The Risk of Education
Some Principles from Luigi Giussani on Authentic Education
In his 1973 TV short “There’s No Time for Love, Charlie Brown,” Charles Schultz issued one of my favorite critiques of contemporary, utilitarian education:
Linus: What's wrong, Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: I just got terrible news. The teacher says we're going on a field trip to an art museum; and I have to get an A on my report or I'll fail the whole course. Why do we have to have all this pressure about grades, Linus?
Linus: Well, I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school; and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college; and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school; and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful so that we can get married and have kids so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard...
Charlie Brown: Good grief!”
Education ought to be much more than the kind of utilitarian transactionalism we see today. What is education after all?
Clearly this is too big a topic to tackle here, but I can at least offer a few thoughts. To keep it manageable, I will take some cues from Luigi Giussani and his book, The Risk of Education.
Speaking of the nature of education, Giussani says, “the introduction into reality: this is what education is .”1 Education involves one helping another enter into the totality of what is real. What is is what is real, and what is real is what is truth. So, education deals with truth, the truth that sets us free (Jn 8:32).
Viewed this way, education must conform to reality outside of us, and it must also correspond to the truth of our humanity. “It is education of what is human, of the original element present in all of us,” and, therefore, “the primary concern of a true and sufficient education is that of educating the human heart as God made it.”2 Education is about accordance — being in harmony or conformity with what is really real, what is true, being of one heart with it, being heart-to-heart with the truth.
I find Giussani’s statement striking when I consider my own children. In light of my children, his line takes on exceptional tenderness. My children are my “image and likeness” and they are God’s “image and likeness.” There is something of me inside of them and there is, what we might call, a divine spark inside of them. Education, then, is about helping my children grow and mature, it’s about helping that spark to come alive inside of them. We must acknowledge this point, or else we fall into the temptation of thinking education is about stuffing a child with factoids and reducing it to utilitarian success metrics (i.e., “giving them what they need to succeed in this life” (see above)). When we view education as stuffing, it becomes transactional and utilitarian. But, if a child already has the spark within them, if a child is already logos-like because he or she is made in the image and after the likeness of the Logos himself, then education is about awaking something already in them. It’s about giving them what they need to come alive — to come into contact with themselves, with the world around them, and, ultimately, with the God who made all of it.
Giussani goes on to make three critical points about educating the human heart as God made it. These elements help introduce the student to the real:3
The past must be adequately proposed. Education roots a child in reality through the concreteness and clarity of a tradition. Without a sense of tradition, without that “given” working hypothesis, “young people grow convoluted or skeptical.” Giussani says that if young people are not given a tradition, they will make one for themselves — and this will always be shortsighted. Education largely exists to give the next generation an adequate sense of tradition. Giussani runs counter to postmodern thinking on this point. Postmodernity dismisses tradition more aggressively than modern thinking did before it. It is a detraditionalized way of thinking. Yet, without tradition, we become unhinged from reality and disconnected from truth. We become like untethered astronauts. As Joseph Ratzinger puts it, “whoever destroys tradition destroys man—he is like a traveler in space who destroys the possibility of ground control, of contact with earth.”4 Without tradition, we invite isolation and nihilism. Tradition, then, keeps us anchored, or, as Giussani puts it, “’suspended’ from the mystery that is the truth in the world.”5 To teach a tradition, one must immerse him or herself in it. The teacher must immerse him or herself in a tradition to hand it on effectively as a witness of it. Therefore…
The past, the tradition, must be proposed “within a present, lived experience” that shows the correspondence between the tradition and the needs of the heart. This is to say, the tradition must correspond to the heart “within a present experience that offers reasons accounting for itself.” The tradition has to be a living reality in the today of our lives. Said another way, what the teacher is teaching must correspond to how the teacher is living. What the teacher is teaching must correspond to what the teacher is cultivating. The tradition he is handing on should be alive and impacting the immediate culture of the school or what have you. Education is not an exercise of pure abstraction, but something borne out in real life. It must have a concreteness to it.
“True education must be education to criticism,” Giussani says. This is the “risk” of education Giussani talks about. It must face the risk of the freedom of the person, who ought to critically evaluate what he or she has been given as a “problem.” The pupil who has been receiving and receiving must, at a certain point, account for what he or she has been given. Criticism means taking stock of things. It means personally comparing that which I have been given (tradition) to the desires of the heart, wherein the ultimate criterion for judgment lies. “And the ultimate criterion,” Giussani says, “which is each one of us, is identical: it is the need for what is true, beautiful, and good.” For parents and teachers, this step can be unnerving. We must allow for the freedom of the child — and trust that they will hold fast to what they have been given.
Giussani concludes this section with a powerful statement that summarizes everything:
Tradition, present experience which proposes and provides reasons, and criticism: if any one of these elements is missing…young people become frail leaves, far removed from their branch…They become victims of the prevailing winds and their changeability — victims of a general public opinion created by the current power.6
In parish ministry, in schools, in the home, in the workplace, wherever, we have to be about an authentic education that helps people become more human by engaging tradition to enter into the totality of the real. In this way, we can stay above the transactional and utilitarian muck and mire so much of contemporary education has become.
Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education, trans. Mariangela Sullivan (London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), 25.
Giussani, The Risk of Education, xxvii.
These notes are taken from Giussani, The Risk of Education, xxviii–xxx.
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 90.
Giussani, The Risk of Education, 15.
Giussani, The Risk of Education, xxxi.