Originally published in Classis
Volume XX, No. 3

In English, we speak of the performing arts as “fine arts.” This distinguishes them as much from the liberal arts as from the mechanical or servile arts (arts directed at caring for the body’s needs, such as cooking or making clothes). But in French, they have a different designation: beaux arts or “beautiful arts.” I have always found this to be both deeply powerful and more apt than our own less enthusiastic designation of “fine.” This conception has spread in my own thinking to encompass not just the performing arts but much more: first, the humanities, and then all human making and knowing. Because once the idea of beauty gets hold of you, it does not let go easily, nor will it be easily quarantined: it tends to expand, colonizing nearby sites and bringing more and more under its dominion. And so, for me, “beautiful arts” has come to encompass my entire approach to education.

My foundational claim is that the heart of pedagogy is romance. Now, romance is not the same as love. Love begins with captivation, as the perception of beauty arrests the eye. It progresses through admiration and meditation (which is an intentional reflective delight in the beauty perceived) to desire and finds its consummation in union. On the other hand, romance is the histoire d’amour,¹ the course of being drawn. It begins not with captivation but pursuit. It aims to draw the other into a space similar to the space the one who romances occupies, thus creating a mutual, symmetrical recognition of and desire for beauty. The mutual and at least somewhat symmetrical occupation of such a space is one of the prerequisites for consummated love.

What does this look like in the case of education? It means that the educator must cast a vision before the student, a vision that will captivate and allure the student. The student is the one pursued, and the educator pursues on behalf of whatever stands as the goal of education. When this romance takes hold of the student, pursuing the goal becomes self-sustaining because it is internally driven: the student wishes to reach the desired end.

My foundational claim is that the heart of pedagogy is romance.

As a result, what is proposed as an end matters greatly, for only the right object will elicit love. But it also matters what we fall in love with, for our loves change us in the direction of our loves. On the one hand, information is not likely to elicit love from our students, and we do not do well in achieving our educational outcome by focusing on acquiring or mastering certain bits of information. On the other hand, even those few who can fall in love with such an end are not helped thereby, for by loving information, they become more the type of person who values information over meaning, data over context, knowledge over people, and facts over truth. Such students are being trained to treat the world reductively, including other human persons. Such reductionism is precisely what classical education in its current forms is trying to avoid because we recognize that reductive understandings of the world are not likely to produce sensitive, creative, holistic solutions to pressing societal and environmental problems or to generate subtle, provocative, yet reverent works of art and genius.

There are, then, two things to be investigated: the first is the dynamics of intellectual romance, in which wonder and imagination play such key roles. Wonder arises from perceived beauty, while imagination works to open the eyes and cast forth our gaze. Without imagination, no object of desire will ever be presented to the mind’s eye; without wonder, it will not captivate us. The second thing to be investigated is the worthy pedagogical ends and how we must subordinate the specific learning outcomes (material mastery) to the greater demand of a vision of reality and one’s place in it. This cannot be separated from moral vision precisely because to understand one’s place in the world is to understand ways one ought and ought not to interact with other objects in that world.

Because teaching is never mere information transfer but aims to take a student as far as possible, we cannot specify the endpoint or prescribe a one-size-fits-all model. In fact, the material is not the goal at all but the formation of a certain type of person, namely, an actively self-motivated lifetime learner. Therefore, we need to cast a vision tailored to each student that will become a passion, such that the students pursue it increasingly of their own accord. Because it is impossible to tailor this vision to each student in the abstract (precisely because no concrete persons are abstract), education requires the teacher to constantly assess and adjust based on real-time conditions on the ground. The vision we cast must be sufficiently broad to keep drawing the student on throughout a lifetime; thus, the goals of education need to be epic in proportion.

I suggest that this process of drawing the student is a form of romance. This notion of romance is not accidental or peripheral to the task of education but is, in fact, its beating heart.

In fact, the material is not the goal at all but the formation of a certain type of person, namely, an actively self-motivated lifetime learner. Therefore, we need to cast a vision tailored to each student that will become a passion, such that the students pursue it increasingly of their own accord.

