But Soup Is Round
Once, when I was younger, I was cleaning the kitchen with my mother after dinner. She lamented that we didn’t have a Tupperware container big enough to hold all of the leftover soup. I, however, in my resourcefulness and intimate knowledge of our kitchen plastics collection, knew just the container she needed. I pulled a deep square dish out of the cabinet and said, “What about this one?” She glanced at it with a face that suggested I might be crazy. Then she looked me dead in the eye and said, “But soup is round.”
I still haven’t recovered.
Sometimes we get so stuck in our habits of thinking, we miss the obvious. When people ask me what classical Christian education is all about, one of my go-to pitches is that we want to teach our students how to think, not just what to think. The idea is that rather than focusing solely on imparting factual information, the real goal of education should be to train students’ minds to think in an orderly fashion, to communicate creatively and beautifully, and to value what is right.
We as a staff have recently been reading Dr. Timothy Dernlan’s 100 Common Questions: A Guide to Understanding Classical Christian Education. I would recommend it to parents or grandparents who want to pitch the classical model to their friends but struggle to articulate what makes it so unique. This book offers succinct answers to some of the most frequently asked questions regarding classical education, summarizing its key tenets. One question in particular stood out in our recent staff discussion of the book: “What is meant by teaching students how to think, not what to think?” Dernlan offers this response:
It is the desire of classical Christian schools to create lifelong learners. To do this, students need to be given tools for learning that they can use for life. Giving students the tools needed for lifelong learning is far better than teaching students lists of facts during a lecture. Some of the many tools that students are given are reading, writing, Latin, critical thinking (Logic), communication (Rhetoric), etiquette, biblical knowledge, a biblical worldview, and many other skills.
In other words, we want our students’ education to be defined not by how many facts they can parrot back to us (even though our students learn a lot of facts!) but by their ability—and genuine desire—to continue learning even when we’re not making them.
Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “The great defect of our education today (is that) we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think.” Our present culture is asking a lot of worldview-defining questions. What does it mean to be alive? What makes human life sacred? What is love? What kind of relationship should a citizen have with his country? Our students will be presented with opposing answers to these questions. No matter what answers we give them, the world will tell them something different, and the world will say it louder. And oftener. And it will claim the moral high ground. The only way for our students to keep their footing amongst the torrent of voices clamoring to be heard is for them to enter the conversation equipped with confidence in the basis for truth, the ability to reason well, and the skill to express their thoughts clearly and winsomely. We at Pinnacle seek to give them these tools by walking them through what has been said on these topics by the great thinkers of the past, by encouraging them to ask good questions, by teaching formal logic and critical thinking, and by training them to search Scripture for wisdom on all their questions.
Teaching students how to think involves protecting them against both intellectual pride and intellectual laziness. Intellectual pride believes it already has the answers, while the attitude of the lifelong learner is to continue seeking truth at all times. For many of us, however, intellectual laziness presents the greater temptation: just not caring enough to want to learn. It takes time and effort to research and commit new information to memory. Rejecting cultural axioms can be costly. And sometimes shifting ourselves out of our old mental habits is just hard. So you get my mother with the round soup. (If you’re reading this, love you, mom!) Our desire for our students is that they would readily acknowledge when they don’t know something and that there would be no shame in such an admission. But we also want to see them hunger to find it out. In other words, it’s okay not to have the right answer. It’s not okay not to want the right answer.
When we say we want our students to be lifelong learners, we mean we wish them to be those who want the truth and who are willing to bear the cost of finding it. Neither we nor our students will always have all the right answers, and that’s okay. What we want to cultivate is the desire for truth and the tools to seek and find it.
Laurel McLaughlin
Upper School Teacher
