Identifying my problem with religious education

I have always had a problem with religious education.

Since I was a boy--as far back as I can go: the flannelgraph and the coloring in pictures and the whole thing--religious education felt flat. I felt like teachers were either keeping information from us or were well-meaning idiots. (No lack of ego on my part.) So today, when I think of curricula that I have seen, I cluck at a lack of depth or the maudlin perspective. Jesus is your friend. Jacob trusted God, so you should too. I am over-critical, it is true. But I don't mean to be. Mine is a criticism of love. What I want is pedagogical richness. I want something that feels as true and alive as its very subject. My criticism arises from some hidden fault. Lucky me, it is hidden no more. Ethical philosopher Agnes Callard has named it.

In a piece titled "Against Advice" in May's edition of The Point, Callard uncovered a subtle problem in the giving of advice. Her subject are the how to do it tips that artists are always giving out to inquiring fans. Authors like Margaret Atwood are always asked to give out the secrets to writing. And they do share tips. But, says Collard, it is all bland, e.g. write every day. It is "empty and canned." None of it gets at the nub of what makes Atwood a great writer. And it isn't as if such lights are being selfish. The advice is sincerely given, and yet falls flat. Why?

Callard's answer is that there is a kind of type mismatch going on between what is being asked for, advice, and what would truly need to be given, which is something more akin to coaching. And because of that mismatch, the whole exchange deflates. What is needed, then, is a clear understanding of the types of language at play.

"Let me make a three-way terminological distinction between “advice,” “instructions” and “coaching.” You give someone instructions as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some (unspecified) further goal--here is how someone might get to the library, if for some reason she wanted to go there; this is the way to put toner in a printer, etc. Coaching, by contrast, effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.

"Instructions make you better at doing what you (independently) valued, whereas coaching makes you better at valuing—-it cues you in to what’s important, at an intellectual or physical or emotional level. Coaching takes many forms—-teaching philosophy is coaching, and I see my therapist as a coach of sorts—-but one thing it always requires is the kind of time-investment that generates a shared educational history. Coaching is personal."

In other words, the would-be-writer sounds like she is asking Atwood an instructional question: What can I do to become a better writer? But she is really asking for a kind of transformation of the sort that made Atwood herself Margaret Atwood. Though Collard doesn't say it, what she is discussing is a mismatch of tekne, instrumental knowledge, for arete, mastery gained from lived experience.

"Instrumental knowledge is knowledge of universals: whenever you have an X, it will get you a Y. I can give you such knowledge without our having any robust connection to one another. Knowledge of becoming, by contrast, always involves a particularized grasp of where the aspirant currently stands on the path between total cluelessness and near-perfection. What are her characteristic weaknesses; where does she already excel; what nudges could she use? Only someone who knows her knows this. An aspirational history is full of minute corrections, dead ends, backtracking, re-orientation and random noise. It is as idiosyncratic, odd and particular as the human being herself."

The needy questioner is unsatisfied because what she is asking for is real contact and what she gets is advice. "The myth of advice is the possibility that we can transform one another with the most glancing contact." She doesn't need advice, she needs a teacher. In the words of a youth minister I heard once, "Sometimes you have to get in the car." That is what she wants, and, of course, the Atwoods of the world can't give that.

As a subject of religious education, I have always been that fan. I haven't asked how to become a writer, but how to become a Christian. That is the interrogation I have always leveled at poor Sunday School teachers and the like. And my expectations always produce a type mismatch. What I want is a sensei or a jedi master, but all that formal programs can give me is advice, and that is the problem.