After reading Peggy Fletcher Stack’s and Gordon Monson’s recent Tribune articles on BYU’s tightening restrictions for their faculty, I am reminded of a passage from Parker J. Palmer’s “To Know As We Are Known.” Palmer sounds to me like something Joseph Smith might have agreed with:
“A spirituality of ends wants to dictate the desirable outcomes of education in the life of the student. It uses the spiritual tradition as a template against which the ideas, beliefs, and behaviors of the student are to be measured. The goal is to shape the student to the template by the time his or her formal education concludes.
“But that sort of education never gets started; it is no education at all. Authentic spirituality wants to open us to truth — whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox. By this understanding, the spirituality of education is not about dictating ends. It is about examining and clarifying the inner sources of teaching and learning, ridding us of the toxins that poison our hearts and minds.
“For example, an authentic spirituality of education will address the fear that so often permeates and destroys teaching and learning. It will understand that fear, not ignorance, is the enemy of learning, and that fear is what gives ignorance its power. It will try to root out our fear of having our ignorance exposed and our orthodoxies challenged — whether those orthodoxies are religious or secular. A spirituality of education will ground us in the confidence that our search for truth, and truth’s search for us, can lead to a new life beyond the death of our half-truths and narrow concepts.”
Gail L. Porritt, Draper
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