The Dynamics of Intellectual Romance

To understand intellectual romance’s dynamics, it will be helpful to make some general remarks about romance.

Romance often begins with one party pursuing the other, but in its fullest form, it is a mutual pursuit. This is why romance is not best described in terms of conquest, such as when a Don Juan conquers the hesitations of a hapless woman who is to him little more than an object.² Rather, true romance is a dance. To be sure, in this dance, there is invitation and hesitation, pulling apart and drawing together again, but it is only a dance so long as both partners stay engaged; therefore, the center of gravity is not in one partner or the other, but rather in the space between the partners that are defined by their ever-shifting relations to each other.

Now, to avoid a dangerous caricature, it must be understood that the teacher acts as a proxy: he is the intermediary between the student and the goal of education. As such, he must be faithful to the goal, recognize when to step aside, and allow the two for whom he has been working to come together on their own. Every good teaching philosophy aims to make the teacher unnecessary in time.

Transforming the Vision of the Student

The first step in romance is to get the attention of the one pursued. This involves a transformation of vision: either something that has not been seen before must be seen for the first time, or something must come to be seen in a new light.³ Likewise, when we think about intellectual romance, we begin with the eye of the mind. The faculty that corresponds to the eye of the mind is the imagination, and so the imagination is central to the work of education. It is specifically the student’s imagination that is of paramount importance here. For though imagination is equally important in the pedagogue—from the first conception of a class to the execution of the very last day—we are concerned here with how to draw students into the task of learning so that it becomes internally rather than externally driven. For that, we must focus on the conditions of the student.

The first and most foundational use of the imagination in education is casting a vision for the student to pursue. Love works using what we have become accustomed to call a final cause: the goal draws one towards itself—it becomes the reason for which all actions are taken.⁴ But a final cause can exert no influence if it is not known, at least to some extent: we do not fall in love with what we do not know, even if it is true that we can never really know something until we love it with a suitable love. Thus, something has to be presented for the student to catch sight of, or no desire to pursue will be awakened. The student enters this dance only reluctantly and must be drawn into it. Something, therefore, must be proposed to the student as an incentive that will ground the risk inherent in letting oneself be drawn out of the comfort of the familiar or known.

This is where we very often go wrong in the service of expediency: we seek to use something other than the goal itself to draw the student into the dance, but when we do so, we run the risk of the student falling in love with the means rather than the educational final cause. For example, we tell students they should study Latin because it will help them with their scores on standardized tests, and in so doing, we instrumentalize Latin. We intend this explanation to be a way station on the journey to the love of the language itself; but it is taken to be the end itself, and so becomes a competing, improper end. It is a rare thing indeed for a student whose understanding of the value of Latin is so brutally instrumental to develop a desire to continue their study beyond this period of usefulness. In fact, I would argue that no student conceives this desire so long as Latin is conceived of only in this instrumental way; the ones who do get inflamed with the desire to continue their study of Latin are the ones who have moved on from the instrumental conception: they have discovered that it is beautiful in its own right, and are now pursuing it out of love.

But this is no thanks to us, who gave no reasons to think it was of anything more than instrumental value. No, if we want the student to fall in love with Latin, we can use nothing else to draw the student into the dance than Latin itself. “Why should I study Latin?” they will ask. “Are you kidding me?” we respond. “Look at this stuff; it’s so cool!” We will read them a line of Vergil, one of the great liturgical hymns, an ode of Horace, or part of the magnificent Requiem mass. We will read it to them in Latin: though they will not understand the words, they must hear the music of it, the unique vowel melody and consonantal syncopation of that language.

Then, we will show them what it means, not by mere translation but by pointing to the interaction between semantics and syntax. We will talk to them about the shades of meaning of these words, their history and how they have come to this place in this locution, and how those connotations interact with one another in ways that go beyond what can be seen from a literal translation. We will also speak of the form and function of the words, the way part of speech interacts with deployment: “this is no mere noun, but an adjective used nominally, or a verbal noun of a certain sort. See how that impacts the meaning.”

