"What Are Christians For?" 4.0

Chapter 5 of "What Are Christians For? Living Together at the End of the World," The Unmaking of the Real: Wonder Among the Institutions, fits more neatly into Jake Meador's published oeuvre. In other words, he's back to channeling Wendell Berry. Which is a good thing. (Earlier posts in this series here, here, here, and here.)

"Over the course of the modern era ... [the] experience of being vulnerable and yet still belonging in the world has been eroded." In the relatively distant past, the psychological effects of the recognition of the frailty of human were, to some extent, offset by the family and larger communities in which many people were born. Thankfully, Meador doesn't turn too deeply to a nostalgia. After all, there was disease, destruction, and death aplenty before the twentieth century.

Instead of a longing for a imagined enchanted past, Meador points to specific loss that characterizes many Americans: the loss of a "sense of wonder as they encounter God's world." In characterizing the sense of wonder, Meador recounts growing up in the vicinity of Lincoln, Nebraska. Like my own, Meador's childhood was spent exploring the physical world away from dominating media, whether analog or digital. For Meador, "these experiences expanded our imaginations, which is to say, they enlarged our idea of what the world was, what we could do in it, and the pleasure it could give us."

These sorts of experiences were never true of all children in all times, of course. But Meador takes an interesting tack when he addresses the source of our current estrangement from the created order. Complementing Carl Trueman's intellectual history, Meador locates the problem not in the world of ideas but in the social structures of institutions. "Many institutions have become the chief means by way which the divide between people and the world is maintained and even reinforced." Drawing from the writings of Ivan Illich, Meador identifies the cause of misdirection of institutions in two stages:

The first watershed comes when a new technology emerges and produces a rapid and significant improvement in quality of life ... But then a second watershed comes when the original goal is lost and the technology or institution become self-referential, judged only by how well it serves its own ends.

I have addressed the effects of institutionalization in connection with the business firm and the institution of the corporate form in several posts (try here and here). Meador in this chapter looks to the connection between wonder and the form of the institutions of contemporary education:

Students in America will receive a standardized curriculum and a standardized reading list (consisting almost entirely of textbooks). We are taught that the purpose of our education is to equip us to pass standardized tests ... So, educational institutions are no longer evaluated according to whether their students graduate with a love of learning, a delight in the world, or a desire to cultivate their minds. They are, rather, judged by test scores, graduation rates, and, for colleges, job placement rates.

Or, as others put it, the current institutions of learning in America are the result of a managerial approach to education. 

But what's to be done? Montessori schools for everyone? A Great Books program? Meador doesn't say, at least in this chapter.