Equipment for Living: What Education is For

By: Marilyn McEntyre

Marilyn McEntyre is a writer and speaker, perhaps most widely known for her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (2nd ed., Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2021). She is a former professor of English at Westmont College, and of medical humanities at UC Davis and the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. Her twenty books include volumes of poetry and reflections on spirituality, prayer, and the end of life. Her interests are broad, but all include a deep love for education, particularly its relationship to words. In this fourth essay in our series “What Is Education?”, Marilyn explores a “list of skills for which a good education equips us. Or should.” When you’ve finished reading the essay, please feel free to “like” it, comment on it, and share it with others.

Equipment for Living: What Education is For

“Literature is equipment for living.”  —Kenneth Burke

My list of things every adult should be able to do includes a number of practical skills—change a tire, make soup from scratch, teach a child to read—and some less practical but equally important—recite a poem, argue civilly, imagine why someone might like opera.  Most of the items on the list (with the possible exception of changing a tire) are in some way a function of liberal arts education, since they involve more than prescribed procedures designed to yield a predictable result.  I’d like here to consider another list of skills for which a good education equips us.  Or should.

1.  A good education should teach us to think about process—to see every manufactured object, living thing, design idea in terms of the processes involved in planning, making, and sustaining it, in terms of the real costs and tradeoffs involved in its production, of its purposes (and who determined those purposes), and of its effects. 

            Thoreau claimed that we only understand a thing rightly if we understand its life cycle or story.  When we look out the window at a tree or across the aisle at another human being, we’re catching them at a specific moment in their long, complex histories.  What we see is a kaleidoscope paused in its turning to reveal a design that will shift with the next rotation.  It might increase our respect for each other if we practiced seeing each other in this way:  as creatures in whom emerging possibilities are constantly at play.

The habit of thinking in terms of process—economic, ecological, historical—doesn’t come naturally.  It requires that we see things as happenings, rather than as nouns—solid and fixed.  If I see the chair in my study as a mere thing, I see it in utilitarian and perhaps aesthetic terms—or in terms of what it cost me on sale at Office Max.  It takes an extra bit of reflection to see it in terms, say, of how the materials of which it is made were cultivated, mined, manufactured, how it was transported and marketed, and with what impact on people and land.  Its history involves a mix of competing values.  Seeing in terms of process complicates my decision about what chair to buy, but it makes the decision more interesting and morally attuned. 

2.  A good education should equip us to frame, reframe, and step outside the frame.  At some point most of us learned that what we thought were universal truths or natural behaviors were in fact deeply culturally imbedded.  I have explored with medical students the fact that even illness is in part socially constructed:  we learn from our cultures how to be sick, what is considered healthy, how much pain to put up with, what appropriate treatment looks like, and in what ways body, mind, and spirit are related. Notions of personal and professional responsibility for health and healing differ.  Food and drug regulations differ.  All these dimensions of healthcare locate it within conceptual frames that need to be critically examined.  Training students in “critical thinking” means acquainting them with the different disciplinary methods that come into play when any policy or practice is being evaluated.  To figure out who pays for healthcare, we need to reflect on how illness, health and healing intersect with food systems, tax structures, research funding, media imagery, faith practices, and civil rights in time of pandemic.  Every definition, protocol, regulation, and transaction takes place within structures that become normative, and are susceptible to abuse. Common assumptions are the hardest to examine, and the most important, as Jefferson knew when, late in life, he wrote, "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times." 

            For Jefferson to suggest periodic reframing of his foundational work took the kind of imagination educators should foster.  It required that he imagine conditions under which his work might become irrelevant—an act of imagination that requires humility and intellectual honesty.  Examining our own assumptions is a necessary stay against the insidious slide toward insularity.  It entails, however, fairly simple questions:  “Why do I think that?”  “What evidence am I relying on?” “What might I find out if I entertained a point of view I tend to discount?”

            Reframing takes audacity.  I think of the rabbi who, when a young man came to him celebrating a victory asked, “How do you know it’s not a disaster?” and when another came lamenting a defeat, asked, “How do you know it’s not a blessing?”  Counterintuitive questions like those encourage the resilience we need to face what we face:  climate change, loss of biodiversity, spreading poverty, political gridlock, and the mixed blessing of pervasive electronic connectedness.  We need people who can consider how blessing might be wrung from doomsday scenarios—and others able to speak a prophetic word to the complacent.  Those who have read and discussed the Divine Comedy or the Federalist Papers or Morrison’s Beloved or the book of Isaiah will be the best equipped for those tasks.

3.   A good education should equip us to raise pertinent and impertinent questions.  Along with diplomas on graduation day students ought to carry away a repertoire of questions that will serve them at any site of decision-making.  Good questions don’t come altogether naturally. A questioning habit of mind is difficult to maintain in environments of standardization, canned judgments, prescribed curriculum, and programmed learning.  Real questions are volatile and scary and lead into uncharted territory.  “What’s on the test?” feels safe.  “What if manifest destiny was a handy way of legitimating genocide?” doesn’t.

            I’ve always admired Thoreau’s willingness to question what seemed obvious or unassailable:  What is a house?   Why practice philanthropy?  How may the speed of rail travel be a pyrrhic victory?

