Frein, George H.

English

Larsen, Elizabeth

UND Scholarly Commons (University of North Dakota)

Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry & Reflective Practice Volume 3 Issue 1 Article 4 6-1977 The Mythological Foundations of Education : A Meditation on Mything and Teaching George H. Frein Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/tl-nirp-journal  Part of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons Recommended Citation Frein, George H. (1977) "The Mythological Foundations of Education : A Meditation on Mything and Teaching," Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry & Reflective Practice: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://commons.und.edu/tl-nirp-journal/vol3/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry & Reflective Practice by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact und.commons@library.und.edu. The Mythological Foundations of Education: A Meditation on Mything and Teaching George H. Frein The University of North Dakota This meditation will not, I promise you, argue for yet another course in the foundations of education. Rather, it will illustrate Thoreau's complaint that schools teach all the branches of learning but none of the roots! We commonly use the word "myth" to mean a fic-titious, even a false story. I recently heard someone say, "The coal"company that says it can restore land that has been strip mined is dealing in myth." Myths have the intellectual respectability of tall tales. A myth is only a step removed from a lie. What keeps a myth from being an outright lie is that it does not even have the power to deceive: no one is expected to believe it. To the extent that words can mean what we want them to mean, I suppose we can use the word "myth" in this way. Originally, though, the word meant just the opposite. A myth was not a false story but a foundational story. The Greek "mythos" is from the Inda-European root meudh or mudh meaning to think over or consider. Hence myth was~tory expressing defin-itive and final reality. The Sophists were the ones who introduced the distinction between mythos and logos (reason) and began to use myth in a pejorative sense. But, what if we read the old myths as wise and thoughtful stories? What if we read them as foundational stories: stories on which lives and even cultures can be built? My concern in this meditation is not semantical: how we use the word. Rather, I am disturbed about the disappearance of the activity described by the original meaning of the word. It seems to me that we have not only changed the meaning of the word but that we have also stopped mything and we now go about 14 I living in a world that is not founded on any basic stories at all. We live in a world without any ade-quate foundation. Life is more and more lived without principle. Self-interest increasingly takes the place of fundamental life principles. As a result education has acquired a pragmatic orientation that leaves stu-dents devoid of a sense of meaning in life and without a usable ethic. Yet people need roots as well as branches. Roots are even more important than branches. Without branches there may not be any fruit but with-out roots there will be no life at all. Lately I have been thinking about three great foundational stories, myths, if I can use the word in its pre-Sophist sense. A great many lives have been rooted and grounded in these stories and I want to suggest that we again tell these myths to ourselves and our students to see if they do not provide some clues about the sources of meaning and vitality that have gone out of living ever since we have ceased the process of mything. I also want to suggest that mything might restore some of the vitality that has gone out of teaching in our time. The three myths I have been thinking about are the Homeric myths, the story of Socrates, and the biblical myth. Homer Last winter I read a child's version of The Iliad and the Odyssey to my six year old son, Mark. We read the whole book through twice and his favorite stories we read again and again. By himself he pored over the illustrations. He especially studied the pictures of battles, of sea storms, of monsters, of gods and of heroes in armor. He constantly asked me to identify the major heroes and deities. It seemed important for him to keep them all straight in his mind and on the right side. In the middle of doing something else he would stop and ask, "Was Ajax one of the Greeks or one of the Trojans?" He also asked about events in such a way that seemed to indicate that he was beginning to dis-tinguish fate, treachery, and virtue. He particularly 15 liked the duel between Achilles and Hector, the story of the Trojan horse, and the escape of Odysseus from the Cyclops. What struck me most about his reaction to these tales was his absorbing interest in the struggles that were going on. His fascination with the great obstacles -- especially the monsters and giants --that the heroes had to face told me a good deal about his own need for courage to overcome his own obstacles and fears. Childhood is not the idyll that adult romantics would have us believe. It is really a time of great struggle and conflict. The child's world is filled with hostile forces that, in his imagination, have all the threatening immediacy of Trojan soldiers bent on his destruction. The cute and sunny stories that make up so much of the volume of children's books these days do not touch the deeper levels of a child's soul, the levels where the fundamental structures of the personality are being laid out. We should, of course, read this pleasant literature with children. It is cute and fun and they enjoy it. But, we should not think that it is enough to SRtisfy the needs of their souls. Those needs cannot be satisfied either by the books the child learns to read from in school. The focus in most of these books is on the technical mat-ter of decoding written words. The latest "book" Mark read to me the other night was Lee Finds Neal. It is a story of hide and seek. The text, one sentence per page, is as follows: "Here's Neal. I' 11 hide. Find me, Neal! Neal finds me. Hide, Neal! I'll find Neal. He's sly. I see Neal. Neal leaves. I eat a meal," etc. Such "reading" may be necessary for chil-dren if they are to acquire basic reading skills. But, it