We All Know That What Will Transform Education Is Not Another Theory or Another Book or Another Formula but a Transformed Way of Being in the world. in the Midst of the Familiar Trappings of education—competition, Intellectual combat, Obsession W

I had a teacher at Carleton College who changed my life, but he lectured nonstop. We would raise our hands and try to get a word in edgewise, and he would say, “Wait a minute. I’ll get to that at the end of the hour.” He wouldn’t have gotten to it at the end of the week, the month, the year. Thirty years later, my hand is still up! He’s dead, unfortunately, but I’m still engaged with what he said.

I wondered what was this magic that made me feel so deeply related to the world of social thought that he was teaching, even though he, himself, was basically a shy and awkward person who didn’t know how to connect with me on the social level.

He would make a vigorous Marxist statement, a puzzled look would come over his face, and he would step over here and argue with himself from a Hegelian viewpoint. It wasn’t an act. He was really confused.

And I realized years later what the deal was. He didn’t need us to be in community! Who needs 18-year-olds from the North Shore of Chicago when you’re hanging out with Marx and Hegel and Troeltsch and other really interesting people? But he opened a door to me that had never been opened before, a world of imagination and thought that I had no idea existed, and it was an enormously gracious act. He was an amazing man who carried a community within himself, a community of people long gone.

(This is a mildly political comment, but I’m amazed at this controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton and her conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. After all, the heart of the liberal arts is the ability to talk to dead people. People pay $25,000 a year to learn how to have conversations with the dead. It’s called being liberally educated!)

Fourth, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover the humility that makes teaching and learning possible.

Everyone in academia knows what Freeman Dyson meant when he said, about the development of the nuclear weaponry that threatened to destroy the earth, “It is almost irresistible, the arrogance that comes over us when we see what we can do with our minds.” So much arrogance that we will keep turning the crank until we destroy the earth itself. It is only with humility, the humility that comes from being in the presence of sacred things and knowing the simple quality called respect, that real knowing, teaching, and learning are possible.

A couple of years ago, Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the DNA molecule, celebrated the 40th anniversary of that discovery. Those of you who have read the book, Double Helix , know that it’s about all of the anti-virtues of academic life: competitiveness, ego, greed, power, and money.

But when they were interviewed on the 40 th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, James Watson said, “The molecule is so beautiful. Its glory was reflected on Francis and me. I guess the rest of my life has been spent trying to prove that I was almost equal to being associated with DNA, which was a hard task.”

Then Francis Crick—of whom Watson once said, “I have never seen him in a modest mood”—replied, “We were upstaged by a molecule.”

Finally, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover our capacity for wonder and surprise, an absolutely essential quality in education. I know what happens when we get surprised in an academic context. We reach for the nearest weapon and try to kill the surprise as quickly as we can, because we are scared to death.

I will never be able to comprehend why people so devoutly believe that competition is the best way to generate new ideas, because I know from experience what happens in competition. In competition you do not reach for a new idea, because a new idea is risky. You don’t know how to use it. You don’t know where it’s going to take you. You don’t know what flank it may leave open. In competition, you reach for an old idea that you know how to wield as a weapon, and you smite the untruth as quickly as you can.

We have flattened our landscape. My image of this objectivist landscape in higher education is that it is so flat, so lacking in variety, so utterly banal that anything that pops up and takes us by surprise is instantly defined as a threat. Where did it come from? Where did it come from? It must be from underground. It must be the work of the devil.

The sacred landscape has hills and valleys, mountains and streams, forests and deserts, and is a place where surprise is our constant companion—and surprise is an intellectual virtue beyond all telling. Those are some things I think we might bring back if we pursued the themes of this conference in our lives and education.

I want to say one final word about the journey toward recovering the sacred, about getting from here to there. I do not believe that we can rightly ask or hopefully ask our institutions to manifest the qualities of the sacred that I have been talking about. I don’t think institutions are well suited to carry the sacred. I think distortion happens when the sacred gets vested in an institutional context or framework.

I think institutions have their utility. They have jobs to do. We all have important vocational decisions about whether to be inside or outside institutions and how to do that dance because we all know their power of co-optation. But I don’t believe that what we’re talking about here is going to be carried by the Roman Catholic Church or the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends or the University of Colorado at Boulder or even the Naropa Institute. I believe these are things we carry in our hearts into the world in solitude and in community.

I have been doing a small study of social movements that have transformed the landscape: the women’s movement, the black liberation movement, the gay and lesbian identity movement, the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe and in South Africa. I will not trouble you with all of the details of how movements evolve. I just want to say a word about the starting point of social movements as I understand it.

I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation. They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live “divided no more,” the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one’s truth to be on the inside.

I call it the Rosa Parks decision, because she is emblematic for me and for many people I know of the historic potentials of a decision that can feel very lonely and very isolated. Rosa Parks was prepared for that day on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, December 1, 1955. She was prepared in many ways. She had gone to the Highlander Folk School where Martin Luther King also learned nonviolence. She was the secretary of the NAACP in her community.

But we all know that the day—the moment—she sat down, she had no assurances that the theory would work, that the strategy would succeed, not even assurances that people who said they were her friends would be there for her in the aftermath of that action. It was a lonely decision made in isolation, but a decision emblematic of that being made by many other individuals in that place and time, for which she has risen to be the exemplar. It was a decision that changed the lay and the law of the land.

I’ve often asked myself where people find the courage to make a decision like that when they know that the power of the institution is going to come down on their heads? How do they find the courage to make a decision like that when they know it could easily lead to loss of status, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of job, loss of friends, and, perhaps, loss of meaning?

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.

And as soon as we made that decision, amazing things happen. For one thing, the enemy stops being the enemy. When Rosa Parks sat down that day, it was partly an acknowledgment that by conspiring with racism, she had helped create racism. By conspiring with death-dealing education, we help to create death-dealing education. But by deciding to live divided no more, we help change all of that.

When the police came on the bus that day, they said to Rosa Parks, “You know if you continue to sit there, we’re going to have to throw you in jail.” And her answer is historic. She said, “You may do that.” An enormously polite way of saying, “What could your jail possibly mean compared to the imprisonment I’ve had myself in for the last 43 years, which I break out of today?”

I don’t know where you are on your journey. My journey is constantly toward trying to understand what it means to live divided no more. And I think if we come out of this conference understanding that decision better in the context of education, we will have done something well worth doing.