Philia de Humanitas
Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted by many as the father of relativism. I do not want to get into an argument about whether that is true, since I think that the fatherhood of relativism goes a bit further back in history. My purpose for invoking his name is simply to highlight how traditional “national” education began about the time that Nietzsche died (1900) and it effects an education of relativism even if the content of that education is not relativistic. Why? Because it treats the most important object in the room as if it has no real nature. That object is the child.
In the Catholic world from which I hail there have been great strides at reintroducing a curriculum that is not relativistic. And even the child would be understood as having a nature, with certain capacities and powers that are perfected in virtues which are not arbitrary as the Nietzschean world would proclaim. In the Nietzschean world, all that is good hails from the mouth of the one who proclaims it and has the power to effect it. But that good goes no further. It is not eternal. Good is good because you said it was so and then had the money or the military power to make it so. Evil is evil for the same reason. This is what happens when one divorces nature from free will. But in a world in which things and people have natures, and one’s decisions and moral life are based on that nature, then there is something beyond mere willful acts.
Many Catholic schools have returned to some degree to a unity of nature and will, at least in the curriculum. However, that has not yet translated with regard to how children are taught in the classroom. Teachers need to be present in the right way to the children before them. To be present to another human being as if they have a human nature, with a body, with senses, with passions and emotions, with an intellect, a will, and heart is of course quite important. But to go no further than this generic understanding of the soul in front of you would mean that love has failed. The concrete person standing in front of one has an incarnated body, senses, passions, intellect, will, and heart. He or she has a biography, with different propensities and talents that have blossomed or failed to blossom as a result of evil and sin. Many teachers of course get to know their children in some of these concrete features. But they are missing a crucial set of features. Those features belong to the the particular developmental characteristics and needs of the child’s nature. We may love that child with his human nature, his God given talents, and even with some knowledge of his or her biography. But when God demands that we love others, we need to love the totality of that concrete person, and especially the most important features of that person. And this is true of children who have a special place in God’s world, for after all, God wants all of us to become like children, His sons or His daughters.
This is why the precept of Maria Montessori is so important — “Follow the child.” By that she means the child with a human nature, with his or her biography and propensities and talents. Not an abstraction. As an educator, it is crucial that we do this if we are to love the child God has placed into our hands. What Montessori discovered was the developmental needs of the child who possess a real nature instantiated in a concrete biography.
Montessori had begun, and I think just begun, to discover the developmental needs of the child. Her discovery, and her work throughout the world, made her realize that these developmental needs are the same throughout all cultures and all history. Those features include how children learn language, mathematics, life skills, home economics, civil life, and faith. It is was not just children, but teenagers and adults as well (as Phyllis Wallbank has revealed). Those features define the common characteristics of different stages of life — such as the absorbent stage (she called these sensitive periods), or what I call the mediated phase (7-12), the self-mediating phase (12-18), and the mutually self-mediating phase (18-24). [I will post a paper on these over the next week that was published in India]. This is why her method has such effect in every culture, for the poor as much as the rich.
What happens when we ignore that concrete child and his particular stage of development? Well, what happens? They are encouraged to relativism. They are encouraged to become sons and daughters of Nietzsche. This is what happens in the traditional industrial-based two dimensional world of the blackboard with a teacher directing all that happens in the classroom. It ends up ignoring the developmental needs of the incarnated child who sits in the desk. Sitting for much of the day is proof of that. Put a child in such a situation day after day, year after year, where they are treated as if they had no real developing nature, and in fact, where that nature was pacified with ADHD reducing drugs, they are taught that they do not really matter, even if the teacher deeply cares for them.
And if you know something about love, then you also know that you cannot love someone to the degree that you do not know them. In the Catholic world from which I hail, this is perhaps one of the most important vestiges of Nietzscheanism that still infects nearly every school and classroom that I know.
It is time to turn away from that privation. Every privation is an evil, it is a deformation of a good. And in this case, that good is one of the most precious creatures whom our Lord is calling to himself and to his kingdom. We need to stop throwing our children to the wolves of relativism. We need to build four dimensional learning worlds that give them bread and not rocks.