STEM is for Grandmothers: Educating for Truth & Freedom

At a time when a child should be exposed to wonder, awe, play, and fairy stories, the STEM brigade tells us we should instead prepare children for careers in engineering and the sciences.

My mother-in-law, a wonderful grandmother and award-winning artist to boot, is fond of buying my nine-year-old daughter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) toys, usually ones suitable for a sixteen-year-old or that contain explosive compounds. Quaint. For Halloween this year the artist-grandmother sent my child not art supplies or paints but a 2D metal skeleton. So far, so good, but this skeleton came with dozens of tiny magnetic labels, with the proper scientific names for every bone in the body. This was, you see, a STEM skeleton, and labeled as such by the manufacturer. The only scary thing about it was that the writing was so small, my daughter asked why the “public bone” (too small to see it says “pubic”) was called that, since it’s an area that is supposed to be private, not public. At a time when a child should be exposed to wonder, awe, play, and fairy stories, the STEM brigade tells us we should instead prepare children for careers in engineering and the sciences.

This episode got me thinking about the distinction drawn by John Henry Newman between the servile arts and the liberal arts, along with questions about what education is for in the first place. A toy labeled “STEM” might convince a loving grandmother to buy it, but toys like this are akin to poorly written children’s stories that, rather than use wonder merely to entertain or story to teach by example, instead try to hit the child over the head with an overly-morally didactic approach that most children instinctively reject, both as bad art and as bad pedagogy.

We could stretch this question from childhood to university education as well. I was in my first year as a history professor at Aquinas College in 2004 when the college hosted Francis Cardinal George for a talk on Catholicism and liberal learning. I recall being inspired by Cardinal George’s description of an integrated Catholic liberal arts education–an education aimed at an integration of wisdom and discipleship stemming from a proper ecclesiology and rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition, evincing the happy complementarity of faith and reason and the living of a moral life. I was so inspired, in fact, that I muscled my way over to speak to him after his talk. After chatting about Catholic higher education, I asked him if he thought such an education would be possible at Aquinas. He responded with words I have not forgotten: “If not here, at a school named after St. Thomas Aquinas, then where?” Concise and to the point. And, true.

Mankind might be made to be free, but it was first Greek and Jewish wisdom and then Christian revelation that led people to realize freedom must be rightly ordered and rightly used, and that doing so does not always come easily. We have, after all, a fallen nature as well as the free choice to pervert or perfect love. Can men and women be taught to be free? Do they need to be taught how to be free? Do they need to be taught how to discern the difference betweens rights and duties, between liberty and license, between truth and error? And if they need to be taught these things, just what should such an education look like–an education that is freeing at the same time it is for free people? Surely it should include STEM. But should it start or end there?  Dostoevsky said beauty, not STEM, will save the world.

What kind of education must an authentically Catholic college offer in an age where telling and even seeking the truth is deemed intolerant and aggressive? The answer is the same liberal, humane learning the Church has always privileged and that bore fruit in the universities of Medieval Europe. This is the only kind of education that speaks fully to what the Human Person needs and to what the Human Person is. It is based on an anthropology that gets the human person right. Above all, it makes real wisdom possible because it recognizes the unity of all truth.

Without a proper understanding of the human person, a college will instead be likely to mirror American society and its aggressively secular U.S. government: disparate individuals in a finite space who find themselves in a Hobbesian war, prevented from mayhem only by Leviathan and intellectual and moral apathy. This is not a recipe for the pursuit of truth, something which our minds were created to seek and know. A college ought to be a community oriented toward a genuine pursuit of the truth in all things. This does not mean all are in agreement about, to borrow Aristotle’s definition of truth, “what is and what is not.” Allan Bloom describes this type of community best, and explains why by its nature an academic community is one where diversity is a foregone conclusion and civil disagreement is common because all are seeking the truth of things: “The real community of man … is the community of those who seek the truth…. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. Their common concern for the good linked them; their disagreement about it proved they needed one another to understand it.”

