The University of Michigan asked applicants for undergraduate admission to submit essay responses to the following prompt:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 16)

Author Robert Pirsig (1928 — ) suggests that science has traditionally concerned itself with truth, while art has concerned itself with beauty. How might these two endeavors be the same? How might they be irreconcilably different?

Science doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about truth. Scientists do. Art doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty. Artists do. The scientist and the artist know what they are doing when they abstract — when they say “science concerns itself with truth” and “art concerns itself with beauty” — which they sometimes have to do. The artist is as smitten with truth as the scientist. The scientist is as smitten with beauty as the artist. Both knock on the same door, see the same splendors, drop the same handkerchiefs. And in their earnest flirtations with the world sometimes their very earnestness gets in the way.

The problem isn’t that science and art are irreconcilably different. The problem is that scientists and artists are irreducibly people, and people can be amnesiac. They forget that the world is as modest as she is alluring; that she can stand to be admired or studied only so much. Sketches and biology satisfy so long as we don’t reduce life to them.

Really talented people have had at least moments of trying. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and a Nobel Prize-winner in genetics, says that we human beings are “lumbering robots blindly programmed” by our genes which “control us body and mind.” Van Gogh had the gall to call this world “a study that didn’t come off.”

Disenchantment and lassitude are the subject of the celebrated early T. S. Eliot. “And I have known the eyes already, known them all — / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?” As for the American novel, the fugitive nature of the true and the beautiful reaches its apotheosis in front of a couple of cabinets:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I don’t suggest the one thing led to the other, but two years after Nick Carraway narrated The Great Gatsby, Eliot announced that he had converted to the orthodox Christian faith. The darling of the literati and the avant-garde had gone off the deep end as Auden would in 1940. Eliot published no major work for ten years. Some essays came forth, some plays, and then in 1943 Four Quartets appeared. It is the work of a man who has gotten beyond decadent aestheticism and the endlessly self-referential question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot became a critic of his earlier work, an artist with a new direction. Like Rat and Mole, he’d heard the music from another room.

By the end of the summer, when Gillian enters the ivy halls of Wheaton College — which to do is to get what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a damned good education” (he told me this as we stood next to each other making water at Boston College urinals) — only the caboose of our family will not have left home and taken his religion to school. Wherever Aaron matriculates, I hope he will be the kind of man moved by the scene of Daisy burying her face in Gatsby’s shirts. I hope he’ll be the kind of man who moves in the direction taken by Eliot and Auden and my Great Aunt Mena. If he does? He’ll know that education is something more than preparation for a game show. And when he watches the best game show ever and “Love Songs & Food for 800” is chosen, and Alex reads the answer, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ he asked, and measured out his life” Aaron will be able to pose without need of with coffee spoons the question, “Who is T. S. Eliot?” and wonder if America gets the irony.

Creation

The doctrine that God is the creator of heaven and earth is the Magna Charta of Christian education. God’s creation of all things means (as people like Justin, Clement, and Donne affirmed) that all truth is God’s truth wherever it may be found. It also means that the Christian is free to pursue this truth anywhere and anytime.

It is helpful to distinguish three distinct ‘moments’ within God’s act of creation. The Christian doctrine of creation affirms, first, that God is the origin of all that is. Second, every major Christian theologian has further affirmed that each created thing has its own existence and its own power to act upon other created things. The existence and power of a created thing, while totally dependent upon God’s divine existence and power, are nonetheless numerically distinct from that divine existence and power. And third, all creation is called to serve and glorify God and is to be judged by its obedience to that call.

The second point in the doctrine of creation is worth considering in some detail. The second point may be called the ‘secular’ moment in Christianity. That is, each created thing has its own identity and can truly interact with other creatures. This secular dimension of the Christian doctrine of creation is one (but only one) of the primary causes for the development of physical science in Europe.

Christian scholars in late medieval Europe drew an important conclusion from their doctrine of creation: because God created each entity with its own integrity and power (this power being dependent on God while remaining numerically distinct from God) and because these entities can truly interact, a science of causes between created things was possible. Thus, when the necessary technological and economic advances had occurred and when the Greek heritage of mathematics, logic, and dialectic had been recovered, the Christian doctrine of creation resulted in the evolution of modern science out of the soil of Christian Europe.

Several important implications for education flow from the existence of this secular moment within the Christian doctrine of creation. Christians are free to accept the truth about the world that emerges from any source, such as modern physics or sociology, even if that source makes no religious appeal. We may even say that there is nothing in principle to prevent one from learning philosophy, say, from Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists. Christians should also be taught to delight in exercising their own creative powers, whether in music, writing, physics, mathematics, painting, or architecture, for these powers are both truly their own and yet also a gift from God.

