Increase and multiply! The Heights motto, Crescite, is taken from this scriptural exhortation. In it, we see two distinct ways in which there can be more of something. A tree, for instance, increases by getting bigger, but it multiplies by producing more trees. This distinction is at root the difference between “much” and “many,” “quotity” and “quantity,” etc. If we intend to learn—that is, to have more knowledge—then we can do that by learning more about the subjects we already in some sense know or by seeking out new yet unknown subjects. It is the same with education; it is the task of the teacher to direct the students in two primary activities that, although seemingly at odds, I intend to show are symbiotic: namely, going deeper and wider.
Every teacher knows that no matter how many times you teach something, it is never enough. The students never know it as sufficiently as you intend. This is natural since we can never plumb the depths of creation; in fact, as the Fourth Lateran Council points out, as we grow in knowledge of something, we simultaneously grow in an even greater knowledge of our ignorance of the thing. There’s no exhaustively plumbing the depths of any piece of reality, no matter how small.
At some point the teacher decides to cut his losses and move on to something else. This “something else” is of course not entirely different, since all of creation constitutes one cosmos, one “universe” as it were. The hope is that learning about this new thing will in some way support the knowledge of the earlier things. This is one reason why students will oftentimes have an easier time with topics when they revisit them later.
This process of going deeper and then broader in turns is really the whole process of education, both for ourselves and for our students. Moreover, this dichotomy explains many of the debates within education. The conservative wants to narrow the scope so as to go deeper. The progressive wants to push the boundaries and broaden horizons. Of course, the progressive accuses the conservative of parochialism and narrow-mindedness while the conservative accuses the progressive of going a mile wide and an inch deep. And both, of course, have an element of truth in their criticism. The educator must find a way to incorporate both of these principles. The shorthand I use for these are automaticity and creativity.
Automaticity enables creativity. If we want to have creative students, they must have significant free mental space. When a child is first learning to play the piano, he has no real ability to be creative. It’s only through becoming automatic at certain things like scales and fingering, etc., that the child becomes able to be creative. This creativity is really at the root of human freedom. There is no tension between human freedom and discipline. As we grow in discipline, we grow in freedom. The number one piece of advice from every successful writer is to develop the discipline to write regularly.
Consider a very common example: a child struggles to read because he often confuses the letters b and d. If he stops to think about it, he can remember; but it’s not automatic. If the child can gain automaticity in this skill, his freedom will grow; he will be able to read deeper and more broadly. To grow in discipline and virtue necessarily entails a concomitant growth in freedom. Just like with the budding pianist, automaticity in letter identification gives the reader the opportunity to read a tremendous amount, and then to think about it, and to write about it, and to dialogue with others about it, etc.
A common controversy in math is between the “drill and kill” camp and the “inquiry-based learning” camp. The problem is that both of them are right—and both of them are wrong. Both approaches are necessary, and attempting one of them without the other is bound to fail. Even the very best teacher with the best materials in the best setting will utterly fail at teaching Algebra to a student who does not have automaticity with basic math facts. Similarly, a Latin teacher will never be able to teach Cicero to a student who doesn’t have automaticity with the declensions, conjugations, etc., of the language. The movement away from timed assessments for basics over the last several decades has corroded the automaticity of students, making it nearly impossible for students to succeed in more advanced classes within a particular discipline, which in turn makes any creativity and original thought within the subject impossible—complaint constantly aired by upper school teachers and college professors.
On the other hand, there has been a vigorous opposition from conservative circles against the softer, more nebulous approaches that have taken hold over the last few decades. Some of these are well founded; whole-word reading is bound to fail at the outset. However, this suspicion often goes too far. Many “classical” schools, especially in the younger years, are overly rigid, focusing on externals over substance. There’s a movement from one set of facts to another without the necessary creativity and playfulness that is required to really make these facts come alive.
This is equivalent to the three transcendentals that classical schools won’t shut up about: truth, goodness, and beauty. Ironically, many of these schools fail because they merely pass on the truth of these to the exclusion of their goodness and beauty. Teachers must not attempt to restrict education to the historical; a world stripped of spiritual reality is a fiction. A good teacher must show reality as it is, which, yes, is founded on its physical and historical reality. But all reality intrinsically communicates goodness and beauty, and for a teacher to either implicitly or explicitly leave that out is to grossly misrepresent reality and to malform his charges.
In short, every object of reality has both literal and spiritual aspects that must be understood together: the body and the soul, the matter and the form. We cannot understand one without the other. These are both distinct principles of reality, but they do not exist as separate realities. The piano teacher needs to teach his pupil the notes and the scales, but he must also communicate that it is desirable to play, and that it can and does bring joy to play. It may be that for the student this piece or practice time will not be particularly desirable or joyful. This is precisely why it’s so important for the teacher of novices to demonstrate his own desire for and joy in the subject. In practice, it is often the opposite; the teachers who love their subjects the most end up teaching the most advanced students, who have themselves already found the subject to be so, and the novice who struggles to see how anyone could possibly want to do this, let alone find joy in it, are assigned to those who often feel the same way.
The teacher must constantly fight against these twin excesses: on the one hand to make the process of education overly automatic and systematized and on the other to make it too broad and nebulous. A good examination of conscience for a teacher is to ask which of these errors am I more prone to and which one am I struggling with now: Am I getting more worn out by the monotony or by the chaos of the classroom? Am I failing more to teach students mastery of facts or am I failing more to manifest to them their goodness and beauty?