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Alder (Docility and Authority (Authority (We must distinguish between the…
Alder
Docility and Authority
Saint Thomas
Studiositas inclines a man to be serious and steadfast in the application of his mind to things worth learning.
Discusses the virtue of studiousness and the vice of curiosity. The virtuous pursuit of learning must not only be moderate, but rightly motivated
What he is saying is simply that the weakest ground for affirming a conclusion is the fact that it has been affirmed by another, even if that other be the master of those who know or a father of doctrine.
Aristotle
Gives us two practical rules to guide us in the casuistry of applying moral principles to particular cases of action
If by temperament we tend to be impatient of authority, we should pull ourselves in the direction of subservience, for by so doing we shall be going toward the mean.
If our temperament is of the opposite sort, we should struggle against our reluctance to exercise an independent judgment
In general, it is worse for those who are in the early stages of study to be indocile than subservient, whereas, on the contrary, for those who are mature and who should assume a responsibility of independent judgment proportionate to their competence, it is worse to be subservient.
Authority
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The need for docility arises from the supposition that a student lacks knowledge or the skill to get it and that a teacher, having what the student lacks, can help him.
Docility is needed, therefore, to dispose him to seek and to use such help wisely and well.
If a teacher claims to demonstrate something which the student cannot see at once to be the case, docility requires that the student suspend judgment—neither accept nor reject—and apply his mind studiously to the teacher's words and intentions
Unless there were extrinsic signs of authority, which marked the proper objects of docility, the student would be unable to direct himself properly with respect to available instruction. Such signs are not wanting.
Docility and History
Saint John's Plan
When such critics follow out the implication of the amendment to the St. John's plan, they usually end up by suggesting lecture courses, textbooks, and manuals, devised for putting blinders on the students and leading them along the straight and narrow path to the truth. (This is an abolition of Saint John's Plan
At the opposite extreme is the position, embodied in much of Catholic education, that the shortest way to the truth is the best. Why take the long and devious path that leads through the great books, with all Reforming Education Two Essays on Docility 30 their difficulties and conflicts, if a living teacher can present the right doctrine in lectures supported by textbooks written by himself or his colleagues;
One position, which may be taken by some of the exponents of the St. John's plan, is to make the living teacher merely a liberal artist, merely a dialectician, whose only office is to sharpen the student's wits as a reader of the books. (Alder believes this is not enough)
Students who are not trained in the liberal arts—and apart from the discipline of reading great books they cannot be—are incapable of the activity of being taught
Textbooks and lectures elicit memorization and, with it, instill subservience
Liberal Arts
He must also argue for the truths and against the errors that he himself has found, or finds, in the books he reads with his students. He must be both doctor and docile
To this extent, he must exhibit docility to his students, for only by manifesting it in his own practice of the liberal arts, can he genuinely persuade his students to follow in his footsteps
Error one: errors: the fallacy of supposing that a curriculum which makes the great books the major teachers must completely exclude doctrinal judgments on the part of the minor teacher
Error two: the mistake of making the minor teacher the chief source of doctrine, permitting him to masquerade as a major teacher, usurping an authority not rightly his.
Philosophy
Hence, education in philosophy is a good field for the examination of the relation between docility and history
The philological study of texts, the delineation of affinities between minds separated by centuries, the tracing of streams of influence and divergence—all these things become more important than bare philosophical argument
Philosophical knowledge consists of a set of doctrines which are timelessly true and which, therefore, can be expounded without any regard for the historical accidents of cultural time and place
So long as the means are properly subordinated to their end, no disorder results from the use of historical scholarship as an aid in the reading of great philosophical books