The Altar of Productivity and the Need for Contemplative Education

Crises of human dignity in our age tend to focus on those patent assaults against the human person, including abortion, the death penalty, war, and the abuse of the migrant and laborer alike—to name but a few. As St. John Paul II describes in Evangelium Vitae, each of these affronts against human dignity is a symptom of a more malignant malaise characterized as a culture of death rather than a culture of life. The key dimension of this culture, as John Paul II lays out, is “an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency” (Evangelium Vitae, §12). The child, the prisoner, the enemy, the immigrant, and the laborer may be sacrificed on the altar of productivity: if a person is not economically valuable to the state or the culture, then this person’s life is not worth caring about.

This culture of death has been translated by Pope Francis into the language of a technocratic paradigm, one in which the logic of the machine becomes overlaid on human relations. This paradigm is closely aligned with an intoxicated sense of human power. We are creators of machines that can manipulate the created order in whatever way we fancy. Yes, we may tremble before the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence that replaces the human worker; but there is money to be made, so full speed ahead. The increase of this power, as Pope Francis describes in Laudato Si’ comes with “the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s immediate interests” (§122). The logic of the machine is an anti-humanism, one marked by dispositions hostile to the act of contemplation whereby the human person perceives the created order as meaningful. It is a culture, acknowledged by Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity, not as logos, a receptive posture toward existence that sees all as a gift to first be received, but instead as techne: what matters is that which can be made, the practical, rather than the meaning of the created order.

If an educational apostolate is to respond to this culture of death, this technocratic paradigm that elevates practicality over the pursuit of truth, it will be through the mission of cultivating contemplative dispositions among young people. Classical education is often perceived exclusively as a rebellion against curricula that ignore the classics of civilization, all the while relying on technology to do the work of instruction. But what if classical education is practiced as a prophetic exercise in cultivating the human dignity of the student, the teacher, and thereby the whole social order? Of awakening those nascent contemplative dispositions that foster a way of perceiving creation not as raw material for technique but as a gift to be received, pondered, and ultimately loved?

A Contemplative Posture of Reception

Late modernity, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has argued, is marked by a monstrous dependency on speed and control alike. Amazon functions as the iconic paradigm of this late modern addiction. Wherever I am in the globe, I expect to be able to shop at a moment’s notice. I should be able to find what I am looking for, and it should be delivered to my domicile within two days. If not, what is wrong with the world?

The same kind of attitude has permeated the educational sphere. The educator believes it is possible to inculcate every possible skill in the child that will lead to success. The child in primary school is assessed from the beginning, determined whether she is developing in a way that can be characterized as advanced, normal, or below grade expectations. Educational interventions are developed that are appropriate to each case. The child may need time practicing reading, so she is given that time before a computer screen where a program is designed to foster this skill. If it does not work, new technical solutions are discerned and adopted.

Of course, no one should be against interventions that promote the literacy of the young person. Schools, whether classical or not, have an obligation to teach students to read. But education as the inculcation of skills through technical interventions is an attenuated vision of teaching and learning alike. As Rosa writes in The Uncontrollability of the World:

Education occurs not when a particular skill has been acquired, but when a socially relevant segment of the world “begins to speak,” that is, when a child or an adolescent suddenly realizes: Oh! History—or politics, or physics, or music—says something to me. It concerns me in some way, and I can engage in it self-efficaciously. When exactly this “spark” occurs is effectively uncontrollable. Mostly it happens at unplanned, unexpected, often incidental moments, and just as uncontrollable is what a young person then makes of or does with the segment of the world in question, . . . what it says to him or her.[1]

My seven-year-old daughter awakened to the joy of playing the piano not through direct interventions on the part of either my spouse or myself. It was not the result of setting up lessons, at least initially. She came to some insight, mostly on her own, that through the instrument in the corner of our house that she could imitate the sounds of music she heard on the radio. She began to sit down, picking out tunes that she had heard before. Only after she came to see the gift of the piano did she ask for lessons.

The educative act, therefore, began with a moment of reception upon the part of our daughter. She awakened to the gift of music in her own time, and she is learning to play the piano in the same way. She continues to hear pieces of music that she imitates, most recently “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. Her piano lessons are intended to give her the skills necessary to continue this work on her own. But without that “spark,” lessons would function only as impositions upon her freedom—and she would respond as any child or adult should, rebelling against this burden.

This contemplative posture of receptivity necessitates a different kind of pace in the classroom, perhaps, one more appropriate to the monastery than the modern-day schoolhouse. In many educational milieus in late modernity, the presumption is that the teacher’s primary responsibility is to do as much as possible within the allotted classroom time. Curricula are chock-full of learning objectives and activities, all intended to prepare the child for flourishing later in life. But an essential dimension of education is forgotten here: the need to slow down, to wonder, and therefore to first behold the gift that is being proposed in the educational act.