When we have finished, the student will likely regret having asked the question; the student will definitely have seen that this is the type of matter that excites, at least in some, passion and joy; and, beyond all this, the student just may experience that first mystical moment of wonder that will threaten, unchecked, to infect them with our own sense of wonder and turn them into one of us: a lover of Latin.

Now, it is just that mystical moment I am concerned about here. What does it look like for a student who has come into contact with my passion to contract that same passion? I argue that more is required than just to see my passion: the student must also leap from this to some sort of intuition of what it might mean for their lives to be inflamed by a similar passion. It is only a similar passion: this is why my students who go on to study theology, even when they enter the same area of the field as me, do not do quite the same things I do. As in all things, every love is unique and non-repeatable. Since love is a relation between two things, something entirely new is created when one member of the pair is changed (that is, the two involved are not now the teacher and theology, but this student and theology). Thus, the student cannot simply see my passion and take it as a goal: what is required is a new vision inspired by my passion yet distinct from it. This leap, which conceives something new by going beyond the existing conditions (the student’s self-understanding and the teacher’s passion), is an act of the imagination.

Thus, the student cannot simply see my passion and take it as a goal: what is required is a new vision inspired by my passion yet distinct from it. This leap, which conceives something new by going beyond the existing conditions (the student’s self-understanding and the teacher’s passion), is an act of the imagination.

Encouraging the Imagination of the Student

As the teacher casts a vision, it is the role of the student’s imagination to catch this presentation of what could be. The imagination makes space within the student for a new version of that vision. It is helpful to the teacher to know this, for the teacher must cast the vision to summon the imagination to work. This was implicit in the extended example I gave of casting a vision for the study of Latin: why read students texts in a language they do not understand? So that the text, coming to them in a form they do not understand and cannot assimilate, may challenge their assumptions about the boundaries of the world, offer them a glimpse of riches just beyond their reach, and, by its very mystery, summon the imagination to work.

However, simply capturing the student’s attention will not be enough. Imagination is equally important in keeping it and drawing the student forward in the dance of learning. Once we awaken the student’s imagination, it must be continually fed.

Sterility is the enemy of imagination. Imagination will break through the toughest rock as long as the vein of mineral it is pursuing remains rich, but once the gold and the gems run out, it tires and turns to other endeavors. Thus, the pedagogue must not only introduce the student to the possibilities of this field of study but must also labor to demonstrate the inexhaustibility of its riches.

This has everything to do with curricular preparation, at the very least, in two ways. The first is the selection of materials. If a student has been hooked into literature by the promise of adventure and visiting other worlds, a steady diet of realistic fiction set in the student’s home culture will disappoint. This was my childhood experience: an avid reader, I would devour hundreds of pages every week. I was drawn to books because they took me to fantastical places to meet larger-than-life personalities. Adventure, transport, and possibility were my stock in trade. But in school I was handed a seemingly unending stream of the same depressing stories over and over again: boy loses beloved animal (Old Yeller, The Yearling, Where the Red Fern Grows), protagonist overcome by the inescapable difficulty of the real world (The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Badge of Courage, The Call of the Wild), or the evils of racism, which were, to me as an African-American man in the south, existentially urgent (Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird)—in short, all those things were what I was reading books to avoid. As a result, though I continued to read several books a week, English was my least favorite subject, and I would not do the reading for class.

On the other hand, if the student has been hooked by the power of literature to face the harsh realities of sinful human existence and to offer resources for finding a way forward through pain, continually asking them to read escapist fiction will not do. Not every student wants dragons, other worlds, or adventure. I may not understand it, being the sort who wants nothing more than these things. But my job as a teacher is not to convert that student to like what I like, but to keep that student reading and to make sure that student’s list of books they cannot wait to read feels like it is too long to finish in one lifetime.

