Why Due Dates and Failing Grades Are Necessary in a Fallen World
Every teacher has, at some point, longed for education without discipline or coercion—but we are sometimes unaware what it is that we’re actually longing for
There is a tension that gnaws at every teacher’s soul: How can I let learning happen freely and joyfully while at the same time holding students accountable?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I’ve caught myself thinking more than once, if I could teach my students without the pressure of grades and due dates and quizzes and final examinations?
And yet, I know from experience that, without the pressures of due dates and grades, even the best-intended students fall behind and sometimes fail to learn anything at all. Sometimes, this is due to laziness or lack of motivation. Far more often, it’s a combination of time pressures and family responsibilities that eclipse their capacities to process the information.
According to Augustine of Hippo, this tension is unavoidable in a fallen world.
“The free play of curiosity is a more powerful spur to learning than fear-ridden coercion,” Augustine admits. At first, it sounds as if Augustine is about to urge the teachers in his readership to stop disciplining their students—but that’s not where Augustine goes.
This recognition that learning happens best without coercion does not result, for Augustine, in a rejection of such discipline. Instead, he points out that “coercion checks the free play of curiosity in accordance with [God’s] laws.” Discipline helps to draw students back “from poisonous pleasures that lead us away from [God],” Confessions, 1:14 (23).
If I have understood Augustine rightly in this paragraph, here’s what he is suggesting: In an unfallen world, we would have learned naturally, in freedom and pure curiosity. But we live in a a sin-infected cosmos in which nature has been distorted in ways that are unnatural. In a fallen world, the freedom of unfettered curiosity would not lead us to learning; it draws us into a deathly pursuit of self-serving pleasures. At this point, Augustine is recalling his struggles to learn Greek and contrasting it with the ease with which he learned Latin, but the larger pedagogical point remains the same, regardless of the subject matter.
And so, in a fallen world, discipline remains a necessary component of pedagogy—but there was once a world where this was not so.
Yearning for the Pedagogy of a World that Is Yet to Come
So what should we make of these words from the North African bishop of Hippo?
It is not wrong for a teacher to yearn for instruction that requires no coercion.
When we do so, however, we should recognize what it is that we are actually longing for.
We are aching for the pedagogy of a world that once was in Eden and of a better world that is yet to come.
“We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it,” J.R.R. Tolkien famously pointed out. “Our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.”
That is as true of teaching as it is of anything else.
The same principles could be used to explain the concept of the necessity for a winner and loser in a ball game in a fallen world. This new nonsense that everybody's a 'winner,' cannot be defended as there can be no true satisfaction to our inner self without the aspect of "who won?" As sinful creatures even our play cannot be without taint.