And yet the secular moment is neither the first nor the last point in the Christian doctrine of creation. Creation begins in God, and its end is to serve and glorify God. The Christian must never be content with purely ‘secular’ knowledge, for it is radically incomplete. The truths of modern physics or of ancient Zen art must be related to and tested by their origin in God and must be made to serve God. If this is so, then even in the case of the obviously secular disciplines such as physics or anthropology, it is always appropriate to relate the contents of these disciples to their divine source and goal. While this need not be a daily endeavor, it surely needs to be attempted regularly during the student’s education. Moreover, it is important that the teacher of physics or anthropology be intimately involved in the process; otherwise the theological perspective becomes a mere ‘add-on’ and not an essential part of the student’s education in physics or anthropology.

Sin

The Christian faith affirms not only the goodness of creation but also its corruption in sin. The modern notion of sin makes it something personal and, usually, private. The classical doctrine of sin, in contrast, asserts that sin has corrupted all of God’s creation.

The doctrine of the fall or sin implies that even our capacity for knowledge has become distorted. There is no uncorrupted and undistorted knowledge available to us. The bleak, ominous shadow of sin is particularly unwelcome in the context of the liberal arts, for it implies that we must look skeptically at all human activity, including the secular sciences as well as philosophy and theology. Our creativity in the arts, divine gift that it is, must be cross-examined in the light of our propensity for sin. Most dramatically, the reality of sin prevents us from knowing our own identity, from knowing at the deepest level who we are.

What are the educational implications of the doctrine of sin? First, all human knowledge, both about ourselves and about our world, is to be held tentatively and with some skepticism. Only God can provide certain knowledge.

Second, it is therefore quite impossible to obey fully the Delphic oracle to ‘know thyself’ unless God gives us such knowledge. Disciplines such as biology, psychology, history, and literature offer the student some degree of self-knowledge. But in a Christian context, the student should be encouraged to view the insights of these disciplines as something less than definitive. Because of our sin, we can establish our deepest identity only when God chooses to disclose it to us.

Third, even when we turn away from the inner knowledge of the self to the external knowledge of the world, the student must never be encouraged to assume that the methods of contents of the disciplines are beyond criticism. Even the scientific method itself is not above suspicion; and the master artist, while appropriately delighting in the divinely given powers of creativity, necessarily distorts that creativity. Thus, as a teacher one of my educational goals would be to cultivate a wise and humble skepticism towards one’s own achievements, whether academic, artistic, scientific, or athletic.

Fourth, the reality of sin implies that we need some criterion by which to measure our achievements. As a Christian, I believe that God has provided such a touchstone in Jesus Christ, who embodies truth.

Redemption

The last of the three main motifs of the Christian religion is redemption. Christian faith holds that God has provided for the redemption from sin of his creation through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.

First, as God’s act of self-revelation, Jesus Christ reveals perfect selfhood to us. This perfect selfhood is expressed not only in Christ’s divinity but in his humanity as well. For this reason, Christianity asserts that Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, gives us a model of true human selfhood and that he shows us our own truest and deepest identity. When we look at the life of Christ, we discover the potentiality for growth which God gives to us when he creates us; but when we look at his crucifixion, we discover the depths of degradation into which sin thrusts us. Anything that biology, psychology, anthropology, or literature claim to teach us about our human identity can, therefore, be put to the test — the test of Christ.

The adolescent and the adult are alike in that, while the project is newer to the adolescent, both are looking for a self to be. Christian teachers in any of the disciplines mentioned will point to Jesus Christ as the model and test of true selfhood, and yet such teachers will also affirm the legitimate insights of their disciplines (the doctrine of creation, as we said, alerting us to the possibility of true insights into human selfhood emerging from secular disciplines or even from a non-Christian religion that makes no first-order theological claims, such as Buddhism).

Second, for the Christian, salvation is both already completed in Jesus Christ and, at the same time, is yet to be completed. But when God’s redemption of the world does come to its final completion, it will be totally the result of the accomplishments of Jesus Christ. The implications of this for education are enormous. Cultural achievements, even of Christians, are ambiguous. Luther said that throughout our lives, we are simul justus et peccator (simultaneously saints and sinners). Since redemption is not yet final, the dialectic between creation and sin has not yet ended. On the one hand, we are not to despair. Christians, and others too, can achieve some success in the sciences and can express a beauty in art that is not merely illusion. The reality of Christ’s conquest over death and decay proves that the goodness of God’s creation is not lost. On the other hand, since Christ’s victory over sin, while complete in outline and in principle, is yet to be finished in detail, we must be careful to continue a healthy skepticism toward all cultural achievements, especially our own.

