Education: What Are You Imitating?

Education has a well-known objective: getting knowledge. On a deeper level, education is about learning how to shape one's affections rightly, and about how to make the right choices. In this month's teacher development meeting, we discussed a talk given by James K. A. Smith called "You Are What You Love" (his book here), an idea which encapsulates all educational outcomes. Earlier this week in Logic and Rhetoric School assembly, I shared the following related message to students:

"Humans are followers by nature. Each of us will naturally follow the person or the things we find most attractive. Another way to put this is to say that we all love to imitate. We are copycats. Aristotle said that great art is simply imitation – not just the kind of art that you do when sketching a portrait or building, but the creative art of your job and your life. Our jobs and our lives are either good or bad art depending upon who we are imitating. Two questions arise from this: First, who are you imitating, and second, where is it taking you?

Who are you imitating? If you imitate a rock star, you will become like a rock star – popular and sexy for a brief flash of history, but ultimately enslaved to your own flesh, lonely, and suicidal. If you imitate a great scientist or saint, you will become like the scientist or saint – fruitful, self-disciplined, confident, and glorifying to God. Who are you imitating? You are what you imitate.

Second, where is it taking you? Some of you know the story of lemmings, which are small rodents that live in arctic regions. They are famously known for sometimes following each other off cliffs to their deaths. Away they will go in a long line, one after the other, straight over the edge. They are the rodent version of sheep, following whoever is in front of them. We are like lemmings and like sheep. Is the person we are imitating leading us to death, or to life? Is the interest or obsession that you have leading you to sorrow or to joy? What is its destination? As you imitate, you are on a road. Where does it end? In his mercy, God invites us to imitate him, and to imitate people and things that are like him. His is the straight and narrow path: difficult, but redemptive, and where there is lasting joy."