What are the proper sources for an educational philosophy? Should educators read only sociological journals and experiment in their classroom for the best results? Or is there something more humane and artistic in the nature of teaching? We have decried the technicism and scientism characteristic of modern education before.
One consequence of these trends is the exclusion of literature and humanities from the broader conversation about education, its goals, methods, and ideals. Charlotte Mason, for one, found novels, fictional literature, and poetry to be a potent source for her educational philosophy. While certainly we can understand the reticence to feature too prominently the imaginative portrayal of a person’s education or development in exact recommendations for how to teach, literature and the humanities have as their subject matter what it means to be human. Therefore, they concern the education of human beings in all their complexity, glory, and fallenness.
Poets, novelists, and fictional writers might not be good guides as to the length of school days and the exact details of curricula and lessons. But they have a farsighted imaginative perception that has the power to shake up, challenge and inform our philosophy and practices. Because of the very unreality and singular nature of their imaginative portrayals, they are able to shock us out of our complacency and restore our ideals and vision for the educational art.
In this article, we will be transported to the 19th century post-Napoleonic era in France to witness the education of Edmond Dantès, a poor first mate of a merchant’s vessel in the south of France. In the classic adventure novel by Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, young Dantès, who is on the brink of perfect happiness, about to marry his love Mercédès, is fatefully betrayed by two seeming friends, and sentenced to imprisonment without trial (Barnes & Noble, 2011 edition).
While in the dungeons of the Château d’If, an island fortress off the coast of Marseilles, Edmond Dantès receives a first-class education from one of his fellow prisoners, a learned Italian man called Abbé Faria. He also will learn from Abbé Faria of a tremendous fortune hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo. After Abbé Faria’s death, fourteen years in prison, eight of which he spent learning from the Italian, he will escape to become the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo. His education has transformed him and enabled him to seek out the hidden crimes of his persecutors, who have only grown in power and riches since his own demise.
In this article I will avoid any spoilers about the end of the book, which I myself am still reading–I also have not watched any movie version–and instead will confine myself to an analysis of the education of the future Count of Monte Cristo.
The Teacher-Student Relationship
When Edmond Dantès is found by his future teacher, he has all but given up hope in despair. Without seeing another soul than his jailer for six years, he has committed to starving himself to death, when he begins to hear a sound of file and digging. He breaks his resolution to try to discover what this is and Abbé Faria reveals himself in answer to Dantès’ prayer:
“Oh, my God! my God!” murmured he, “I have so earnestly prayed to You that I hoped my prayers had been heard. After having deprived me of my liberty, after having deprived me of death, after having recalled me to existence, my God! have pity on me, and do not let me die in despair.” (111)
Their relationship comes about as a result of God’s mercy, providentially arranging for Dantès to be lifted out of his despair in a dark and unjust world. Dantès’s relationship with his teacher has a unique beauty about it because he has been starved of human-to-human interaction; he is open to friendly and familial love in a way that few students are. As he says to Faria at their first meeting, “If you are young, I will be your comrade; if you are old, I will be your son” (113).
The Abbé Faria quickly develops a paternal affection for Dantès. Like an expert psychologist and counselor, and with the piercing perception of a Sherlock Holmes, Faria helps Dantès discover from only his memories who it was that thus betrayed him and sentenced him to his unjust and torturous imprisonment. But their relationship has a moral and spiritual mentorship at its heart rather than a professional detachment:
Faria bent on him his penetrating eyes: “I regret now,” said he, “having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did.”
“Why so?” inquired Dantès.
“Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart–that of vengeance.” (136)
As their relationship develops Dantès’s promise, “I shall love you as I loved my father” (113), holds true, and after 8 years Faria will adopt Dantès (“whom Faria really loved as a son,” 154) by granting him the secret of his treasure.
Unlike the situation of many modern classrooms the teacher-student relationship of Faria and Dantès is of long duration, spans multiple subjects of study (as we’ll see), and is more akin to personal mentoring and tutoring, with a familial father-son air. The mutual interest, joy in companionship and holistic integration challenges our factory model assumptions. Why is it that we have abandoned the tutorial or the multi-year influence of a teacher on a student’s life and development? Perhaps it is because we have also abandoned a traditional vision of the ideal teacher.
