Detachment and Trust

            The virtue of detachment can appear negative at first glance. We can be detached from material possessions, and that’s hard. We can also be detached from our plans or our self-image: that’s perhaps much harder. But while detachment necessarily has a negative quality, requiring a breaking of sorts, detachment is necessary for very positive things, such as growth or love.            One of the positive ends of detachment is for the sake of trust. We sometimes have to be detached in order to trust, and trust is important in a boy’s education, for we are dealing with a garden, not a dollhouse. A boys’ school cannot be a dollhouse, where we dress our dolls up, and our dolls do exactly as we wish. Such a picture might seem laughable, but how far away is this from real examples of boys not allowed to run around, to climb trees, or a host of other restrictions, all in the name of safety? Such a model of education threatens to smother our boys rather than cultivate their thriving. And so a better model might be that of a garden, where we indeed work the soil, prune and water our plants, but we do Read More …

Attentiveness

Students sometimes ask in class “Why do we have to study this?” We can ask ourselves the same question: Why learn proofs in geometry, the rules of algebra, or the detailed history of the 1840’s? The theorems, rules and facts seem to be unnecessary when everything can be plugged into a calculator or searched for online. Why do we need to be in school?  The answer is that everyone, but especially young minds, need training in attentiveness. By learning this rule of algebra or this historical fact, you are training yourself to be more attentive. You are learning how to silence the noise and chatter in your head so that you can experience the world around you as it really is. Education is about fostering a greater attentiveness, a greater perception of the world. A perception of the world around us and the world as it has been: in history, literature, art, and other ways. It is about discovering the existence of things that are not a part of you and do not at all depend on you. It is an openness to the being of things. We can marvel at the changing of the seasons, the origins of the Read More …