My Funny Augustine

Bernard Bailyn’s challenge to historians to reframe how they approached the history of education in America was a call to move away from what he saw as the narrow perspective cultivated by Teachers College, Columbia, and other schools of education founded during the Progressive era.  He believed that educators, zealous for the prestige and the pedigree of their rather new profession qua profession, focused on finding in the past antecedents for the institutions and institutional structures in which they were invested as professionals.

Such an approach, Bailyn argued, begged the question and created “histories” that missed some of the most historically significant cultural currents shaping education from the Colonial era to the present – the “present” at the time being 1959, when Bailyn delivered his influential paper, “Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study.”  (The paper, as well as an accompanying bibliographic essay, was published in 1960 by UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute.)

Rather than focus narrowly on “formal pedagogy” or the institutional founding of particular schools or colleges or universities, Bailyn said that historians should regard education as “the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations” and should take special notice of “education in its elaborate, intricate involvement with the rest of society,” as well as of its “shifting functions, meanings, and purposes.”

This broadest of definitions for education as an object of historical inquiry – “the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations” – was a clause buried in the middle of a sentence.  But it quickly became a guiding principle shaping ambitious new projects, most notably and perhaps most immediately Lawrence Cremin’s three-volume survey of the history of education in America from the Colonial era to (by the time he finished volume three) the post-Watergate era.

I hadn’t encountered Bailyn’s essay when I picked up Cremin in the summer of 2012, so I was a tad perplexed when Cremin spent a significant amount of ink on such things as newspapers and colporteurs and sermons and songs.  (And yes, I had already read Wickberg’s essay on the history of sensibilities during my coursework – several times – though I think it took me about five more times reading it through at various stages of my project before I actually understood it fully, or fully enough.)  At first, I saw all these features of Cremin’s history as interesting but frustratingly dilatory digressions.  But the more I read in the field, the more I recognized the brilliance of Cremin’s approach.  He wasn’t being digressive; he was being highly selective.  From all the various means by which cultural norms and values are handed down, he had chosen a few that he saw as most significant for the history of education in this liberal democracy.

I suppose you could say that the history of education took the cultural turn before the Cultural Turn.  (However, read Kerwin Lee Klein on this, in From History to Theory – the trail of Boazian / Benedictine anthropology runs back and forth over and through American thought during practically the entire 20^th century.)

In any case, a Bailynesque view of education and the educative has helped me not only focus my research, but also develop a better sense of how I stand in relation to my subject, and what I stand on.  That, in turn, has helped me better understand my students.

Now, 566 words into this blog post (thanks for reading this far!), let me give you an example of what I mean.

We didn’t have saints in my family growing up.  We didn’t believe in saints, or sainthood – that was for superstitious Catholics.  If you had asked me about whether there is any kind of fellowship or communion between the living and the dead, I would have recited Hebrews 12:1-2 for you, and would have explained that the “cloud of witnesses” referred to Christians from earlier eras who have already died, but that they’re not actually watching us, because to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and those who are in the Lord’s presence are looking at him, and so forth – all pretty run-of-the-mill fundamentalist Baptist dogma (though for pity’s sake don’t call it “dogma” – “No creed but the Bible!”) in the last quarter of the 20^th century.

Nevertheless, I did have a Fisher-Price record player.  And on my fifth birthday, a family friend gave me the Disney album for “Mary Poppins.”  That became one of my absolutely most favorite records.  I hadn’t seen the movie yet, but I listened to the songs over and over (and over and over and over).

My favorite song on that record was “Feed the Birds,” with its verses in a plaintive, moving minor that shifted for the refrain into the soothing major to deliver its ethical admonition of simple charity.  Of all the verses in the song, the one that fascinated me and thrilled me from my scalp to my toes was this one:

All around the Cathedral the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares.
Although you can’t see it, you know they are smiling
Every time someone shows that he cares.

I never connected that verse to the great cloud of witnesses, nor did I realize how descriptive it was of the architecture of St. Paul’s.  But that idea that the saints and apostles were somehow not just living but alive to and invested in the love we are to show to our fellow creatures – that lodged in my consciousness and shaped something like an instinct for me, an instinct that ran at cross currents to my religious environment, an instinct that there was something deeply important that I was missing by not knowing more about the saints – even if, as I believed, “saints aren’t real.”

Mary Poppins was my early introduction to Patristics.  And first among my Fathers was Saint Augustine, whom I met at last in the Western Culture program at Stanford.  Everybody had to read Confessions, and almost everybody in my freshman dorm hated it.  Augustine was too much.  All this chest-beating remorse over some stolen pears.  But I loved it.  Loved it.  Loved everything about the book.  But I didn’t love everything about Augustine.  I had some bones to pick with Augustine.  I still do.  We all do.  You don’t need Mary Poppins to introduce you to the conceptual world of Augustine; welcome to Western culture.  Saint Augustine is as much to blame for “Feed the Birds” as Sherman and Sherman are.

But I was not able to explain to anyone at the time why that book so resonated with me.  It’s only in retrospect, as I have rethought what counts as an education, that I have been able to perceive the (admittedly strange) throughline from “Feed the Birds” to that freshman year epiphany about the importance of contending with Saint Augustine’s ideas today.  Via two very different routes – one route through the most kitschy products of mass culture, the other route through the hallowed halls of academe as guardian of all things Great – I came to a growing awareness of the long history, the deep history, the essential history of Christian thought between the era of the apostles and the Reformation.

I think about this strange educational journey now in my work, in my teaching.  Because my own kids went through the public schools here in suburban Dallas, I have a pretty good sense of what’s on the reading list for local high school students, many of whom end up attending the institution where I teach.  Mostly, I have a sense of what’s not on the reading list, and if I wanted to, I could spin a persuasive declension narrative about how “nobody is reading X anymore” – where “X” could be anyone from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to e.e. cummings.  And I could bemoan my students’ lack of knowledge about these or other Greats.

But I know that my students know – or at least know of — all kinds of things, and they learn in all kinds of ways.  There’s apparently an entire video game based on Dante’s Inferno.  All those Civilization games and Crusader Kings video games are introducing players to an absolutely dizzying level of arcane knowledge about Medieval Europe and the Byzantine Empire and heaven knows what else.  And then there are the Assassin’s Creed games, set in different historical eras.

Now, am I saying that these artifacts of our current cultural moment convey an adequate understanding of the literary traditions or historical periods they use as the premise of their gameplay?  No.  But for many kids, they are an introduction to themes and subjects and times that pique their interest.  They open the door to knowing more, even if knowing more must entail unlearning – or reframing – some dodgy historical narratives.

I’m grateful that I was formally introduced to Saint Augustine via the Western Culture program at Stanford.  In some ways, keeping company with him while squaring off against him will be the work of my intellectual life.  (Take a number!) But I’m just as grateful that I was introduced at the age of five to “the saints and apostles” whose joy, I was given to understand, derives from seeing love issuing forth in deed in this world of ours.

Mary Poppins was not wrong.