A Portrait of the Ideal Teacher
We are introduced to the learned Abbé Faria as an intellectual, certainly, but also as a paragon of moral insight: “The meagerness of his face, deeply furrowed by care, and the bold outline of his strongly marked features, announced a man more accustomed to exercise his moral faculties than his physical strength” (115). When he learns from Dantès of the removal of Napoleon from power and the restoration of the monarchy in France, he exclaims in a sort of biblical doxology:
“The brother of Louis XVI!–How inscrutable are the ways of Providence!–for what great and mysterious purpose has it pleased heaven to abase the man once so elevated, and raise up the individual so beaten down and depressed?”
And then later,
“Ah! my friend!” said the abbé, turning toward Dantès, and surveying him with the kindling gaze of a prophet, “these are the changes and vicissitudes that give liberty to a nation.” (118)
Faria’s prophetic gaze is not only political, but has a spiritual or theological source. His later refusal to consider killing a guard during an attempted escape confirms him as a man of conviction and scrupulous character, whatever else he may be (121-122).
Because of his moral fiber and his endless invention and great learning, he has not succumbed to despair, like Dantès, even though he has been imprisoned much longer (117), but has secretly made himself tools (115) from the odds and ends in his prison, pens and cloth to write his magnum opus, A Treatise on the Practicability of Forming Italy into One General Monarchy (123), and of course he has carried out a multi-year project of digging in an attempt to secure his escape. In addition to all this, he has used his free time in his cell as an opportunity to improve himself, continuing his own personal education. How is such a feat possible? Faria explains to Dantès:
“I had nearly 5,000 volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times I found out that with 150 well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with. I devoted three years of my life to reading and studying these 150 volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart; so that since I have been in prison a very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though their pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandès, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli and Bossuet. Observe, I merely quote the most important names and writers.” (123)
In addition to this detailed knowledge of Great Books, through which Faria possesses “a complete analysis of all human knowledge,” Faria also knows five modern languages, as well as Latin and ancient Greek, through which he teaches himself modern Greek. If this description might have seemed to classify Faria as merely another arcane, ivory-tower intellectual, we should note the applied practicality of his slimming of the 5,000 volumes down to a select 150 and his further comment that he names the “most important names and writers.” This is a teacher who can discriminate between various authors and is able to distill for his eager pupil the essence and summation of “useful and desirable” knowledge. He knows how to do this for another because he has first done it for himself.
It is worth noting again that Faria is not driven to despair by his imprisonment because his vast reading has provided for him an endless source of employment and joy in his own ongoing learning. The flow of thought overrides his unfortunate circumstances. He has spent his time, among other things, making a vocabulary of the words he knew in modern Greek and turning them back and forth in his minds in order to develop facility with the 1,000 he knew in order to be able to express perfectly anything he wanted (123).
But Faria is not a humanist and linguist alone. He also is an eminent source of useful information and scientific knowledge, as well as the inventiveness and crafty resourcefulness already displayed in his tools and excavations:
“The elder prisoner was one of those persons whose conversation, like that of all who have experienced many trials, contained many useful and important hints as well as sound information; but it was never egotistical, for the unfortunate man never alluded to his own sorrows. Dantès listened with admiring attention to all he said; some of his remarks corresponded with what he already knew, or applied to the sort of knowledge his nautical life had enabled him to acquire. A part of the good abbé’s words, however, were wholly incomprehensible to him; but, like those aurora borealis which serve to light navigators in northern latitudes, they sufficed to open fresh views to the inquiring mind of the listener, and to give a glimpse of new horizons, enabling him justly to estimate the delight an intellectual mind would have in following the high and towering spirit of one so richly gifted as Faria in all the giddiest heights or lowest depths of science.” (136)
Such an ideal teacher surely surpasses what any of us who are employed in the profession might hope to attain; nevertheless, he represents an expansive vision of the intellectual life that we cannot do without. Faria’s title, Abbé, names him a member of the clergy, whether cleric or Abbot, and recalls the term for “father” used of abbots and priests. He is a spiritual and theologically grounded intellectual, who has also attained to the breadth of humane learning and obtained a practical and deep scientific understanding. He is a polymath or renaissance man. He is therefore able to situate the various branches of human learning in relation to one another.
How far a cry is this ideal from the high school teacher or college professor, plyer of trade knowledge and skill development in but one area, yet without a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the whole!
