The Technicians of Learning

 

I found an old essay on First Things the other day called "The Technicians of Learning," written in the year 2000 by Edward Tingley, a Canadian art historian and philosopher (https://www.firstthings.com/.../08/technicians-of-learning). The title caught my eye because it seemed to describe the role TSTC technical faculty have carved out for themselves. Most of us are not teachers by trade. On the contrary, we are tradesmen hired for a combination of technical skill and willingness to learn how to teach. I am one of these - a tradesman first and a teacher second. As I read on, however, I discovered Dr. Tingley has used this phrase to describe a wholesale failure in the way the academy has understood its purpose and even in how it has defined knowledge and learning. In short, he asserts the accumulation of knowledge displaced the pursuit of education. While that may seem like a distinction without a difference, Tingley understands education as an ongoing engagement with the great questions of civilization, not "a body of knowledge" conferred through training. In fact, Tingley asserts a classical liberal education is "not training" at all, in the sense we train technicians to build networks or fix engines. Training in that sense is "technical knowledge," from the Greek word techne, or technai, which Tingley also calls to describe "productive knowledge." In contrast, he uses the terms "phronesis and sophia" to name "philosophic wisdom and practical wisdom." The Greek word "sophia" means wisdom and forms half of the word philosophia - the love of wisdom. The root word in phronesis is phroneo, which means to think or to understand, (https://biblehub.com/greek/5426.htm) as in Philippians 2:5: "Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus" where the word is phroneite (https://biblehub.com/interlinear/philippians/2-5.htm).

 

Tingeley's contrast between "techne" and "sophia and phronesis" is one I cannot contest. I live at the intersection of those two ways of knowing. On the one hand, I make my living transmitting a body of technical knowledge and fostering technical skill. At TSTC, we are tradesman teaching practical arts. We are proud of that because TSTC exists to address the skills gap. At Perkins, I'm working on a master's degree in divinity, which will most emphatically not make me a master of the theological. At the end of my studies, I won't have all the answers. At most, I'll be equipped to ask better questions and teach the Christian faith more faithfully as a practicing theologian. Tingley argues the liberal arts made the mistake of applying the methods of the hard sciences to themselves, thus reducing learning to knowledge. The university thus became not a accumulation of scholars asking questions but a factory accumulating knowledge, even in fields where methodology misses the point. As I reflect on this, the shift in focus from learning to methods of knowledge seems to stem from an epistemological error. Scholars and academics in the 19th Century concluded the methods by which the hard sciences produced knowledge which others could confirm through experimentation could and should be applied elsewhere. In other words, working from the assumption only the scientific method produces knowledge, they tried to make everything a science, which turned the university on its head. We might ask, from the other side of the 20th Century, whether the Progressive Era lead us anywhere worth going, whether the mechanistic approach to producing knowledge technicians constitutes education, and whether recent college graduates possess either useful "technai" or "phronesis and sophia."

 

I'll grant those answers will vary from school to school and student to student. Some universities seem to be failing in every possible way just now. Other schools aim transparently to produce artisans and technicians. Schools like that seem to be doing better, while public faith in higher education in general slides off a cliff. I wonder however if there is not a balance to be struck between the two ways of knowing. The honest trades all require a certain body of knowledge as well as the practical wisdom to apply such skill appropriately. Is there a way to pursue the formation Tingley argues 19th century theorists like John Henry Newman abandoned so college graduates can hold their technai and sophia together? Is there a way to develop a frame of mind which understands both the value and the limits of various sorts of learning and knowledge?