must be entirely subordinated as a skill-means to the purposive-end of reading for the sake of satisfying the needs of the soul. School books, like Lee Finds Neal, do not awaken the soul. The Homeric myth does, or at least did to Mark. When he finished reading Lee Finds Neal the story was over. When we finished a story from the 16 Iliad or the Odyssey Mark would return to it again and again in his play. He often dressed up as a Greek soldier and acted out what was going on in his imagi-nation. Other times he would dramatize the story all across the living room floor with Fisher-Price people for the Trojans while GI Joe and super hero dolls took the part of the Greeks. Of course, he unselfconscious-ly talked out loud all the time so that I always knew what was going on. His play seemed to reproduce faithfully the myth: victory is always a struggle; it never comes easily or without the courage to face external obstacles and internal fears. The myth in-evitably served as the foundation of Mark's play. Lee and Neal never did. I conclude from this that teaching which neglects mything to concentrate exclusively on technical skills lays down no foundation in the soul and makes it very difficult even to build up a set of technical skills. Mark's teacher reported that only two other children in class were making the progress they should. Out of the grossness of the Trojan War Homer created a vision of life that served as the vital foundation of Greek culture for centuries. Homer's stories tell of courage in the face of fear and still speak to the deeper levels of the soul. Far from being false stories the myths are true to the needs of the child who is just beginning to put down the foundations of his life. Socrates An education requires more than lessons in courage to be complete. It also demands humility and self-knowledge. I recently asked a college class rhetorically, "Why did the Delphic Oracle say that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens?" I could tell at once that many did not know, so I repeated the question literally. No one had any idea! No one knew that Socrates was wiser than all other Athenians because he knew that he did not know, whereas everyone else was ignorant of 17 his own ignorance. In fact, my students, some of whom were seniors, had only the vaguest idea of who Socrates was. I find it shocking that a student can obtain a college education without having heard the story of Socrates. His story is certainly one of the greatest foundational stories in the history of the West. Without knowing what Socrates knew even the most meticulously educated person is in the gravest danger: the danger of pride and arrogance. Without humility and the recognition of ignorance all further learning is impossible. No wonder so many college graduates settle in a posture of merely conserving what they know. They even become enemies of the ideal of justice, replacing it with the good of the status quo and self-interest. The habit of Socratic question-asking they rightly sense to be a threat to their security as the educated elite. Reasoning for them is not questioning reasoning but technical reasoning. Those who do question the quality of justice and dare to doubt conventional wisdom are viewed as agitators and the enemies of society. In a nation like ours where the fortunate young are given such a great amount of education, and thereby gain access to social and economic power, it seems foolish not to make clear to them that the con-text and framework of knowledge is ignorance. Without the awareness of his or her own ignorance an educated person can be a greater danger to society than the uneducated. The arrogance of the learned will pro-duce a tyranny no less objectionable than the arrogance of blood or might or conquest. But, if the educated who lack humility are a danger to society they are also a danger to themselves. Without knowing one's ignorance one does not truly know himself or herself. The injunction of the philosopher is "Know thyself." It requires courage as well as wisdom. That is why the physical courage of the soldier is so instructive for the young. It symbolizes the moral courage needed to face the world of inner struggle and to engage in the contest for 18 I 1 one's own soul. To know oneself is to know nakedness, weakness and ignorance. The truth about oneself is often unpleasant. Freud has taught us of our anality. We must all learn about our mortality and a thousand other limitations. Until we acquire the habit of say-ing, "I don't know" we will not learn very much and we will never see ourselves as we are. The story of Socrates is a story of moral courage not only because he stood up for his convictions in the face of social opposition but chiefly because he faced up to himself and acknowledged his own ignorance. Socrates knew himself and therefore escaped the illu-sions others had to accept in place of life as it is and in place of the truth. One of the great illusions, so widespread in our culture, is the belief in the need for material abun-dance and the idea that the purpose of education is to prepare one to acquire that abundance. Socrates knew that it was not for the sake of having material things that one sought an education. The purpose of education, he believed, was to know oneself and to join with others in the making of a self true to what it means to be human. The extent of Socrates' achievement is reflected in the fact that all subse-quent philosophy in the West is really only commentary on Plato, who told the story of Socrates. An education that neglects not only the philo-sophical tradition but the story on which it is founded -- no matter what else it provides -- will only conspire with that part of our own makeup which wants to hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves. Such an education is far worse than ignorance for it is a conspiracy against the truth and against the soul. It is a lie. The truth is that it is not easy to know oneself and self-knowledge is more like igno-rance than knowledge. I cannot conceive of the teach-ing of anything that is humanly worth knowing where the telling of Socrates' story would not be a relevant myth, a foundation for genuine learning. How could students get through college without having heard Socrates' story from most of their professors? 