What Is Essential Is Invisible to the Eye

On Monday, while your children enjoyed a day at home, their teachers were at school. An in-service day may look like a pause in the calendar, but for our faculty it’s one of the fullest days of the year, devoted to the formation of the men and women who stand before your children each morning. That formation has a purpose beyond the teacher himself. We form teachers so that they may form children well. Professional development that loses sight of the student has lost sight of its purpose.

 

Some of Monday was practical. Our faculty spent time deepening their understanding of special education, how our intervention specialists serve students who learn differently and how every classroom teacher shares in that work. A child who struggles deserves a teacher who knows how to reach him.

 

The heart of every in-service day at CLASSICAL, however, is the “faculty read.” Our teachers read a short book or essay drawn from or connected to our curriculum, and then they gather in a classroom to discuss it together, just as our students do. I insist on this because teachers should regularly experience the work they ask of their students. A teacher who has read a difficult passage, offered an interpretation, listened to a colleague, and discovered something he had missed knows again what it means to sit on the other side of the desk. That experience makes us better teachers.

 

This week our faculty read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Mrs. Gleason, our former lead kindergarten teacher, joined us to open the conversation, and after her presentation the faculty broke into small seminar groups.

 

The book is narrated by a pilot stranded in the Sahara after his plane goes down. As a boy he once drew a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant. Every adult who saw it told him it was a hat. In the desert he meets a small boy from a distant asteroid, who asks him, with complete seriousness, to draw a sheep. Over the following days the prince tells his story. He has left behind a single rose, lovely and vain, whom he loved without yet knowing how to love her. On his way to Earth he visited a string of tiny planets, each inhabited by a solitary adult absorbed in some occupation. On Earth he meets a fox, who teaches him the secret he came so far to learn: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

 

Saint-Exupéry wrote a defense of the child’s way of seeing. Children look at the drawing and see the elephant inside the snake. The grown-ups in the book see hats and sums. Aristotle taught that philosophy begins in wonder, and a child arrives at our doors already in possession of it. A school can starve that wonder or feed it. We at CLASSICAL feed it with stories. From the beginning, we’ve relied on stories to form moral character and civic virtue because a story shows a child what goodness looks like long before he can define it.

 

Mrs. Gleason turned our attention to two of the grown-ups the prince meets. The Lamplighter lives on a planet that turns once a minute, and he lights and extinguishes his lamp every minute because those are his orders. The prince admires his faithfulness, yet the man never asks whether the orders still make sense. The Geographer sits at an enormous desk recording mountains and rivers he has never seen. He refuses to record flowers because they are ephemeral, and when the prince learns that his rose is ephemeral, he feels his first pang of regret for having left her.

 

Either figure, Mrs. Gleason warned, is easy for a teacher to become. The Lamplighter is the teacher of routine, faithful to procedure and too busy to ask what the procedure is for. The Geographer is the teacher of information, who knows the whole map of his subject and never leaves his desk to meet the child in front of him. Childhood is ephemeral too, and the teacher who attends only to what is permanent and measurable will miss it entirely.

 

Against both, she set the rose. The prince once came upon a garden of five thousand roses and despaired, thinking his own was ordinary after all. The fox corrected him. His rose was unique because of the time he had spent on her, the hours of watering and listening, and that time had made him responsible for her. Mrs. Gleason asked our teachers to regard each student this way, as the rose entrusted to their keeping and made precious by the attention given to her. Josef Pieper would call such time leisure in the classical sense, attention freely given to what deserves to be loved.

 

That is what an in-service day is for. Our teachers spent Monday reading a children’s book as adults and remembering that the children they teach see what the rest of us have forgotten how to see. They returned to your children’s classrooms this morning, I hope, a little less like the Lamplighter and a little more like the prince, kneeling beside his rose.

 

Torches Up!

Mr. Rose