The classroom is not first a place of work or labor but of wonder. True happiness for all creatures is grounded in this wonder, in the leisure to first receive the world as that which is graciously given rather than imposed upon the will. As Josef Pieper wrote in his classic, Happiness and Contemplation:

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the harried elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of the workaday busyness.[2]

The young child and the adolescent alike will indeed be expected to spend much of their lives in labor. But the classroom, especially in a classical setting, should be a different kind of space. It should be marked by the medicine of leisure, inviting teacher and student alike into a mutual wondering at the wonder-filled gift of existence.

This monastic disposition of contemplation is a prophetic assault against the enforced busyness and speed of late modernity. For the child, education becomes an underlining of their dignity as a creature who is first receptive: knowledge begins not through force but that philosophical question par excellence, “What is it?” Likewise, the educator ceases to be some agent of the state, training a future generation of young people whose telos is economic production. The teacher is a co-participant in fostering wonder, of creating festive classrooms infused with material worth beholding for the student and educator alike.

For this reason, the exclusion of screens from these environments—especially for the young child—should be the norm rather than the exception. As the media theorist Anton Barba Kay has described, “Each medium . . . embodies a standard of rhetorical authority. It proposes itself to you in terms that shape your habits of mind, according to the tacit measure of an ‘ideal’ audience measure (as listener, reader, or user).”[3] The screen, especially the digital devices of late modernity, foster dispositions that militate against wonder. We scroll the internet or TikTok feeds, not stopping to behold but consuming information as we move along. We do so privately, not as a wonder-filled community, but as those who are each beholding a private universe unfold before our eyes.

The media appropriate to a contemplative, receptive education will necessitate the exercise of a communal slowness. The book, especially in conversation, slows us down. Words can only be read slowly, discussion can only unfold at the pace of human conversation and thought. Likewise, the environment of the classroom is integral here. It will be marked by occasional silence. The student’s attention will not be directed toward something novel every seven minutes or less. Likewise, a contemplative education, one would hope, recognizes that there are more things in the created order than books (despite what my growing library says). The beauty of creation must also be included in a curriculum: students must spend time outside, beholding and wondering at what they see. They should look upon beautiful works of art, letting their sight be formed to see more than what is initially visible.

A Contemplative Posture of Pondering

The human person is made to wonder at the world, but education does not cease there. Eventually, each of us must learn to make a judgment: not only is it worth looking at, but is it true? And if it is true, what are the consequences for me?

It is here that education in modernity is especially undignified. Most students have been formed to think about education as the reproduction of the teacher’s thought. Assessments are designed for the student to parrot back what the teacher said in class. My own undergraduates flourish in this sickly model of education: if I said that Augustine says marriage is ultimately about friendship, then the purpose of any assessment is to say precisely what I, the educator, said about Augustine. But such assessments allow the students to distance themselves from the pursuit of truth. It does not matter if the proposal is true, it simply matters (for the assessment) that the student can say what I said. And since I possess the power as the instructor, what I say is true.

Now, this all might make a classical educator rather uncomfortable. After all, classical education curates great works of literature and the development of ideas in a way that allows the student to take up a certain posture toward reality. That is, to know that truth is possible, and the curriculum proposes such truth to the student. The student, in some sense, must presume the authority of the parent (who sent them to this school), the curriculum (as designed by the school), and the educator (who embodies this wisdom in their own life) if the education is to have a salutary effect upon the life of the mind. Otherwise, the entire school falls apart.

But integral to the model of any classical education is dialogue. It is not simply the great work of literature or the ideas that matter. It is the voice of the student and educator alike wrestling with the material, seeking to know and understand what is proposed in the text or idea alongside one another.

A professor of mine once told me that to think through the idea of any text or concept requires the same amount of thought that the original thinker performed. You have not yet discovered the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas by being able to parrot his five ways to “prove” the existence of God. Rather, you have only mastered what is proposed when you have begun to think like St. Thomas. You must enter his stream of thought, ponder what he is up to in those proofs.

This kind of pondering, what we might even call critical inquiry, is what the educator Luigi Giussani meant by encountering tradition. Without tradition, the young person has no capacity to set out in the discovery of truth. He or she is bereft, striving to understand what is true without any story or narrative to make sense of reality. He writes in his The Risk of Education:

Tradition serves as a sort of “explanatory hypothesis of reality” for the young person. No discovery can be made—that is, no new step may be taken, no contact with reality may be generated by the person—except through a set idea of possible meanings. . . . Fundamentally the working hypothesis gives people certainty about the positivity of their own endeavors. . . . This allows for the marvelous eruption of discoveries, the marvelous succession of steps and chain of connections that characterize the development, or education, of a being. . . . “Introduction to the total reality” cannot occur without some idea of meaning that the individual in formation considers to be sufficiently solid, intense, and sure.[4]

Classical education takes the time to contemplatively ponder this tradition, to offer this solid grounding to the young person. But this offer is always dialogical. The student has the freedom to accept or reject the proposal that is being offered. The risk of a dignified education is the freedom that the student possesses to say yes or no to the proposal.