Third, we participate in this redemption only through faith. Salvation is always God’s gift and never our own achievement. This means that our cultural accomplishments are never the means of redemption. Christians do not engage in education in order to bring in the Kingdom of God; that is, Christians must not view education as a means of salvation.

Fourth, What then is the positive role of human culture and education? My answer is that for the Christian, the successful artifacts of culture — religion, medicine, law, business, management, art, music, science, and marriage at their best — are all parables or expressions of redemption. For example, Marxist critics from Western Europe have argued that Tchaikovsky’s beautiful and harmonious music, which was written under the numbing cruelty of the Czars, is merely escapist and therefore utopian art. They reason that since this harmony did not reflect the objective situation, and since it could not contribute to the objective realignment of political power, its beauty was misleading, dangerous, and inauthentic.

While I don’t doubt that for some nineteenth century Russians, attending a Tchaikovsky ballet was merely escapist, it is also possible that its beauty helped keep alive the hope of God’s redemption, where that redemption will include perfect harmony and beauty. One could also argue that works such as Tchaikovsky’s (or, for example, the landscape paintings of Ming dynasty China) provide hints of a salvation already partially accomplished and present. As Christians, we believe we’ve received news announcing where that salvation is accomplished — at the cross and empty tomb of Jesus. To my way of imagining, an education in the arts ought to climax in a recognition of Jesus Christ as the one towards whom all beauty and harmony ultimately points.

Fifth and lastly, God’s redemption in Jesus Christ required the incarnation. Christian salvation is not, as the Gnostics would have had it, a purely ‘spiritual’ reality, but rather it includes the physical presence as well. This physical presence is to be found in the historical ministry of Jesus; it is ‘there’ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist; it is in some sense symbolized in the priest’s bodily presence, and this physical presence continues in the holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Thus education insofar as it claims to be ‘Christian,’ requires the physical presence of the Christian teacher.

Without that physical presence of the Christian teacher, no educational method can adequately teach a student how to integrate faith and learning; that is, how to integrate the incarnate salvation of Jesus Christ with academic discipline and the life of the mind. One of the highest priorities of a Christian education, therefore, would be the recruiting and retention of faculty who evince a classical and eclectic kind of Christianity, who are competent teachers, and who can embody the integration of the Christian faith with their various disciplines.

[I wrote this eighteen years ago while under consideration for a faculty appointment in the Religion Department at Phillips Exeter Academy. Most of what I wrote that long ago now seems to me naïve and requiring serious reconsideration. This survives discarding.]

All that remains to be proved is the value of sport to American society as a whole. The conclusion follows naturally from an understanding of America as the bourgeois nation par excellence. The great spiritual threats to bourgeois society are apathy, enervation and acquiescence to mediocrity. Sport is uniquely suited to combat these evils, because it carves out a space for honor, excellence and the pursuit of glory.

At the same time, the modern form of sport subsumes the honor ethic under an institutional structure that does not consider the things of this world to be of ultimate significance. Sport thereby avoids the tribulations of pagan society in favor of the modern Protestant order. Religious devotion to a football team coexists with American Christianity because the fan knows that the former is temporary, but he awaits the eternal satisfaction promised by the latter. Sport is simultaneously an antidote to the worst of the bourgeois order, and a great bulwark thereof.

The supposed insignificance of sport to education is thus shattered. Sport is much more of an educational enterprise than the utopian dreaming of those obsessed with changing the world. Sport recognizes that a thing can possess excellence without possessing perfection, and that there is some good in its preservation.

Athletes of Yale, stand tall. You have the admiration of this second-string second baseman on the club baseball team. The wider student body will sip lattes, wear eclectic scarves, and disdain your allegiance to the institutions of the bourgeois order, but they are mere ingrates. For all the while, in a small way, you have been holding up civilization unawares.

Peter Johnston is a senior in Saybrook College at Yale University. Read the whole column in today’s YDN.

Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern their children.

What’s Wrong With the World, thanks Martin

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

The New Yorker

Thank you so very much. I feel more pleased and honored by this award than I can adequately say. I want to express my gratitude to the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation and to the Reader’s Digest Association and to all of you.

I am also deeply appreciative of the help and encouragement I’ve been given by a great many people over the years, several of whom are here tonight.

