prepared the finest students to lead and a loss of community which was found in smaller, less bureaucratic institutions. In a 1984 commencement address, Harold R. Logan of W.R. Grace and Company questioned the contribution made by large state universities: "I submit that one of the things we have gotten is a weakening of the private-education system in this country by the rapid growth of our State-subsidized university which has grown to such a size as to lose all personal touch" (287).

The vision's core values downplay the practical benefits of learning and emphasize the intellectual and spiritual benefits. The ideal college prepares its students for responsible participation in the community. Its mission includes forming an educated citizenry, inculcating a sense of service, and nurturing the moral character of students. The curriculum of this college is not based on practical value but on intellectual merit, and the student body is composed of an academically elite group of students who will live the examined life and serve others after graduation. Finally, faculty research would include not just the discovery of new, practical data. Research would promote the contemplation of the enduring values that shape the community.

The ability to participate in a vital community has diminished in the twentieth century, and this breakdown in community has led to severe problems. Many educators lament the belief that the individualistic model dominates contemporary higher education. Robert L. Spaeth, dean of Arts and Sciences at St. John's University in Minnesota, remarked in 1987:

Individualism is so rampant in American higher education today that it goes unnamed and often unnoticed. It is, I believe, our way of life.. [I]t has produced the very failures that critics are constantly bringing to our attention. Individualism has infected both student bodies and faculties, and the two groups encourage it in one another. Students by and large come to college today to major in a field that will lead to a career-their own career-by means of which they hope to become successful and at least materially comfortable (24).

Examples from other spheres of public discourse also reflect concern for a lack of community. Robert A. Nisbet, in his book The Quest for Community, observed, "Despite the influence and power of the contemporary State there is a true sense in which the present age is more individualistic than any other" (9). Nisbet argued that the release from the contexts of community have not led to freedom and rights but to "intolerable aloneness and subjection" (25). Further, he saw individualism as the defining characteristic of the current age: "[I]t is by no means unlikely that for our own age it is alienated or maladjusted man who will appear to later historians as the key figure of twentieth century thought" (10). To truly integrate faith and learning, Christian higher education should provide communal experiences that help students to overcome the individualism of the current age.

Conclusion: Having the Courage to Make Students Unfit for the World

At the risk of sacrificing legitimacy, Christian educators strive to make students unfit for our individualistic, pragmatic world. Our goal is not just to make the professionals more Christian but to also make the Christian professionals more philosophical. It is perfectly acceptable for college students to prepare for a career, but training should be secondary to education. This is not integration by addition-the addition of Christian principles to a specific discipline. This is not the integration of learning with faith. This is the interrogation of learning by faith. The introduction of faith ought to transform the premises and first principles that undergird every discipline and the very idea of education itself. Christian education, when the circle of learning is restored and service is emphasized, is about Truth for its own sake.

Learning, as a form of worship, is not exclusively the province of theology or the other deductive disciplines. Holmes demonstrates that the study of creation through the inductive sciences can also be an act of worship:

If the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork, or if we wonder that God so gifts his creatures, then liberal learning can still become a call to worship. It will be a holistic kind of spirituality-not a compartmentalized piety, peripheral or even opposed to rigorous academics, but one that heartily embraces all of learning and life and delights in every indication of God's wisdom, goodness, and power. (Holmes 116)

The union of inductive and deductive contemplation is, by its very definition, integration.

As the director of an honors program, I have an excellent opportunity to work with a group of colleagues who can take risks by integrating the curriculum. In our program and programs like ours throughout the CCCU, Christian teachers are free to try new things without risking the legitimacy of the entire institution. Our honors program has been able to initiate change campus-wide by providing leadership in curriculum and faculty development. Our students have also had a profound influence on other students and on the culture of our campus. If a college or university is expected to conform to the expectations of the institutional environment, an honors program is expected to be radical and experimental. Honors programs do not have a subject matter all their own but instead provide a space on campus for multiple disciplines to interact with one another. While this restoration of the circle of learning would be more difficult across an entire campus, an honors program can do this more easily. A good honors program should seek to make students unfit for their majors and unfit for the world in all the right ways. Students ought to "see things as they are," be quick to distinguish truth from useful information, and ask difficult questions that require multiple disciplines to be reconciled with one another. In the end, they are insightful and thoughtful Christians prepared for a life of work and prosperity, but more importantly, for a life of doxological learning and service.

In contemporary culture, skill acquisition and career preparation seem to have overshadowed traditional education. In an era when the examined life has taken a back seat to the professional life, it may be the role of the Christian teacher to put the intellectual, contemplative dimensions back into the classroom. This is a radical calling for CCCU institutions that strive to acquire legitimacy by offering the same specialized, professional curricula with a Christian twist, but, if successful, our attempts will reinvigorate Christian higher education and restore its intellectual content.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Baylor University Conference on "Christianity & the Soul of the University," Waco, Texas, March 24-27, 2004.

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THOMAS J. ST. ANTOINE <tom_stantoine@pba.edu> is Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of the Frederick M. Supper Honors Program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He has a B.A. from Palm Beach Atlantic University, an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. in Speech Communication from Louisiana State University. Dr. St. Antoine has published his work in Research on Christian Higher Education, The Florida Communication Journal, and Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies. He has also co-authored a chapter in the forthcoming book The Art of Rhetorical Criticism and has served as editorial assistant for the Quarterly Journal of Speech.