That freedom to ponder, to ask about the truth of what is being offered, is the difference between indoctrination and education. The former is the kind of anti-humane propaganda that often passes for curricula in college or university settings. A former student of mine once took a course in sociology on marriage and family. The professor taught, despite evidence that exists to the contrary, that happy marriages have no benefits for the flourishing of the child. The student wanted to write an essay arguing a contrary position to the professor, but she was told that any contrary position was wrong. Such positions were simply wrong, and therefore, any student who challenged the professor would receive a lower grade. That is indoctrination into ideology, certainly not education into truth.

A contemplative education grounded in a dialogical pondering upholds the dignity of the student by refusing to indoctrinate. The writings of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Teresa of Avila are worth reading because they present truth. They are not entirely true (what Christian thinker has mastered the totality of reality in a sufficient manner?). The intelligent student will have critiques. But they present a dimension of truth, which any wise person should wrestle with if they are to become pursuers of the truth themselves. It is never enough to say that something is worth reading because it is a “great book.” Rather, a book is great because it presents a facet of the truth essential to human flourishing. And knowing the truth can set you free. If the proposal about human life offered by great thinkers from the past is true, then it changes the meaning of my life here and now. To learn that the human person is made for happiness, and that happiness consists of contemplation, reorients my future. I cannot pursue any dimension of my life in the same way if that proposal is true. All of this is taken up in the great work of pondering the truth in education.

It is this dialogical seeking of the truth in community with the past (the tradition as proposed), the present (my life as receiver of the truth), and the future (what this truth might mean for me as I continue to live) that constitutes the contemplative and in fact prophetic nature of pondering in a classical education. Josef Pieper in his essay, “The Philosophical Act,” describes philosophy as useless only in the sense that “philosophical knowledge is not legitimized by its usefulness or usableness, or by virtue of its social function, or with reference to the ‘common need.’”[5] We study great works of literature or mathematical proofs not because one day we will need to do so as laborers. Such an assumption reduces every man or woman to their career. Yes, human beings should be able to pursue (one day) meaningful work. But they should pursue this work in a way that each person, no matter their career, has become a seeker of truth. They ask questions, often critical or discerning ones, that unveil the various manipulations of political or cultural propaganda. This is a vocation of every person whether they attend Harvard, a local community college, or enter a trade upon graduation from high school.

A Catholic education—whether classical or not—must inculcate this contemplative habit of pondering as a service to the polis. You could say, right now, that we abide in a post-truth society, one where truth has been substituted for a politics of power. Because there is nothing transcendent, nothing except the human actors who must win no matter the cost, then all that remains is a violent rhetoric that manipulates persons for the sake of winning. Truth is for those who do not want to win—it matters more that the polls say that people think a certain way than if that way of thinking is true. A contemplative education of pondering inoculates against and empowers graduates to seek and pursue the truth. It is always worth asking the question, in conversation with our neighbor, “But is it true? And if so, what does it mean to me?” Again, this is a slower education, one incompatible with the kind of things measured by standardized tests. But it is one necessary for the flourishing of a culture of life in our own day.

A Contemplative Posture of Love

The most distressing thing that an educator may notice in a student is the disappearance of desire in the student’s eyes. In my milieu, where assessments with grades are often normative, this manifests itself as an exclusive concern with assessment. Students are not interested in studying theology because it is worth knowing, because it can shape and reshape what the student desires. They must study theology; it is a requirement. And therefore, if they receive a B+ on an essay, they are interested not in improvement for its own sake. They do not care that exercising excellence in composition is a worthwhile endeavor. No, they want an A. They want an A, because they need all the As they can obtain, if they are to pursue whatever comes next in their lives. They have come to see their worth primarily in terms of assessments. I am worthwhile as a person because I have received As.

Of course, the opposite case is also normal enough for a teacher. You meet a student who has given up because they cannot get As. Since the A is a virtual impossibility, why try to study at all? Disciplinary problems tend to emerge from such students, who no longer understand their dignity as rational, imaginative, or creative persons. They do not measure up to the assessments given, meaning that they do not measure up. What is the point in trying?

In both cases, everything about school becomes laborious for such students, even if they are excelling. I often ask my undergraduates, how many of them love the scholastic rather than extracurricular dimensions of their education. Around 75% of them admit that they have antipathy for the educational environment, that they are only in college because they need a credential for whatever comes next. If they could, they would go directly into a career, but they cannot. So, they are taking this required theology course, enduring this kind of study until they get to work.