I am indebted above all, in countless ways, to my family: my mother and father, Ruth and Christian Hax McCullough, my brothers Hax, George, and James McCullough, and to my own five children, Melissa, David, Bill, Geoffrey, and Dorie, all of whom have played a part in my work and given me the best of reasons to keep working. And above all to my wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, editor-in-chief, mission control, strong partner, and best friend, the finest person I know. And by far the best dancer.

I am hugely indebted to an inspiring teacher, Vincent Scully of Yale; to my old friends and former fellow editors at American Heritage, Alvin Josephy and Richard Ketchum; to Peter Schwed, Dick Snyder, Michael Korda, Sophie Sorkin, Frank and Eve Metz, all of Simon & Schuster who have been my publishers from the start; and to my friend and literary agent, Morton Janklow, who has been, in recent years, one of the spirited, refreshing sides of a very different life as my work became better known, and who has given me some of the best advice I’ve had from anybody about many things besides books.

I must also thank for their shining example and friendship writers Conrad Richter, Walter Lord, Barbara Tuchman, Bruce Catton, Paul Horgan, and Wallace Stegner.

And let me include, too, how much I owe to the throbbing, steadfast city of my childhood, wartime Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and to this, the greatest of our cities, New York. Like so many of you, I couldn’t wait to get here. It was here I got my start, here I discovered that wondrous window on the world and on the nation’s past the New York Public Library, here, with the Brooklyn Bridge, that I found a story like no other.

It is seldom that anyone ever receives so handsome a tribute as I do tonight, or is offered the opportunity to address so distinguished an audience with such influence as you have on our country. So I wish to speak about something much on my mind.

We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.

The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far.

Warning signals, in special studies and reports, have been sounded for years, and most emphatically by the Bradley Report of 1988. Now, we have the blunt conclusions of a new survey by the Education Department: The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation’s high school seniors haven’t even the most basic understanding of American history. The statistical breakdowns on specific examples are appalling.

But I speak also from experience. On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students-the cream of the crop. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” I asked. None. Not one.

At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.

Who’s to blame? We are.

Everywhere in the country there are grade school and high school teachers teaching history who have had little or no history in their own education. Our school system, the schools we are responsible for, could rightly be charged with educational malpractice.

Can we expect some jolting national alarm to sound? Will there be in these remaining years of the 1990s some sensational event like Sputnik in the 1950s, to shock us into a realization of the true nature of the situation? Probably not.

But something must be done. And we can begin by asking a few fundamental questions.

Do we really care about standards of performance any more?

Are we read to accept the reality that in a government of the people it is not some longed-for leader who will save the day? If we’re looking for leadership, the place to look is in the mirror.

Too many teachers have little if any real understanding of what they’re teaching, let alone that vitality and passion for the subject that makes a great teacher so effective. If you think back to your own time in school, the courses you liked best and did best in were almost certainly the courses taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teachers you liked best were almost certainly those who were excited about the material and conveyed that excitement to you.

We have to start training teachers to teach history-and grade school teachers especially. We have to begin early with children. The earlier the better. We have to get back to basics. And let’s not be quite so bedazzled by the information revolution, by all the glittering promise of information highways.

Information isn’t learning. Information isn’t education. We have to have better teachers and we have to have better books.

We need better textbooks. We need more and better biographies for beginning readers. Too much of what’s written as history for our children is contrived by committee. It’s an assembly and it’s deadly. It reminds me of the old piano teacher’s lament, “I hear you play all the notes, but I hear no music.”

So why bother? “That’s history,” is the expression now. That’s done with, junk for the trash heap. Why history?

History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is-or should be-the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.

At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?

Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.

I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.

What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we’ve been through in times past and who we are.

Think how tough our predecessors were. Think what they had been through. There’s no one in this room who hasn’t an ancestor who went through some form of hell. Churchill in his great speech in the darkest hours of the Second World War, when he crossed the Atlantic, reminded us, “We haven’t journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

Now history isn’t just good for you in a civic way. It isn’t just something you take to be a better citizen. It does do that, and that in itself would be reason enough to stress its importance. “Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free,” Jefferson said, “expects what never was and never will be.” And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

But, I think, what it really comes down to is that history is an extension of life. It both enlarges and intensifies the experience of being alive. It’s like poetry and art. Or music. And it’s ours, to enjoy. If we deny our children that enjoyment, that adventure in the larger time among the greater part of the human experience. We’re cheating them out of a full life.

There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: “Tell stories.” The pull, the appeal is irresistible, because history is about two of the greatest of all mysteries-time and human nature.

How lucky we are. How lucky we are to enjoy in our work and in our lives, the possibilities, the precision and reach, the glories of the English language. How lucky we are, how very lucky we are, to live in this great country, to be Americans-Americans all.

David McCullough’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, 1995.