The teacher preparing a literature class can expect a variety of students who will have to be hooked in various ways. Since she cannot choose to build the class for one without disenfranchising the others, she will have to provide variety so that each student will have multiple books they can really resonate with, set at reasonable intervals throughout the school year.

But it also means that teaching a student the “wrong sort” of book, as will happen regularly in the model I am describing, is not just an exercise in telling a student to be patient. You do not tell the girls to be patient during Treasure Island because Pride and Prejudice is coming or tell the boys to be patient during Pride and Prejudice because War of the Worlds is coming. Teaching is not just about meeting students where they are; it is about moving them from where they are to some place they would never have imagined they could be–indeed, someplace they never could have reached had their imaginations not been shepherded with care. So, at every point, the teacher must be attentive to helping each student see how the “wrong sort” of book for them is not, in fact, the wrong sort but connects to and expands on their perceived interests.

Secondly, the inexhaustibility of the field’s riches must be shown by challenging the students with material that is too hard for them. This is critical, for it shows them that there is still a long way to go, and this challenge draws them forward.

Teaching is not just about meeting students where they are; it is about moving them from where they are to some place they would never have imagined they could be–indeed, someplace they never could have reached had their imaginations not been shepherded with care.

I cannot stress enough how important this is at every level of education: students must see that however far they think they have come, the rabbit hole goes much deeper. But care is required: overuse of this technique or presentation of material too far beyond the student will result in frustration. The imagination will shut down because the student will fail to see a path from where they are now to where they are trying to go. Therefore, one must not do this too often or present material too far beyond where the students’ capabilities lie.

So what about the student who has been successfully drawn into this kind of relationship to the material to be learned? Such a student is characterized by wonder, which arises as a spontaneous and total response to the perception of and assent to the vision presented. The imagination often begins in wonder, and it also leads to wonder.

It is important to think about this because we need to know what we seek in the student. Diligent attention in class and timely and conscientious completion of the assigned work are important and necessary for the student’s progress, but they are not the goal. One can be seized by more or less prosaic and external motivations and still display these traits. We are looking for an attitude of wonder, which looks different in different students but is always characterized by forward motion: the student longs to move on to the next thing and moves through the material eagerly, unselfconsciously, and sometimes even unconsciously. As George MacDonald says: “The right teacher would have his pupils easy to please, but ill to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, ‘Here I will dwell.’”⁵

Think of a student in a seminar class who does not speak up but is actively engaged in following the conversation. One day, the conversation hits upon something important to him, and despite his concerns about social awkwardness or his firm intention to keep his opinions to himself, he enters the conversation as naturally and vigorously as if he had been participating all semester. Until the student arrives at this point, the teacher must continue to romance him, trying to draw him in. Once this point is reached, the teacher’s task changes: now the goal is to feed the hunger that has been awakened, to provide a steady diet of suitable material so that he is not tempted to retreat back into his shell.

This, too, is a curricular point: the student who has been captivated and responds to material in wonder has made a personal connection, which will begin to take the student down paths specific to that student. Here, a one-syllabus-fits-all approach begins to fail: the student’s love of Latin differs from the teacher’s and will run to different sorts of texts. And one student will differ from another.

To take maximal advantage of the developing romance, we must be light on our feet with respect to our curriculum. We need room to allow one student to dive deeper into Caesar while another pursues an interest in Horace, and still another mines the riches of the liturgical tradition. If the goal is for the student to learn Latin well, the student may do so from any of these texts (however much certain ones will be privileged on the AP exam); if the goal is for the student to love Latin and learn it well as a result of that love, then not all of these texts will serve the goal equally well with different students. And so, as student capability expands, the course ought to build in more opportunities for each student to follow the lines of inquiry that he most wonders at and longs for.

A last word on romance: because we woo on behalf of another, we are not drawing the students to ourselves, but to stand alongside us in admiring what we also love. Indeed, since one is being led into rather than away from the web of interconnected relations that make up the world, this romance is not a seduction (leading apart) but an induction (leading into). There must therefore be a limit to the cult of personality; the teacher must decrease that the goal may increase in the student’s eyes. When the student’s admiration is primarily focused on the teacher, the student is being led away from the pulsing richness of the matrix of interconnected knowledge that is truth. The true teacher points away from herself: “You think me so fascinating because you are seeing in me the reflection of what I love. I am not fascinating, as you suppose; I only love what is fascinating beyond words.”

