Pedagogy and Friendship

John Henry Newman understood only too well that professors influence students; the question is not if influence will take place but what kind of influence. He held that a pedagogy without the friendship of professor and student can only expect an environment of distrust and hostility: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University and nothing else."

Strangely, this is a result that many in the modern university not only accept as normal but practice as a virtue. The pedagogical practices inherent in Alasdair MacIntyre's encyclopedic method and the genealogical critiques may not know it, but they exist in ethical practices, though ones gone terribly array. Their methods of objective distance and power distrust have been made more believable by being offered in an ethical and pedagogical environment that reinforces their claims-- its very structure, at once supposedly objective yet lacking in anything like a curricular common vision.

Mark Schewn places much of the blame for this at the heart of the nineteenth-century German research institution, as well as the Weberian distrust of emotion and relationship in university education. Phillia, Weber holds, always pollutes the objectivity necessary for true research. But is this really the case?

Michel Polanyi observed that research is more intuitive in nature than is mostly admitted, and it is often passed along in non-verbalized ways to its new initiates. He called this "conviviality," the communication of true knowledge on the inarticulate level. Such knowledge involves a fair level of trust between teacher and student, and is therefore, essentially a-critical in nature. As such it is a tacit knowing: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of cultural heritage . . . No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."

The modern university by its overt distrust of friendship creates a world where encyclopedia and genealogy tragically seem true, though at the most human level they must continue to teach and research despite this, living off the cultural capital of intellectual honesty, collegiality, freedom of conscience, trust in rational discourse, scholarly discipline, a dependence on continuity with the past, even the desire for mentorship between student and teacher--all ethical practices which must be taken on faith, as Polanyi observes, even when honored in the breach.

Note how in Henry James' story, "The Figure in the Carpet" that once the narrator experiences knowledge as utility and as mastery, it soon replaces joy and delight in the love of learning:

[W]hat now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge - nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it - they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion - perversely, I allow - by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose (293).

Treating your education in a purely instrumental way is to succumb to the encyclopedia project of which MacIntyre warned, which only too quickly leads to the distrust and suspicion of genealogy. Such a disposition of mind and heart can occur in any educational environment, but the modern ethical chaos of individualism only lends it a deeper epistemic credulity. We have literally created academic structures that make the modern and post-modern assertions feel true, even as our humanity must struggle against them. As such, these structures are traditions who have hidden from themselves their former purpose for existence, living in a practice that once had the higher end of the love of knowledge from a dedication to the truth as the gift of God.

This current state of things suggests that Christian institutions of higher learning need to be cognizant and intentional about friendships between faculty and students. Learning is not just factual but intuitive and initiatory. Mentoring is often a two-way street because education is founded on the practice of submission, initiation, cultivation, and eventual contribution and clarification. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us,

The moment of truth comes . . . [as] the student begins to arrive at conclusions different from those of the master, as the largely unilateral power relationship of apprenticeship gradually yields, or should yield, in a healthy relationship--to authentic community and a deepening collegiality between teacher and student . . . it is a rite of passage filled with joy and fulfillment for all concerned, as well as with moments of deep anxiety.

What renders this "moment of truth" and "rite of passage" meaningful is a shared commitment to something like the academic ideal, a belief in freedom of inquiry as an essential aspect of our true humanness. As such, it demands of us personal virtues, fiduciary skills of trust and time, and they can exist for a season in systems of thought that mitigate against themselves.

Yet the cultures of encyclopedia and genealogy are finally pedagogically incoherent. These virtues cannot stand by themselves for very long. What they need is the larger theistic framework of the purpose of knowledge and of intellectual service to humanity to render their academic ideal an ultimately meaningful practice. Faithfulness in this context means an investment in others; it requires a certain speed--a slow listening and speaking that "hears" the tacit dimension in the other person. We all have favorite teachers in our lives, and those of us in higher education can each recall very significant professors who shaped our future callings, answered our questions, guided our thinking, assuaged our doubts, and disturbed our complacency.

In a Christian context, we need the hypergood, the telos, or final end we are pursuing set before us always, what the Westminster Confession so lovingly made proverbially:

Question 1: What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.