The Ideal Student and Course of Study
We have already seen Edmond Dantès’s readiness to learn and relational receptiveness above. In many other ways he represents the ideal student for so grand a teacher. He has the proper sense of wonder and curiosity, as well as the right early experiences to be an attentive learner:
“Though [he was] unable to comprehend the full meaning of his companion’s allusions, each word that fell from his lips seemed fraught with the wonders of science, as admirably deserving of being brought to light as were the glittering treasures he could just recollect having visited during his earliest youth in a voyage he made to Guzerat and Golconda.” (125)
The process of learning or education is here compared to uncovering the glittering treasures of the east (two territories in India known for grand buildings and diamonds). Because of this proper disposition toward the value of learning, Dantès became so “absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, [that] days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course” (137). He enters the time-warm characteristic of the flow of thought already possessed by his teacher. But of course, they first determine the appropriate course of study before embarking on a journey limited only by the qualifications of the student.
“And that very evening the prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon the following day. Dantès possessed a prodigious memory, combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of conception; the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the dry reality of arithmetical computation or the rigid severity of lines. He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect, during his different voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.” (137)
Not all students will have Dantès’s natural qualifications of memory, calculation and poesy. But these are nevertheless the key ingredients in a rapid and effective course of study. It would be incorrect to say that Abbé Faria taught him everything; in fact, he makes an interesting set of distinctions between principles and application, the sciences and philosophy. “Human knowledge,” he says, “is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself” (136). He then sets a term of two years as all that would be required to compass the principles, while not the application of this knowledge, noting that “to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other” (136).
Faria here alludes to the Aristotelian distinction between true scientific knowledge, which involves the ability to demonstrate, and the mere memory or understanding of a thing. He also describes philosophy as “reducible to no rules by which it can be learned”; it is rather “the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven” (137). For such a prodigious intellect, Faria has a proper humility about what the teacher can convey to the student and what the student’s own learning and continuing education after schooling must do to complete the enduring love of wisdom (“philosophy”) that “bears the soul to heaven.”
For the Count of Monte Cristo in the making, this scientific course of study is enough, and presumably his own efforts at blessing his friends, enacting vengeance on his enemies, and making a new life for himself when all is done, will be necessary to complete his journey. But one further thing is needed to prepare him for that task: the Abbé Faria’s finishing school:
“The abbé was a man of the world, and had, moreover, mixed in the first society of the day; his appearance was impressed with that air of melancholy dignity which Dantès, thanks to the imitative powers bestowed on him by nature, easily acquired, as well as that outward polish and politeness he had before been wanting in, and which is seldom possessed except by those who have been placed in constant intercourse with persons of high birth and breeding.” (139)
We often overlook the powerful effect of the teacher’s mode of being, “polish and politeness,” upon the students, or the natural effect of “constant intercourse” or social interaction with a certain type or class of people. We might describe some of these habits and customs as the result of enculturation, without which a student would be unprepared for certain callings in life. Dantès, for instance, could not have become the Count of Monte Cristo without this “air of melancholy dignity.”
Conclusion
Let us close by summarizing in the form of several propositions what we have discovered in our fictional excursion into the singular education of the Count of Monte Cristo.
The bond between teacher and student should be more than professional, but friendly and even familial, on the order of adoption or apprenticeship. This reality makes our modern era’s rapid change of teachers and professionalized teaching staff conducted at economic scale a liability, rather than a benefit. Tutoring and tutorials, as well as smaller schools with teachers teaching the same groups of students across multiple years in multiple sub-disciplines, become desirable from the perspective of teacher-mentorship.
The ideal mentor-teacher, especially at the secondary or collegiate level, is a man or woman of moral and spiritual standing, not just an intellect or a capable deliverer of content through an engaging ppt lecture. The ongoing education of the teacher and his active engagement in interdisciplinary inquiry are not extras to be dispensed with at will, but necessarily influence the ideal student who is to become like his teacher. We must avoid hiring teachers as subject-experts or mere practitioners, rather than as spiritual, moral, and intellectual guides with a commitment to lifelong learning.
In early youth the cultivation of a student’s interest, wonder and curiosity, as well as habits of attention and strength of memory are crucial to his later development. Students should learn languages and have vivid experiences that will serve as the hinges on which the doors of later learning will swing open easily. In secondary education, 150 Great Books well studied will be a better summation of human knowledge than 5,000 books indiscriminately encountered. In addition, the understanding of principles in the sciences must be supplemented by application and demonstration, in order to bubble up to that highest of attainments, the true philosophy or love of wisdom.
Life itself will be the test of a student’s education, and especially those decisions and choices of prudential wisdom upon which a life is made new or wrecked upon the shoals of an unjust world. (P.S. I can’t wait to read what happens next in The Count of Monte Cristo.)