“The right teacher would have his pupils easy to please, but ill to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, ‘Here I will dwell.’”

The Goal of Education: A Corrective

All this indicates that we must retreat from the temptation to think that worthy educational goals are best described in terms of material mastery or even sets of skills. The reason, to reiterate, is that it is rare for a student to fall in love with mastering a body of material or acquiring a set of skills. A student may be greatly devoted to a subject because of some instrumental use to which they can put it, but they will rarely fall in love. The type of person who can fall in love with such a utilitarian goal lacks the imagination to realize the moral vision of a good life.

This phrasing already recommends one type of alternative goal or one feature that alternative goals might be expected to have: they would present the material as of intrinsic rather than merely instrumental value. I say “merely instrumental” to avoid a certain sort of over-correction that villainizes instrumentality in any apologetic for the study of a discipline. It is not the case that we must make sure the student has no thought at all for the usefulness of a body of knowledge, but we must help them to see why it is attractive in its own right, for this will engender a deeper passion that grounds not just perseverance when study gets difficult, but even joy.

What does intrinsic value look like? This is a hard question for us in our present cultural moment when everything is relentlessly interrogated for its utility. But even if we cannot give an exhaustive account, we can begin someplace fairly uncontroversial: beauty is intrinsically valuable. This is easy to test: we are all drawn to and esteem it, yet it is difficult to say why we should. It is one thing to ask why we find something beautiful and another to ask why we like beautiful things. The former question can be answered by pointing to various features of the beauty in question; the latter feels a bit like being asked why one likes Christmas, chocolate, or one’s kids. I’ve never needed a reason to like chocolate; it is just good. And here we have an interesting clue: I have defended my love of chocolate (or rather, refused to defend it) by referring to another transcendental: goodness. In a healthy mind, the transcendental properties of being (goodness, truth, beauty) need no justification to be desired—they are simply desirable.

This is why I have placed so much emphasis on the imagination. Something must be perceived for it to be judged beautiful, and the imagination can offer non-physical images to the mind for consideration.

So, the goal must be beautiful, but this is not yet an account of the proper goal; it is merely a descriptor. What more can we say? If the goal of education is to present something that a student can fall in love with, and that can communicate meaning to not only the rest of the student’s studies but indeed to the student’s entire life, our proper goal will not be a list of materials or skills, but a vision. The nature of this vision will differ depending on whether one is thinking at the level of a particular class, a discipline, or education in general. However, each lower level must point to and connect with the higher levels.

The following account is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.

At the class level, the teacher might pose a problem arising from consideration of the material. For example, in a history class, the teacher might ask the students to consider, as a guiding question for the year, what it means for a government to defend its people, and how the duty to do so might look different in different circumstances. A Latin class might highlight the tension between form and function (adjectives used as nouns and adverbs, participles as verbal adjectives, etc.). A literature class might keep returning to the question of what true friendship is (from David and Jonathan in the Bible to Bilbo and Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit), or what makes for a good king (Beowulf, Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Hamlet, Henry V). In all of these ways, what we are offering the students is a vision of how the material in question belongs to deep questions about being human in the world, forming societies, and resolving one’s duties.

At the level of a discipline, the scope broadens and grows closer to the true end of education. While a course in history may have the goal of tracking a certain dynamic through time, the history program as a whole might aim to argue that human societies tend to perpetuate certain types of behaviors and structures, which take on varying significance in light of the specific nature of their contexts. The Latin program as a whole might aim at a grasp of the Roman way of viewing the world, focusing on what the language reveals about the Roman mindset and values. The literature program could be oriented to the expansion of models for how to be in the world, brought about by the imaginative inhabiting of other lives and other worlds. These broader disciplinary goals help guide the way the individual courses in the sequence are planned.

