Women’s Work
On Alex Sosler’s “Schools for Philosopher Carpenters”: I enjoyed the issue Educating Humans. But in the essays about and photos of schools teaching in experiential ways – head, hands, and heart – I found it often hard to determine whether girls were included equally with boys. In his conclusion, Alex Sosler, for example, says, “The modern economy was built on the work of hands: agriculture, industry, manufacturing. We’ve shifted toward a head economy: accounting, management, information technology.” What is unacknowledged here is that both economies are in fact built on the largely unpaid work of women in the family and home, as well as on every aspect of paying work. One Mount Academy photo shows a young woman working in the agriculture program, and clearly girls sing in the choir. But no curricular description includes the hands-on work where, in the adult world, women predominate: nursing, medical tech, caretaking, home maintenance, child-rearing, early childhood education, sewing or garment construction, or home nutrition.
Of course, I think girls should be included in all the curricular options that are available, but boys would also benefit as much as girls from the ones that seem not to be offered.
Saving Literature
On Phil Christman’s “The Queen of the Sciences”: As a sincere traditionalist, I agree with your stance of resistance to the false purveyors of progress and their algorithmic mining tools. But I think you fail to recognize how academe has let down the side by surrendering the language of “the true, the beautiful, and the good.” Contemporary literary criticism mirrors the language and mindset of the nihilists mentioned in your essay – no love of literature for its own sake, just exploiting it for some dubious project of social justice in order to allege its usefulness. For this reason I admire the ending of your essay: the refusal to make a “case for the humanities” to the nihilists. When we adopt their language and mindset, we’ve already lost the fight.
Silver Linings
On Benjamin Crosby’s “Why We’re Failing to Pass on Christianity”: Benjamin Crosby’s piece contained some excellent wisdom for (re-)Christianizing those in the twenty-first century who think they already know what the Bible is all about. A distinct but growing category I’m starting to see in my work with Gen Z college students are those who don’t know anything about Christianity (often because their parents kept them away from a faith they had stopped believing in). However, unfamiliar with the negative experiences of their parents, some of these students come to college genuinely curious to learn what the big deal is about Jesus. For them, the “good news” isn’t merely good, it’s truly news they’ve never heard before! They tend to require more basic forms of catechism than those who grew up going to church, but they are also typically more eager to learn since it’s all brand new to them. Our “post-Christian” era certainly has its downsides, but there are some silver linings and unique opportunities as well. I’m grateful for ministers like Rev. Crosby to help show us the way.
Classics and Car Mechanics
On Dhananjay Jagannathan’s “Teaching the One Percent”: I recently retired from a wonderful career as a pathologist. I was a biology major in undergraduate school, but was just a little shy of a minor in classics. I still read classical literature with regularity and keep a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and a collection of Seneca’s letters at my bedside. But another pillar of my education has nothing to do with a university. I worked for eight years in an auto-body shop and rustproofing business, where I rubbed shoulders with people from the inner city and Appalachia. I learned things no formal schooling can teach.
Learning through Play
On Peter Gray’s “Let Children Play”: While reading your timely and much-needed dose of humanity and common sense, I was reminded of John Dewey’s Experience and Education and the author’s focus on the unstructured nature of play, as children develop and abide by the unwritten rules of whatever game they play. Movies like the Toy Story franchise and Recess speak to what many of us of a certain age knew and enjoyed: the freedom to be children interacting with other children, and what too many of today’s youngsters – and their parents, for that matter – lack. May your words find lodging in the hearts of many parents and teachers.
On Toby Payne’s “The Green Paint Incident”: Your green-hands story reminds me of my first venture with forty-four fourth-graders crowded in our very small classroom in desks that didn’t accommodate creative art activities very well. Within what seemed like only a few seconds, numerous children had their own or someone else’s orange paint in their hair! I believe it was my first realization, similar to yours, that our plans aren’t always their plans, but how wondrous the experience they have in spite of us. Our children need more like you.