All of this is a mark of an anti-humane education, one that has confused the classroom for the mechanism of the factory. The students know that they are part of some economy of exchange where if they respond well to the various assessments, then they receive in exchange a credential that will allow them to succeed. Teachers too succumb to this paradigm. They perform in a pro forma way their responsibilities as educators, eventually coming to view the students as enemies. If only they cared, my job would be great. But since they do not care, what is the benefit of giving too much of myself to this work? What is the least I can do to get by? Educational settings eventually become places of profound unhappiness.

Catholic education, especially in a classical setting, must offer another way. The heart of the classroom is the contemplative virtue of love. We do not often think about love as contemplative. But as Josef Pieper writes contemplation (whether earthy or heavenly in its object of devotion) is always grounded in:

The loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world. The common element is an approach whose impetus bursts forth from the core of man’s being, feeds on the energy of man’s whole nature, and carries all the powers of that nature along in its dynamic movement. Within that common element the intrinsic force of the craving for happiness is united with the data of all the senses, with the play of the imagination, with the insights of reason, and with faith and the supernatural New Life. . . . Without this love directed toward this object, there is no true contemplation. Love alone makes it possible for contemplation to satiate the human heart with the experience of supreme happiness.[6]

The classroom is contemplative, therefore, when it is full of love. Love, here, means not a subjective affection that any of us feels—I like math or geography. Rather, love means self-gift. We might even be courageous enough to use the term sacrifice: a contemplative education is a sacrificial one.

What do I mean? True sacrifice is always a matter of gift. The student who discovers a love of books gives all of him or herself into the study of such literature, even when this study is difficult. I certainly remember, when first studying Latin in high school, how often I struggled with translation. But I had fallen in love with the material, and therefore, the translation of even the most difficult of texts became a delight. Likewise, the educator who cares for her students sets up within the classroom a space of communion: between text and student, between student and student, between teacher and student. So many of my colleagues find themselves annoyed by the task of grading. It is a burden that must be endured. But what if one saw this work in another way? Grading not as a mechanical assessment of a student’s thought but offering the gift of attention to the student, perhaps the most important thing that a mature adult can give to a young person.

It is here that the use of artificial intelligence becomes an egregious assault upon the contemplative, loving space of the classroom. If a student turns in an essay with AI, that student is not giving over the self in the assignment. A gift is not being offered at all—the student and teacher relationship has become a mere exchange. The same educator, who now must view the student’s work with suspicion, perpetuates the same logic. The student is the “other” who must be caught. Or worse, rather than give feedback of substance to the assignment, the teacher commits the same transgression—relying on AI to offer feedback.

The solution to this problem, as so many others in the educational milieu, cannot be reduced to developing ethical guidelines. Yes, those much exist. But what is needed is a reclamation of the festive quality of education. Education is always more about festivity than force. As Pieper, a frequent interlocutor throughout this essay, notes, true festivity is always grounded in loving recognition of the gift that is received and given. The presence of worship, therefore, in the Catholic or Christian school is not ancillary to the curriculum. Again, it is the prophetic introduction of a transcendent love into all that the student and teacher do. The Eucharistic gaze and reception at Mass is a doxological act, a profession that I am not my own—and therefore, I need Jesus Christ to come to me, to complete me. This liturgical way of being, founded in a love that I cannot create but can only receive, becomes defining of every dimension of the school. Every act of bending the knee, of worship, underlines that before else we are made for gift. And it reveals the meaning of all education: we are created as receivers of a gift that surpasses all human understanding, but if we look lively in the present, we can begin to see the presence of that gift even here.

Conclusion: Contemplation and Dignity

An education into human dignity, as this essay proposes, does more than raise awareness about the culture of death of St. John Paul II and the technocratic paradigm of Pope Francis. Instead, it offers a contemplative education intended to foster the dignity of each student, teacher, parent, and administrator in a school. Slowing down, pondering truth, and loving this search may not seem like the kind of exercises that will end abortion, the death penalty, or the wars that disrupt human society. But if the culture of death is defined by efficiency, an inhumane reduction of the human person to a machine, then developing contemplative habits necessary for human happiness in the school is the beginning of developing a culture of life. Perhaps, among educational apostolates, the most prophetic thing we might do as people of faith in a late modern context addicted to speed and control is to look, think, and love. Such an education, especially in a Catholic milieu, should be available to every person created in the image and likeness of God who desires it.

EDITORAL NOTE: This essay was originally a lecture given as the inaugural Cultura Vitae Lecture for the Chesterton Academy of St. Scholastica. It was delivered at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, IN.

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