At the level of education, we get to the purest version of the goal, which we are trying to instantiate at every level and in every class. Simply put, education aims to offer the student a vision of how to be in the world. Because there is no one right way to be in the world, and each individual has a unique, unrepeatable, and finite range of possibilities for being in the world, this will involve understanding the world, understanding human persons, and understanding the self. Because an integrated vision for how to be in the world requires adequating these components (the world, human persons, and the self) to one another, it will require wisdom.

Indeed, this wisdom is the most proper goal of education because understanding the world, other persons, and the self facilitates wisdom. This is another of the major claims I wish to make: Education aims most properly not at acquiring knowledge but at wisdom. This will satisfy the criteria for love, for a student may fall in love with wisdom, and there is little more worthy to be loved than wisdom.

Formation of the Soul: Moral Vision and Education

It will be noticed, with considerable discomfort by some, that the type of education I am recommending is not able to be separated from moral vision precisely because to understand one’s place in the world is to come to an understanding of ways one ought to and ought not to interact with other objects in that world.

Modernist pedagogical sensibilities may wish to push back here in the following ways: it is not our responsibility, they would say, to champion particular moral systems or codes. Our job is simply to give the students the tools to think for themselves so that they may determine what moral code is best for them. Or, to take a different approach, the moral order and the order of knowledge are just different things. To try to unite them in this way is to commit a category error. Because they are distinct, not only may one teach the one without the other, but it is perhaps desirable because the teacher may be an expert in history without being an expert in morality.

We must vehemently reply to these and any such objections that they are naive and self-contradictory. Western culture has always considered knowledge and morality to be linked: the Bible treats the knowledge of good and evil as integral to trespass,⁶ and Plato and Aristotle seem to largely agree that the good is such that if it is known, it will be done—evil is committed out of ignorance.⁷ Indeed, to teach students that we can give them the tools for moral living without commending to them specific norms of moral living is already to recommend a certain range of systems of morality, namely a range in which different moral systems compete under reason, subject to reason’s investigation, deliberation, and selection. This is to teach that reason is amoral, which, in fact, gives an absolute moral mandate to the operations of reason.

Education aims most properly not at acquiring knowledge but at wisdom. This will satisfy the criteria for love, for a student may fall in love with wisdom, and there is little more worthy to be loved than wisdom.

No, there is no education apart from the transmission of morals. Our students will hope and dream, love and hate, serve and rebel based on the truths we teach them. Education is a fearsome responsibility, and we will not do it well by deceiving ourselves about the nature of the task we have taken up. To teach is nothing less than to shape and form the soul–not absolutely, for the student also has agency in learning. They will take up what we offer more or less well and decide what to do with it to shape their identity. But make no mistake, we will leave our mark on the persons thus formed by our training.

Education is then the building up of students in wisdom using romance to commend to them a certain vision for how to be in the world. Such an approach to education is inherently transformative for both the students and the pedagogues. Good teaching cannot be reduced to techniques or strategies. You can revolutionize your classroom by flipping it, but you cannot revolutionize your students’ souls in this way. The true art of the teacher is to take each student by the hand and lead her to stand at the edge of what they have always known to be possible: this is romance. As the student gazes out upon a landscape of possibilities previously unimagined, the teacher’s art is to highlight key features in that landscape: this is casting a vision for the beautiful. This vision has to be received by the student’s imagination if it is to become a catalyst for personal transformation, and so the teacher artfully displays this new land in ways that will best appeal to the student’s desires and interests. And we must always keep in mind that this land we have brought her to is a land the student will ultimately explore without us, though we may travel with her for some time. If we have anything worth teaching, it cannot be covered in a few or a dozen years, but can only be approached through a lifetime of curiosity, imagination, wonder, and passion. To develop all this in the midst of a changing world and a changing self will require wisdom on the part of the student; to sow to this lifetime of change requires the exercise of the wisdom the teacher has built up through her own similar journey through the land of enchantment that is erudition.

Notes