education as adventure<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCourage is often misunderstood as the absence of fear. The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz<\/em> believes that if he only has courage, he won\u2019t be afraid of anything. Correctly reasoning from a mistaken premise, he assumes that his fear proves that he lacks courage (which turns out, in the long run, to be false). But courage is not rightly apprehended in the absence of fear. In fact it really can only ever be tested in the presence<\/em> of fear. It is not courage to undergo a risk you don\u2019t perceive as one: it\u2019s just obliviousness. Courage is deciding<\/em> that fear is not going to determine your behavior. The coward, by contrast, has decided<\/em> to accept a guaranteed mediocrity in exchange for the freedom from risk. Most people do that. The pain comes anyway, but without the achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMost situations calling for courage don\u2019t present life-and-death risks; usually one is risking some sort of pain, but not death. And yet life itself is <\/em>what is on the line. The life lived courageously \u2014 whether marked by conspicuous success or not \u2014 has value and purpose; the cautious accumulation of safe choices, however, will constitute a life barely lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt may seem odd to talk about courage in the educational adventure, but I think it is real, even if the costs are seldom reckoned clearly. It requires courage to tackle a subject one knows nothing about, and to face the possibility of failure. It takes courage to take a tough course that might blemish an otherwise \u201cperfect\u201d transcript. In my time as a teacher I have seen students or their parents (more often the latter) cave in to their fears. Rather than coping with the reality that they might<\/em> not succeed, or that success might only come after some painful hard work, they choose to demur, and so make their failure certain. \u201cWhat you say is all right for exceptional students,\u201d some parents have told me, \u201cbut my kids are not really exceptional.\u201d Oddly, I usually thought the kids were<\/em> exceptional, or could be. But never mind \u2014 they had decided<\/em> not to be, and they lived down to those expectations. Nothing sells like defeatism.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf one does not strive to achieve \u2014 not so much for the sake of being exceptional as for the intrinsic value of the thing being sought \u2014 one will surely collect quite an assortment of forfeitures. Our society cultivates, indulges, and excuses cowardice at every level, and even vilifies people for having the backbone to stand up for what they think is right, in the tacit belief that if we don\u2019t hold others to account for their cowardice, they won\u2019t hold us to account for it either. Even holding out for accountability is considered \u201celitism\u201d; timorously moving with the herd claims justification by proximity: \u201ceveryone is doing it\u201d. The scriptures say otherwise. In the parable it shows up as burying one\u2019s talents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, there are reasons other than cowardice to stop studying something, and I don\u2019t mean to suggest that everyone who ever dropped a subject was a loser for doing so. A genuinely tone-deaf person probably won\u2019t benefit from the study of music, and, having found that out, is well advised to move on. But such fundamental physical or mental incapacities are relatively rare. Lack of courage \u2014 call it gumption, commitment, or drive, if you will \u2014 is far the more common cause of failure, because one can achieve it from any point on the scale of potential. The race to the bottom is fast and easy, and one can feel good about not being in absolute last place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s not about place: it\u2019s not about comparing oneself with others. In the perspective of the church, saints are heroes of the faith. We must resist the temptation to sequester them as a class different from ourselves. One of the more treacly hymns of the twentieth century in the Anglican tradition is \u201cI Sing a Song of the Saints of God\u201d by Lesbia Scott (1929). It has survived despite its rather precious phrasing, I think, because at bottom it conveys a gritty and uncompromising theological truth. The first verse winds up: \u201cthey were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not about exceptionalism or elitism. It\u2019s not about being better than anyone else. It\u2019s about faithfulness, and about boldly turning our talents to good account (talents taken literally or figuratively: what we\u2019ve been lent for use in God\u2019s service, not given as unearned keys to self-satisfaction). They are not our own in the first place. We are charged with using them, investing them, as best we may. We are not even required to be successful \u2014 certainly not in the jaundiced eye of the world. We are required to be faithful<\/em> \u2014 and that means using our gifts courageously, not burying them. Whether we strive or not, we will all encounter the sting of failure; we might as well face that fact. As T. E. Lawrence says in Lawrence of Arabia<\/em>, \u201cThe trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.\u201d Hurt will always come; failure can be intermittent or constant. Only those who do not risk are sure to fail all the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I will take the Ring,\u2019 he said, \u2018though I do not know the way.\u2019 \u2014 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, \u201cThe Council of Elrond\u201d Frodo setting off on a nearly hopeless trip to Mordor or the knight taking up the quest for the Holy Grail are, intentionally or not, setting out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,7,32,48,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character-formation","category-edu","category-games","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}