To The Angel of Schooling, Write: Redeeming the Telos of Schooling as a Liturgical Institution, And the Role of the School Administrator as Peace-Weaver, Through the Lens of Prophetic Imagination
The purpose of this dissertation is to critique the institution of mass schooling by holding up the failure of both its liturgy and its pedagogies as part of the larger failure inherent in the overarching telos of the marketplace. The problem addressed here is that schooling operates as a religious institution through its proffering a sacred cosmology around what I will conceptualize as “The Religion of the Marketplace” that shapes students in the imago dei of the Homo Economicus whose hearts are shaped to worship the god, Mammon, by the disordered love of avarice to find peace, contentment, and happiness through the theology of consumption. This dissertation examines the schoolhouse as a liturgical institution, arguing not that schools should be religious, but rather that they are “re-ligious” (Baker and Letendre, 2005; Meyer, 2009) in that they bind us to what Charles Taylor (2004) describes as social imaginaries (ways of seeing and being in the world) that then become “religious” (held as sacred) for a given culture when they are legitimated, replicated and perpetuated through their specific pedagogies and practices. Using exegesis of biblical texts and a historical exploration of the vice of avarice, I will argue that the cultivation of Mammon undermines both moral and political health because it erodes empathy and keeps one’s focus on the disordered love (Augustine, 1958) of one’s own self-gratification and –glorification. This work seeks to address the moral, philosophical, political, and theological problems that are deeper than the issues addressed by the current public discourse on school reform. By theorizing the concepts of “Mammon” and “Liturgical Institutions” (Smith, 2009), this inquiry explores the ways in which the Religion of the Marketplace shapes a theology of consumption that drives schooling, and the monstrous consequences of its so doing. This conceptualization opens the way to speak about the need for the school administrator to act as prophetic peace-weaver, the one tasked within the organization of a given school to usher in new modes of discourse and praxis in order to see not school reform, but school redemption occur
