One Unicorn could be just a figment of your imagination. Herd several together, and you get a Blessing of Unicorns upon your day. This week’s Unicorns consider education, Byung-Chul Han on hope, historical inaccuracies of the new Gladiator film (I’m shocked!), and homemakers!
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It’s always a happy day in my house when the new Plough issue arrives. You will want to spend some time with Peter Mommsen’s editorial introducing this Winter issue: “Educating for Freedom.” The story he tells has to do with the origin of kindergarten—and, specifically, the idea of a garden where children play and, as a result, learn creatively. It turns out, however, that when first introduced, the idea was perceived as highly seditious and dangerous. A taste from Mommsen’s introduction:
In 1851, Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, weighed up fleeing his homeland for America. That August, the Prussian government had banned as seditious the network of kindergartens he had started eleven years earlier. To a government fearful of liberal-democratic ideas, the new institutions were breeding grounds of “atheism and demagoguery,” dangerous cells of “Froebel’s socialist system” that promoted “destructive tendencies in the realms of religion and politics.” One aristocratic alumna of Froebel’s recently founded college for training kindergarten teachers – it was the first secular professional school for women in Germany – actually felt compelled to emigrate to escape accusations of subversion…
In one respect, the Prussian government was on to something: Froebel’s pedagogy was politically threatening, at least to authoritarian regimes. The goal of education both in the family and the school, he insisted, is “freedom and self-determination.” That’s why during the heady revolutionary days of 1848, the German National Assembly had resolved that Froebelian kindergartens “should form a part of every child’s education.”
Mommsen concludes that Froebel approach was to educate children as persons, members of God’s kingdom. He did so in a way that imitated much of how Jesus taught as well.
Read this essay in full here or wait for the physical issue to land in your physical mailbox.
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Speaking of education and more, Sarah-Jane Murray in Christianity Today considers “The Book Screwtape Feared Most” in a moving reflection on C.S. Lewis, Boethius, and Advent. A taste:
Some 27 letters into his correspondence, Screwtape stages an intervention. At all costs, the senior demon of C. S. Lewis’s classic Screwtape Letters tells his apprentice devil, Wormwood, do not let your human “patient” pray about his wandering mind.
The patient is in love, Screwtape notes, and this presents a perfect opportunity to ensure that he never thinks of God (or, as the devils call him, “the Enemy”). Distraction is hell’s greatest asset, and if the patient had the wherewithal to lay his distraction before the Enemy in prayer, it would inch him along in sanctification.
At least one human author, Screwtape notes, has realized how this works. He’s “let this secret out” and threatened hell’s plans. That author is Boethius, the sixth-century theologian whose works were obscure in Lewis’s day and even less known now. Our modern neglect of his classic book, The Consolation of Philosophy, is a grave loss for the pursuit of Christian wisdom.
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Okay, one last education related Unicorn for the week: Faine Greenwood’s “The Death and Life of Simon’s Rock” is a farewell to her alma mater. In the process, though, she asks questions related to the question of why anyone should care when yet another small college closes its doors:
Since 1964, the Simon’s Rock campus has occupied the forested and marshy slope of a frequently-freezing hill in the quaint Berkshires town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Within its confines, a few hundred students live and work amidst a set of largely mid-century buildings that, if you squint, could have been designed by the Pizza Hut corporation at some point in the 1970s. (The name of the school refers to an actual, hefty glacial-erratic rock that lurks in the campus forest).
When Elizabeth Blodgett Hall founded Simon’s Rock, she envisioned it as a place where clever and self-motivated students could begin their college studies at a younger age than is typical – indeed, before they’d actually graduated high school. It was the first early college of its type, and it quickly began attracting a few hundred teenage eccentrics each year, taught by a largely equally eccentric crew of professors. Professors taught in a Socratic and seminar-oriented style which revolved around lots of writing, reading, and arguing, a methodology that has persisted to this day…
I do think the passing of Simon’s Rock matters. That’s it’s a canary in the coal mine, a warning about where we’re heading in this country.
Allow me to try to explain why.