This unity of truth, however, requires a unified curriculum and holistic approach to campus life. A college can have a faculty of Catholic intellectuals—scholars who self-consciously contribute to the conversation between faith and reason, and thus who participate in a living Catholic intellectual tradition—and still fail one’s students. Catholic intellectuals, on their own, teaching come what may, are not enough to inculcate wisdom and discipleship. Merely the existence of a university is not enough. Adding STEM to the mix is not enough, even if students move on to high paying jobs as engineers. In his book, A Godly Humanism, Cardinal George argues that “the disjunction of the curriculum is a far more powerful source of relativism than any doctrine preached by any member of the faculty.” Why? Because if the unity of truth goes unrecognized, without theology and philosophy to integrate the disciplines, then the university is a university only in name. In reality, it is a multiversity, steeped in relativism by default because it lacks an integral framework to relate truths uncovered in the disciplines.

Relativism, wrote John Paul II in Fides et Ratio, “is corrosive not only of faith but of reason.” So as long as faith and reason are held to be inimical to one another, as the continental Enlightenment ideologues claimed they were and as many Americans continue to believe, then this hostility between science and faith, between research and faith, will hamper any real liberal learning. Put differently, a disjointed curriculum rooted in the divorce between faith and reason cannot adequately overcome what Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism.” It will only make that dictatorship stronger. Faith will no longer be seeing understanding because it does not think understanding can be found or, conversely, that faith leads to anything objective. The conversation between faith and reason, which produced the world’s first universities one thousand years ago, thus ceases. This is how colleges then graduate men and women who are less free than when they entered four years earlier. They are, to use Cardinal George’s illustrative phrase, “on a collision course with reality.”

The goal of all humane learning is to take us off this “collision course” by liberating our minds to seek and know the truth about ourselves. This is what the humanities do best. If we care not for the past and consider it childish, unenlightened, and outdated, we must then ignore our future, for it will someday be the past of another who will disregard all our accomplishments as so much superstition and nonsense. In so doing, we step out of the organic community to which Edmund Burke refers, one of past, present, and future souls. We also turn our back on a conversation that has been going on since at least the fifth century B.C. Thus, we live only for today, like the beasts, limited in focus to sex and sustenance. Merely adding STEM in the name of “relevance” and to please the customer-orientation of today’s students (and their parents) will not change this. Students may indeed want sex, sustenance, and STEM, but a rightly ordered education will give them what they need, not necessarily what they want. In a proper education, the customer is not always right.

What is “liberal” about the liberal arts is that they liberate us from our time and place so that we can explore the perennial questions of humanity posed by St. John Paul II in Fides et Ratio: Who am I? Where have I come from and Where am I destined to Go? Why is their evil? What is there after life? I would add to these, what is the proper relationship of the individual to his community, to his state, and to God? History’s disciplinary role is especially valuable here, for it frees us to know the roots of our identity in order to take us out of an enslaving presentism. We are then left free to make better sense of our own world and to imagine how we might strive to sanctify it and make it more conducive to human flourishing.

A liberal arts college educates for wisdom, not simply for facts, because wisdom allows us to make good choices and to discern the important from the unimportant. A liberal arts education is one wherein we seek not knowledge for knowledge’s sake nor for mere practicality. A Christian liberal arts education should enable graduates to use their freedom to choose the good.

This all goes to say, then, that a Christian anthropology therefore is essential, not supplementary or accidental, to an authentic Catholic liberal arts education. Man cannot be liberated by nonsense from nonsense or from ennui by the relativism that brings with it metaphysical boredom and unhealthy skepticism. The search for truth and the acknowledgement of the unity of truth are the key difference between an authentically Catholic education and a secular education. Only the truth can set you free (John 8:36). Authentically Catholic colleges are open to the totality of truth because they honor the dialogue between faith and reason. Their graduates should be primed for a life in which they are free to make good choices and properly discern the important from the unimportant. Only in retrospect might a student realize just how great their longing was for the transcendentals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. As a product of a Catholic liberal arts education they will then realize that this hunger is natural and ongoing, and that, as Peter Kreeft has said, one can never become too filled with truth or bored by beauty.

And so I will close with some wisdom from Russell Kirk, who wrote much on education and what the educated human being looks like:

“And being educated, they will know that they do not know everything; and that there exist objects in life besides power and money and sensual gratification; they will take long views; they will look backward to ancestors and forward to posterity. For them, education will not terminate on commencement-day.”

Perhaps an additional lesson, for grandmothers at least, is to keep your skeletons in the closet.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.