A long time ago one of my junior high students mentioned to me that she had started tennis lessons. “Oh,” I said, “what do you love about tennis?”
She stared at me blankly and gave a weak giggle.
Just like with her cello lessons and her schoolwork, love had nothing to do with it. She did tennis because it was something her parents decided she needed to be proficient in. She aimed for technical excellence on the cello because that was what was what was expected of her. She crammed for tests weekly because she both hated to get anything less than an A and and knew that her parents would hate it as well.
She did get A’s. Lots of them. She also never made a interesting contribution in class, connected comments to previous learning, or showed any glimmer of enthusiasm for history, music, Latin, or composition.
As she progressed further into the logic stage, this kind of mentality began to hinder her ability to “get A’s.” She had figured out the “system” of the grammar stage (memorize a bunch of stuff and regurgitate it), but since those things had been mastered in fear of “not knowing” rather than in love of the things themselves, they didn’t stick. The discussion format of our upper level classes was difficult for her. It is hard to use rhetoric “to instruct, to persuade, and to delight” (as Cicero says), if you’re not persuaded that what you’re learning is intrinsically worthy and if you don’t actually delight in it.
Competent engagement with the liberal arts and the Great Books demands more thought than regurgitation and more interest than an obsession with grades. It demands a mastery rooted in love.
In an essay titled “On Naming the World: A Protestant Vision for Training in Wisdom,” Bradford Littlejohn argues: “There is a kind of mastery driven by hate and a kind driven by love…. [In] the modern ideal of knowledge…rather than being animated by love of the object of knowledge, we are driven by hatred of the unknown.”
Hatred of the unknown (which also manifests as hatred of failure) is a poor catalyst for a lasting education. There needs to be more to learning than hating to have a wrong answer. There needs to be a love of discovering the right answer because it is through love that learning takes root and abides.
Mastery in love is an attitude towards learning that cannot be cultivated exclusively by teachers. As you probably noted in my opening story, the student’s perspective on learning was heavily influenced by her parents. To them, getting less than an A was not acceptable because the A was a trophy to be won…rather than an imperfect metric to communicate about true mastery. Granted, an A does often communicate something about student knowledge, participation, and diligence, and there are many “A-Students” who have a true love for understanding. But the reduction of a student’s education to a collection of uppercase vowels and consonants on a report card is folly and does not account for the necessity of desire.
Proverbs 8:11 says: “Wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.” The cultivation of the affections to love what is lovely and to nurture the desire for wisdom is indispensable as we strive for a mastery in love.
How do you know when students truly have this mastery in love? When the student discussion has uncovered a marvelous connection between the Gospel story and a Greek epic and no one’s looking at the clock even though the period is over—when a student squeals with joy over how chemistry applies in real life—when a student ranks his favorite ways for solving simultaneous equations—when a disaffected student raises his hand in the middle of the lecture to ask, “Will this be on the test?” and the rest of the students in the class stare at him and shake their heads in disbelief—that’s how you know.