It matters that US higher education is offering an ever-diminishing set of educational options geared towards bringing out the best in eccentric smart kids with weird ideas. Especially those smart kids who, for various reasons, lack perfect grades, test, scores, and behavioral records. I know many extremely successful and clever people who simply did not have their shit together enough when they were 16 to stand a chance of getting into a truly elite (as well as small and supportive) private university. Young people like this tend to benefit considerably from smaller and more supportive college settings, as opposed to huge and impersonal colleges: I worry that it’s going to get harder and harder for these kids to find that environment at non-hyper-selective schools in the future.
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Steven Knepper, who co-authored a new book on Byung-Chul Han (and I had the privilege of interviewing him and his co-authors here earlier this fall), reviews Byung-Chul Han’s newest for Front Porch Republic. A taste from the introduction, before you go read this in full:
The end is nigh. If not the end, at least some catastrophic turn of events that will forever change our world for the worse: nuclear war; mass extinctions, rising water levels, and volatile weather; various AI-administered dystopias. You can provide other worst-case scenarios. They are manifold. Higher rates of mental illness and collapsing birth rates are complex phenomena, but surely this sense of impending doom seeps into both. Our time is one of anxious fear, resigned pessimism, or too-chipper (desperate?) optimism that technology or one’s preferred candidate will save the day. According to the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han, what we really need is a hope free of optimism, one that fully acknowledges possible catastrophe. Han’s new book The Spirit of Hope meditates on the difficulty but also the necessity of such hope in our time.
Unlike optimism, Han argues, hope does not deny the problems we face or their scope. It often emerges out of or near to a despair in which our plans and certainties are rattled. Such hope knows what it does not know: the future. It sees in the uncertainty of the future, in its contingency, the possibility—however slim—of renewals, of paths around or beyond the doomsday scenarios. “Those who hope,” Han writes, “put their trust in possibilities that point beyond the ‘badly existing.’ Hope enables us to break out of closed time as a prison.” Hope challenges the sense that we are on an irreversible course toward a certain end. For hope, the future is not a runaway train on a fixed track. There might be a way that we’ll come out of this OK.
This kind of hope grants a certain patience about the future, but it also allows one to act, sustaining the day-to-day in a richer way, seeking and pursuing remedies for the problems plaguing us.
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On another note, I’m not planning to watch the new Gladiator sequel, but there is no better person to review this chariot wreck of a cinematographic endeavor than Bret Devereaux. I’m grateful that he sacrificially took the time to watch it and write about it for Foreign Policy. In a nutshell, “My compliments to the special effects team. Everyone else, see me after class.” Just how much of hot mess is this? Here’s a taste:
To start, Gladiator II cannot even decide what year it is. The audience is repeatedly informed it has been 16 years since the first film, which suggests the year is 208. Yet the film is set during the joint reign of Caracalla (r. 211-217) and Geta (d. 211), which would place the film in 211, though an early title card declares the year A.D. 200, putting it also in the reign of Septimius Severus (r. 193-211). However, the film opens with a Roman invasion of North Africa, suggesting someone has confused the A.D. 200s with the Punic Wars of the 200s B.C.
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Last but not least, my brilliant friend Ivana Greco is working on a book, and I’m really, really excited about this one. You can read about it here, and here’s a taste:
I have been working for the past two years on a book about homemakers. The working title is No One at Home: What America Lost When Her Homemakers Went to Work…
Right now, I’m working on a chapter about how homemaking lost its social value in the second half of the twentieth century. Post-war America essentially stopped valuing the work of the home. Even in the 1950s, when the craft of homemaking seemed to reach a peak, I would argue that it was not valued per se, but turned into a status symbol instead. Thus, you got scenarios where a husband took the train to Manhattan, attended a three martini lunch, thereafter “worked” in a comfortable office, and came home to a wife who had spent the day raising their five kids, and yet was expect to serve him another cocktail, because he had been working, and she had not. No wonder we got second wave feminism. I’d have revolted also.
To get a more detailed glimpse of Ivana’s project, I highly recommend this essay: “Protecting the Home Front: Why We Need a ‘G. I. Bill’ for Homemakers.”