(28) Speaking to Teachers in Today's Culture

Speaking to Teachers in Today’s Culture

The theoretical work mediated here is mainly that of Bernard Lonergan who gives us a theory of interior conscious patterning and activities he calls general empirical or transcendental method that includes a cognitional theory and a theory of knowledge. Transcendental method is the method of human consciousness and, thus, is referred to as a trans-cultural base. A study of his work, and of works of others who have understood his work, however, will find us deeply entrenched in an ongoing dialogue with a long history of persons whose philosophic and scientific questions have changed.

However, such change occurs only as a manifestation of their ongoing dialogue with one another within the basic open-ended structure we explore here. In these chapters my contribution to the field, with minor exception, is limited to pedagogy—a beginning invitation for your personal foundational review, and a set of verification procedures for your appropriation of your own conscious pattern using Lonergan’s and others’ theoretical work as our guide.

My present project, then, is modest. However, I wish also to add to the literature that seeks to draw transcendental method and the process of self-appropriation into secular and religious education and, further, into a foundational attunement in the sciences, and in common everyday dialogue. With the exercises in hand, teachers in the university, high schools, or even earlier grades, can mediate critical self-knowledge to those who are not yet theoretically minded, or who are just beginning to become reflective and self-reflective. Thus, the exercises are for those teachers who want to make optimum the conditions for a reflective and self-reflective life in ourselves and in our students. Also, using what we learn here, we can continue our own self-development in a more critical way; and, further, we can begin to recognize ongoing work in our field that does not violate the broad outlines and dynamism of conscious order in its intentions, its development, and its being-towards-transcendence.

With others, then, I propose that speaking of these matters with full awareness of the context of a global culture is of utmost importance. I also argue that the most important participants of that culture to reach today are teachers at all levels of education. For teachers, of all people, are called to understand the importance of theory to their own political milieu and to the “experiment” of democracy, and civilization itself, in which we live and, I assume, hope to continue to live.

Teachers should, at the very least, take seriously the exploration of their own foundations of knowledge, and the existence of potential reflective horizons in our own selves and in our students. If we are to do so, we must produce accessible philosophical writings and make such writings available to the general public, to the secular and religious academy, and to other schools, and in a way that is relatively shorn of esoteric expression (Lonergan’s Insight) or aimed at a limited audience in a circumscribed field of concern (Lonergan’s Method in Theology).

When Frederick Crowe writes, “Pupils leaving primary school will be as familiar with this structure as they are with, say, the golden rule” (2002, p. 15), we can assume such familiarity will not come from having read Lonergan’s Insight, A Study of Human Understanding or Method in Theology:


I am writing not theology but method in theology. I am concerned not with the objects that theologians expound but the operations that theologians perform. (Lonergan, 1972, p. xii)


The performance is not only theological but, more comprehensively, human. When we speak of the transcendental method in us, rather than in the theory, we speak of every teacher’s fundamental concern—to leave and to lay open the student’s heart and mind to all that they might understand that is worthy of them; we speak to the foundations of education; and we speak of the spiritual fount of all knowledge, and of all love.

Moreover, my work here is not about adding some new sound-bite or catchword to common discourse, e.g., TM, or TMethod, or some new covert political doctrine to education. Rather, I harbor a great faith in your own mindedness as a teacher and the motivation and light that resides at the center of that mindedness. Call it heart, mind, soul, spirit, or the desire to see children learn--whatever. That light in you is the hope of the world. My hope is that the present work will inspire you and your students to come to know and to love what you discover of-in-for yourselves as we try to recover the meaning of self-transcendence as a central part of the secular and-or religious educational experience.