Author: Justin D. Klassen

Educating for Friendship

How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?

This spring, I took a class on a field trip to the main campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, a community of Catholic women whose charism includes a call to live sustainably and work for environmental justice. Some of our course texts highlighted the natural world as an emerging source of spirituality among nonreligious young people in the US, and I wanted students to see that many traditional religious communities find God in nature, too. The question was how today’s “nones” might resonate with, well, nuns.

On a beautiful Saturday in April, we walked the immense campus and heard the Sisters’ attention to the land is rooted in their love of God and all that belongs to God. The following Tuesday, I asked the students what they had learned on the trip. My focus on course content had me looking for evidence of learning in conceptual connections, so when students’ initial responses provided such evidence, I thought “great, objective achieved.” But then someone offered a different sort of comment: “What I really liked is that we were outside walking and talking with each other. I feel like I got to know people. Obviously I’ve seen you guys all semester, but I hadn’t really seen you. Just being together like that is what will stick with me. I learned I should do it more.”

Genuine human connection: another objective achieved! Yet it hadn’t been an explicit objective because, to be honest, the weight I give to conceptual learning often relegates connection and friendship to the periphery. When it happens, wonderful, but it’s not really the goal. How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?

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Saying Yes to Weirdness and Wandering

We are earthlings. Walking the earth is a practice of being who we are. Culturally, however, we are viewed as weird if we befriend birds and listen to the wind and hug trees, or find ourselves in our embodied earthliness rather than in our tech-mediated identity and status.

I always arrive for class five or ten minutes early to set up—log in to the computer, turn on the projector, get my notes arranged, the usual. When I began teaching in 2009, the classroom was generally noisy with student chatter during these minutes. Over the years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, things have grown quieter. Many students now walk into the room with headphones on, looking at their phones. I have to speak loudly just to cut through the silence with my “Okay, let’s get started.” Recently, a student left his earbuds in, and when I asked him to remove them, he told me it made no difference since they were on “transparency mode.”

I get it; I have earbuds, too. I seldom run an errand without entertainment running through my head or go for a walk without a reality buffer. Like my students, and, indeed, like many in this society, I find habits of attention difficult to cultivate. Part of the problem is my trying to remember and practice these intentions alone, while the alternative is backed by corporate interests and the attention-capturing tech they design. As Thomas Merton says, we live in “a world in which [human beings] are dominated by massive organizations and rigid institutions which seek only to exploit them for money and power.” Even when we intentionally use our phones and other technology for felicitous purposes, we are buying into something whose intended aim is indifferent to our happiness.

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Recovering Deep Gladness

When we compel young people to discern a specific career path as early as high school, or encourage them to spend time only on resume-building activities in college, we fail to honor their complete humanity. Instead of asking the question, What’s your major?, we should embrace questions like, What brings you joy?

When I introduce students to Frederick Buechner’s adage about being called to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” I ask them which side of that Venn diagram they think has been underemphasized in their prior learning about vocation. Most often they mention that “the world’s deep hunger” needs more attention. This might be true, or maybe they think it’s what I want to hear. Perhaps they have been told so often that they are part of a self-centered generation that it has made them reluctant to seek their own gladness or name it as valuable. Recently, however, an insightful minority report stood out. A student responded that they might have been told to focus on themselves, but they sure haven’t been encouraged to seek deep gladness. If anything, they’ve been told to focus on themselves by building their resumes.

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Learning and Living Through Awe

By calling us to alertness without first asking us how credible we are in the eyes of the world, how important we are in the various hierarchies with which we are afflicted, awe is nothing less than an affirmation of our immeasurable dignity, our worthiness to grow in wisdom.

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In his recent article in Christian Scholar’s Review, Paul Waddell suggests that every human being is called to live wisely and well. In practical terms, responding to this shared calling means becoming “skillfully attuned, each day, to the myriad ways in which we are summoned out of ourselves in response to the beauty, loveliness, and goodness of the created order—as well as in response to its suffering and affliction.” To me, this sounds at once true, simple, and utterly countercultural, as perhaps simple and true things often are.  

Waddell’s account of growth in wisdom certainly runs counter to what many people these days expect a college education to accomplish. Professors and university administrators are asked by pundits, legislators, parents, and prospective students about placement rates, career-readiness, and trending programs, but not very often about what it means to live well. I personally can’t recall any conversations in which outsiders to the university have asked me if we give students the capacity to be skillfully attuned to beauty and suffering. And the truth is that in an atmosphere of precarity, many of us might prefer simply to focus on “giving them what they want,” which seems to be a clear and comfortable path to a lucrative credential.

Except that we do still talk about learning, and I want to propose that the necessary connection between learning and awe is the reason that college still can and should produce the kind of attunement to calling that Waddell talks about. In fact, if we do learning right, it must at least potentially give students the capacity for living wisely and well.

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