Conversation Starter 20 | The End of Rhetoric with Andrew Black

In this Conversation Starter, Andrew anticipates festivity, thinks about Capstone, and argues that the end of education is not the power to control but is instead the freedom to love.

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Transcript

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Dear listener, Christ is risen. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. And in this happy first week of Easter, the Academy will spend its time rejoicing at resurrection feasts at North, South, and Midtown campuses. The sight of children in their Sunday best, the smell of ham, the crackling enthusiasm of a merry gathering will electrify the air, as it does every year, as we celebrate the greatest of the great feasts. Indeed, the redemption of the world by the death and resurrection of Jesus. And in this Easter tide, we turn too to the final focus of this year's podcast season, to the Academy's portrait of a graduate and to the capstone imperatives. To begin, today's starter, the end of rhetoric. What is an education at the Rhetoric School all about? At the Academy we have a few ways of answering this question. We call these ways our portrait of a graduate. And in years past, at the beginning of our capstone class, I would point seniors especially to the four pillars that comprise it. What has this education been for? I ask. Their answers are often surprising, as various as the backgrounds from which these students come, as loaded with sincerity and cynicism and confusion and clarity as anyone might expect from a room full of seventeen and eighteen year olds. Yet we conclude this discussion with these four pillars, and focus especially on the fourth quote our graduates joyfully embody a cruciform vision of all of life. But this embodiment is the end of a rhetoric student's education. It is the highest form of rhetoric. Generally speaking, the unique task of rhetoric for the Christian student is the difficult task of attractive articulation rising from the habit and gift of charity. In other words, through imitating Christ creatively, we draw others to him and thereby to the unity that is founded in obedience and sustained by a life of love. Importantly, this is not exactly what the classical tradition by itself means when it talks about rhetoric. As we learn from our Plato, the ancient art of rhetoric, mastered and taught by the sophists, teaches students how to think critically and to think for themselves, goals often lauded by even very admirable educational institutions today. This classical vision of rhetoric by itself teaches students how to weaponize critical thought in loyalty to the student's individual good. The ancient rhetorician can make the weaker argument appear stronger and will do so and will thereby gain the power to manipulate others, whether by the mechanisms of state or by the social powers on display in school hallways and cafeterias and social media platforms the world over. The student who learns to think critically and to think for herself has gained the power to control her neighbor. Yet, as our portrait suggests, Christian rhetoric is different. Christian rhetoric has, as its goal, not political or social power, but rather the everlasting good of the neighbor in the city of God. So rhetoric as the final stage of the trivium, and capstone as the culmination of an academy education, seeks, like all liberal arts, to liberate each student. And yet it seeks to liberate the student so that she can be bound to her neighbor and to her neighbor's good, in spite of all base desires and selfish preoccupations. Not freedom from constraint, but freedom to choose the path of love, that is to say, the path of Christ. We have all along been seeking to free students so that they can joyfully embody a cruciform vision of all of life. Question one. Question two. When you discuss the reason for going to school, do you discuss freedom as an ultimate end? What kind of freedom? Why? Question three. Is it clear to you that in the Christian imagination, in imitation of our Lord, the highest good of our freedom is a self sacrificing love? Where is this love made visible in our lives and in the education of our children?