The good thing about a mediaeval education

It's funny. It really is funny once you see it. The received wisdom is
that the church is obscurantist and the age of science has it...

We gradually wake up out of it and see the lie. Karl Popper and Einstein
are the key, as we realise our notions of science were completely false.
Irrational even!

We put the film in reverse and replay the obscurities of the "Age of
Enlightenment". We go back to the 13th century or further, and pick up
where the tradition left off... This is why the training of priests
normally takes seven years, and I begin to see it now. When I went into St
Paul's Bookshop the other day, I was very fortunate to be recognised by one
of the nuns who run the shop. I was fumbling around in the philosophy
section and she came over to help me, knowing I was one of the old fogies
studying at the Beda (rather than one of the keen young high-flyers at the
Venerable English College, straight out of university and full of their own
brilliance...) Within five minutes she identified exactly the books I
would need to get me up and running. None of them were on my booklist, but
having purchased them, they have got me moving pretty fast already. Never
mind feminine intuition: let's hear it for rational thinking nuns!

But the one nagging thought, in all of this, concerns looking back at my
teaching of English Literature and what might have been... If I had learned
Descartes, Locke, Hume and Berkeley, I would have known what Defoe was
writing about. It would have been the entry point to see the complementary
and opposing currents and ideas... The Romantic poets would have been more
easily and intelligently understood, and George Eliot would have suddenly
been my heroine (instead of a monumental bore).

And crucially, I could have taught it all much better. If only someone had
thought to give me a medieval education instead of a modern teacher
training.

~..~
( ' ) rabit chaplins: a better understandin of English Lit now they is not
teachin it...


.

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