Keep Silence and Hear

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV writes that a school should be a place where the young learn to “seek and love the truth.” He worries about an educational culture in which an “incessant flow of information” displaces “research, reflection and discernment.” His prescription is strikingly traditional: Education needs rhythms of “silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis.” Leo does not oppose critical thought. He explicitly names its cultivation as one of the purposes parents rightly expect schools to serve. But judgment appears as the culmination of practices that precede it. We have sophisticated vocabularies for reading as a skill and as an exercise in criticism, but a thinner one for what happens before them: what it means to encounter a book that should be understood, received, and internalized before it is judged.

The problem is not that students have opinions. Good education should eventually make students’ judgments more independent. The problem arises when independence is confused with immediacy. A child who has barely encountered an argument gains little freedom from being asked at once whether he agrees with it; he has been invited to judge before acquiring very much to judge. Jewish civilization has wrestled with this problem for centuries because its intellectual life has been organized around inherited texts. Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) begins its account of learning with a revealing verb: “Moses received [kibel] the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua.” Something precedes Moses. Before he transmits, interprets, or teaches, he receives. The point is theological but also pedagogical. A student does not enter the world as its first reader. He arrives in the middle of languages, histories, arguments, and books that were made before him.

Jewish learning, however, has never understood reception as passivity. A passage in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot offers a telling sequence. Playing on the biblical phrase hasket u-shema Yisrael—“keep silence and hear, O Israel”—the rabbis distinguish two stages of learning: first listen, then analyze and clarify. Rava, the fourth-century Babylonian sage, states the principle more directly: One should first study Torah and gain expertise in it, and only afterward analyze it deeply. The rabbis were not opposed to criticism; they were opposed to premature criticism. Nor did receiving mean encountering a text vaguely. Deuteronomy commands parents concerning the words of Torah: veshinantam, “you shall teach them diligently.” The Talmud hears in the Hebrew root an association with sharpness: The words should be sharp in one’s mouth, ready to be recalled when questioned. Memory, fluency, precision, and repetition are not alternatives to thought. They supply its material.

The rabbis developed a vivid vocabulary for the distinction. In the Talmudic tractate Horayot, Rav Yosef is called “Sinai,” distinguished by extraordinary command of received sources, while Rabba is called an “uprooter of mountains,” distinguished by incisive analytical power. Asked which should take precedence, the sages answer: “Sinai is preferable,” because “everyone requires the owner of the wheat”—the one who possesses the intellectual provisions upon which reasoning depends. Horayot is discussing scholarly precedence, not modern curriculum, but its metaphor offers educators a useful warning. Schools can become enamored of producing uprooters of mountains before students possess much wheat. Analysis requires something upon which to work; originality requires an inheritance from which to depart; judgment requires knowledge secure enough to distinguish an author’s argument from one’s reaction to it.

This is where some apparently old-fashioned classroom practices deserve reconsideration. Before asking a seventh grader whether he agrees with a biblical speech, make sure he knows who is speaking and what came before it. Before asking a student to critique Lincoln, let enough of Lincoln’s language enter his memory that he can recognize its rhythms and arguments. Let poems be recited. And let children sometimes copy worthy words by hand. At a recent Tikvah conference on Western civilization at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Judith Ballan argued that cursive requires “continuous motion, sequencing, and planning” and trains “fine motor control, visual discrimination, and sustained attention.” More importantly for education, she observed, it “rewards care and precision” and can habituate students to “standards of excellence.”

That argument suggests that the disappearance of cursive is about more than penmanship. Writing can itself become a form of reception. We ordinarily teach handwriting with sentences selected for convenience. But why not sometimes select them for their worth? A child learning a new hand might slowly write, “Honor your father and your mother,” or “You shall not bear false witness.” A student encountering Rome might form the words veni, vidi, vici—“I came, I saw, I conquered”—and then consider the human ambition compressed within them. The point is not that copying produces assent. It is that before students are perpetually summoned to express themselves, they might occasionally inhabit someone else’s language letter by letter. As Ballan notes of the Declaration of Independence in its unmistakable hand, a written work can possess beauty as well as content. The hand slows reception, gives language physical form, and allows memorable words to become, quite literally, embodied learning.

This suggests an order of intellectual operations: reception, possession, interrogation, judgment, and only then something deserving the name of originality. The student is neither sovereign nor servile. He receives something he did not make, learns it closely enough to possess it, questions and argues with it, and eventually may add something of his own. Leo has done a service by placing the formation of the human person back at the center of our educational conversation. Jewish civilization can offer an old intuition to that conversation: Before we teach the young to stand over every book as judges, we must teach them how to stand before a worthy one as students.