19 The Bible My own area of teaching is not the classics or philosophy. It is the discipline of religious studies. Each year I meet college students in the course "Intro-duction to the New Testament." And each year they seem less and less knowledgeable about the biblical myth. My task, of course, is not to convert them to the Christian faith. I simply wish them to be bibli-cally literate and this, I take it includes a recogni-tion of the wisdom of that writing. Students come to my class with only the vaguest notion of the best known biblical stories and unable even to tell the story of Jesus in a way that would remotely contain the major themes of any one of the four gospels. They cannot recount, in their own words and phrases, the Christian myth, though nearly all are quick to tell me that the gospels are the truth and not myths! But my reflection here is not upon my students' ignorance. I want instead to admit my own ignorance, though of another kind than that of my students to be sure. At the same time I want to indicate how the biblical myth as a foundational story can be returned to again and again as one tries to build one's life at various stages. I do not here claim any divine authorship for the New Testament texts, but I do see the New Testament myth as a foundational story. Actually, my students' ignorance of the text and of the basic symbols and themes of the Christian tra-dition has been a help to my own continuing education in the meaning of the myth. With students I must constantly return to the most basic (and hence most significant) elements and structures of the gospel story. In the case of the gospel of Mark, for example, this means that it cannot be taken for granted that the central theological theme, which is salvation through suffering, will be at all apparent to the college reader. As I took the students through the text of Mark this last time I showed how each story was an element in what was essentially a very carefully constructed series of baptismal instructions. The theology and 20 symbolism of baptism controls the arrangement of the individual narratives that make up the larger story. I was careful to explain that this theology was a theology of death and resurrection and that it was symbolized in the baptismal ritual through the drown-ing of the old self in the water of baptism for the sake of the birth of a new life beyond the old. The philosophy that Mark is careful to set out is not a philosophy of victory but of defeat and of finding truth in that defeat. The task I set for my students and, hence, for myself was to find this doctrine, not only in an isolated saying of Jesus, such as, "If you would be my disciple, take up your cross •.• ," but in the whole structure of Mark's work. In the process of this work as we were looking at the story of the cure of the blind man in chapter eight I saw something that I had never seen before in the text. "The blind man," I said, "is undoubtedly typical and symbolic of the person preparing for baptism. Not only is he nameless and, hence, able to be a sort of Everyman, but his healing takes place in two steps or stages. At first he sees only confusedly and says, 'Men look like trees.' Jesus then, in Mark's telling of the story, has to finish the cure. This story, I went on to say, is followed by Peter's famous recognition of Jesus' identity: 'You are the Christ.' But just as soon as Jesus started to talk about his having to go through much suffering and to die Peter tried to correct Jesus' sense of what was to come." It then occurred to me that this story of a two-stage cure of the blind man, which I never understood before, was really the theme of Mark in miniature. No doubt Mark creates the story of a healing in two stages (and the story is unique to Mark) because, like the faith of Peter and like life itself, healing or salvation is an affair of two stages. The first stage, characteristic of the first half of life, is the affirmation of life in the face of opposition from external sources like the Pharisees. But, that stage does not achieve true humanity. In terms of the story of the blind man: "I see men but they look like trees." A second step is required. To be healed, 21 to see correctly, to be whole, one must accept death and the self in the face of death -- the task of the second half of life. Here was more evidence that, even for Mark, the earliest and simplest of the gospels, it is not chiefly by miracles, which Mark greatly plays down, that Jesus creates a way of life worth following. It is by accepting death as he did that Jesus became a healer or a savior for people like Peter who later in life in a second stage -- came to both an affirma-tion of life and an acceptance of the cross and death. So much sentimental interpretation of the story of Jesus makes it a simple one-step story: a story of triumph and easy victory. In Mark's telling of it, it is more com~lex. If, he tells us, we are to see straight, to be alive, to be saved, it is only by going down into death. ) The story of Jesus is not a story of easy salva-tion. And in Mark's gospel there is virtually no resurrection story at all compared to the later gospels. Mark's version is thus a good myth, i.e., a story adequate to the complexities of life and death that have to be built upon it. Like the Homeric myth and the story of Socrates, the story of Jesus can be returned to throughout life, as the need arises for a rediscovery of the ground and foundation of life. The meaning of a myth is never exhausted. The teaching that is mything is then a teaching that has more than passing value. Myths provide a lifetime of reflections and meditations. The deepest foundations of education are mytho-logical. Yet, in spite of all the recent talk about "getting back to the basics," I have not heard anyone suggest that the basics go deeper than technical reasoning. The foundations of education are mytho-logical and at its most profound level teaching is a form of mything. 22 i 

Freshman and Academic Writers: The Process of Productivity

https://commons.und.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=tl-nirp-journal

The Mythological Foundations of Education : A Meditation on Mything and Teaching

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UND Scholarly Commons (University of North Dakota)