On “Educating Humans”: I was trained in child-centered teaching and learning through play. It was spontaneous and fun and I loved it. Then the National Curriculum for England was introduced. I accepted that perhaps there was need for more structured learning, particularly for less experienced teachers. But teaching as vocation seems to be forgotten. It has become a nine-to-four job with no thought of preparing during holidays or doing extracurricular activities. Playing in the snow at recess was banned for health and safety reasons! When I left teaching, my classroom was more of a work space, with the home corner, sand and water, and craft and painting areas gone. In their place is a whiteboard linked to the computer. I remember telling one parent that what her bright little girl needed was not more English and mathematics but play and learning how to relate to her peers!
But I am also heartened by my neighbor’s accounts of teaching in a small village school. Today I heard of two children playing for hours and sorting out their problems not by bickering but by negotiating and tossing a coin to see who would go next, without argument at the result. Perhaps change is on the way!
Religion in India
On Jetti A. Oliver’s “Religious Persecution in the World’s Largest Democracy” (Plough online): As someone who has contributed poetry by invitation to Plough in the past, and as a practicing Hindu, I was surprised to see the biased elisions and misrepresentations in this article.
Anti-conversion measures in India date back to the era in which European Christians governed it. The British Raj discouraged evangelization after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in order to keep the peace. They understood that aggressive proselytization would disrupt South Asia’s delicate social weave of religious faiths. In any case, modern India’s anti-conversion laws are rarely enforced. That is why some states in eastern India have been entirely Christianized; Nagaland, for example, has a higher percentage of Baptists than Mississippi.
In any case, the supposed persecution of Christians by Hindus is overstated to the point of mendacity. The Catholic Church is the second largest landholder in India, second only to the government of India itself. This is the same Catholic Church whose Portuguese adherents perpetrated the Goan Inquisition, literally torturing Hindus into conversion over the course of centuries. Dozens of shrines and temples were demolished by the Portuguese Catholics, too; the future Saint Xavier proudly recorded himself doing so in his letters home. In several Indian states today, Hindu temples are controlled and taxed by the government; zero Christian churches suffer such extractive exploitation and lack of autonomy.
Furthermore, many Christian-run educational institutions in India receive government funding. Some Indian states, like Mizoram, offer government scholarships exclusively to Christian students. Often government-funded Christian schools reserve seats for Christians at a far higher percentage than their share of the population – even though their funding comes from a mostly Hindu taxpayer base. Mostly Hindu tax revenue sustains the massive budget of India’s Ministry of Minority Affairs (which covers all of India’s non-Hindu faiths, not just Christianity). Right across secular India’s borders, the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh have no such dedicated Ministry to protect their Hindu and Christian minorities. Regionally, there are few better places to be Christian than India – which is why India currently harbors Christian refugees from Pakistan, but Pakistan harbors no Christian refugees from India.
The largest poll ever conducted on freedom of religion in India, the Pew poll of 2021 (seven years into Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister), established that 89 percent of Indian Christians feel they are “very free to practice their religion.” For reference, a nearly identical percentage of Hindus – 91 percent – feel that way. A larger, more statistically significant difference was found when Indians were asked whether respecting all religions was “important to being truly Indian.” 85 percent of Hindu Indians answered in the affirmative … compared to only 78 percent of Indian Christians.
Mr. Oliver’s article gives us all some insight into that gulf. Missionary propaganda has poisoned Indian Christians against a religion that has been a gracious host to Christians since late antiquity – as well as Persian Zoroastrians and Baghdadi Jews fleeing Islam. Remember that proselytization, traditionally and to this day, does not involve simply “selling” one’s own religion through preaching and charity. It involves defaming the target religion. In India, anti-conversion laws at worst result in a fine or a few years in jail. Right across the border in Pakistan, the penalty a Christian would face for defaming Islam is death. Mr. Oliver can publish his defamatory distortions while continuing to live and work, unmolested, in contemporary India; India’s two neighboring Muslim-majority countries, as any student of the region knows, are not nearly so forgiving. Until this asymmetry is noted and praised, any account of South Asia’s religion and politics is incomplete.
This article’s publication is particularly disheartening to witness at a time when anti-Indian and anti-Hindu sentiment is at an all-time high on social media platforms and in public policy. I believe Plough’s nature and mission is better than this, which is why I have taken the time to write this letter. I can only hope that you share it, in its entirety, with your readers.
Send contributions to letters@plough.com, with your name and town or city. Contributions may be edited for length and clarity and may be published in any medium.