            Raising good questions requires encouragement, training, and the leisure to pursue them meaningfully.  In Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper reminds us that the leisure required for a liberal arts education is necessary not simply for the pleasure of the privileged, but for the common good. What we are cultivating in those classrooms are questions no constitutional democracy can afford to stop asking:  How and where are decisions being made?  Who funds the research and services we depend on?  What tradeoffs are we accepting?  When does poverty reach the tipping point that turns beggars into revolutionaries?  Why do news media present wildly differing narratives of public life?  The list, of course, is endless.  The hope is to make questioning a habit—even an annoying habit—and to recognize when one has sufficient information to act.

            The questions we hope to foster might focus on the very institutions in which we encourage them—about curriculum design, the evolution of disciplines, methods of assessment, architecture, and the economic pressures at work on them.  Our own “back yard” is always a good place to start.

4.    Education should enable us to tolerate, and even embrace, ambiguity and paradox.  We need what Keats called “negative capability”—the capacity to “dwell in ambiguity without straining after resolution.”  Some of our worst social problems can be traced to an undue desire for closure—closed borders, closed systems, fixed categories, or a rush to regulation where a flexibility might work to longer term purposes.  Consider the difference between theologians who are willing to wrestle with a “living word” that supports various readings and those who seem driven to nail it down to univocal interpretations.  Or the difference between English teachers who insist on the crushing proprieties of the five-paragraph essay and those who admit there are as many ways to write well as there are to make soup.  Christian educators in particular need to take seriously the model of a teacher who taught in parables, loved paradox, and relied on purposeful confusion, whose teaching involved impertinent questions, unsettling surprises, and radical reframings. 

            Negative capability protects against bigotry.  If one begins with the assumption that the answer to most serious questions is “yes and no” or “it depends,” one may find that those answers provide a solid foundation for good critical reasoning.  Do we embrace the second amendment?  Yes and no.  Depends on whether we believe the right to bear arms includes selling kids M-16s.  Should GMOs be banned?  Depends on how one defines genetic modification and who’s funding research on its effects.  And what does Eliot mean when he writes “Teach us to care and not to care / teach us to sit still?” 

            Christian tradition, among others, invites us to wrestle with how “opposites” may be interdependent, how paradox may be the only adequate way to tell the truth, how wealth can be a kind of impoverishment and progress a form of loss; how eternity is not duration but absolute nowness; how the kingdom of heaven is already but not yet. 

            What I hope we would ask of students is to consider every paper, every experiment, every original idea, participation in an ongoing conversation whose origins and ends we can’t know, and whose purposes and outcomes we can’t fully fathom.  Only certain kinds of outcomes can be measured—a truth to bear in mind as we try to assess what we do.

5.  A good education should teach us to read.  Good reading is strenuous, subjective, and mysterious.  It requires sufficient versatility to entertain variant “readings” of a text.  It requires attention to subtlety and subtext, construction and deconstruction of interpretive horizons, and awareness of how words carry the weight of cultural history, current usage and personal association.  It rewards slow attention.  I think here of an evening spent with willing grad students lingering over a single long sentence in Absalom, Absalom!  When we read that way we discover that every reading is an act of interpretation.  The score is not the music; the listener and the viewer are involved in producing the spark that happens when art meets life.  

            Pre-law students need to wrestle with the meanings of disputed terms like “cruel and unusual” or “freedom of speech” or “originalist.”  Religious studies majors need to consider what difference the differences among Bible translations might make. Psychology students need to consider the implications of the DSM 5 definition of autism or bipolar disorder or depression. 

            E.D. Hirsch calls interpretation “a discipline that is fundamental to virtually all humanistic studies.” I don’t believe we can read or even look without interpreting.

6.  A good education fosters empathy.  Medical school faculty often argue about whether empathy can be taught.  For their students the question is urgent and practical, as well as complicated.  We’ve all rolled our eyes over ill-timed assurances like, “I feel your pain.”  We don’t feel each other’s pain.  But we can, and must, imagine it.  Cultivating active, generous curiosity for others’ experiences and points of view is one of the responsibilities of the educated. 

            Good literature is written and read in the service of compassion.  Stories—and this includes the stories told in history courses or religious studies or anthropology—invite us to inhabit other points of view, to consider how people arrive at decisions, how anger might mask pain or greed have its roots in fear. 

            A good education equips us to entertain hypothetical questions: Why might she have done that?  What might be mitigating factors?  What pressures might she be under?  Pausing to ask these questions before arriving at a judgment can serve justice in small but significant ways.

            To encourage these habits of mind we need institutions that are spacious, slow, and subversive—that resist the momentum of the marketplace and hold out for relational learning rather than commodified education.  We need people who keep one foot outside the institution and a critical eye on the terms in which we couch our objectives. 

            T.S. Eliot wrote, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility.”  Humility is a prerequisite to real learning.  It is the wisdom we can’t afford to cease pursuing as we attempt to pursue our deepest purposes in a climate that drives schools to adopt inappropriate business models.  Humility enables empathy, and empathy compassion, and compassion generous policymaking that may finally make for peace.  It is our business to maintain hope for that peace.  We can only do so if we remember what we are about and whom we serve—and that your good and my good are inseparable, because they are the same.