FROM THE EDITOR: The Hand You're Dealt Is Not Paralyzing
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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There is a popular idea in the study of history called the “Great Man,” or “Great Person,” theory. The phrase is autological. Professional historians largely dismiss it — count me among them.
Circumstances, timing, a bit of good fortune, and those who came before and surround great individuals are part of every person’s story — especially those we deem “Great.” Put another way, it takes a village. None of us gets there on our own.
But there is a trait that every great person shares that gives credence to the idea that people are self-made — being intellectually and emotionally ready for the moment.
Great education does that. And great people commit themselves to it.
Our public K-12 education does not provide students with this. We’ve traded strenuous debate, intellectually rigorous lectures, and expansive book reading for standardized tests, “activities” accompanied with reams of teacher provided handouts, and “Google research.”
And too many “reform” movements — especially those focused on parents’ rights — would further deprecate education by submerging intellectually challenging work under a sea of affirmations that what a student’s family taught them is “right,” and not ripe for interrogation.
But then, it can be difficult to appreciate the art of growing into intellectual and emotional maturity if we are seldom in the presence of greatness, and if we have lost an appreciation for what intellectual training can do.
Martin E. Marty was a Great Man. In his 97 years, he wrote more books — 60 — than many adults will read in their lifetimes. Each on a topic that he never imagined he would make a living studying — American religion.
“In my case,” Marty said while delivering the 2006 Charles Homer Haskins “A Life of Learning” lecture, I was:
being drawn into a life work that I did not seek or foresee, on a subject for which I had shown no explicit interest, through positions for which I never applied.
So how did he get to be one of the most-revered public historians of the 20th century?Directing 115 doctoral dissertations? Teaching for 40-plus years at America’s pre-eminent school of higher learning, the University of Chicago?
The university students I taught between 1963 and 2006 might never be able to imagine how our elementary education back in 1933 could have prepared us for lives of learning.
In those early lessons, and his more rigorous studies in high school and beyond, Marty learned to “accept the cards of history as they turn up without regarding the hand you hold as a paralyzing fate.”
Marty passed away on Tuesday at his home in Minnesota, never having seen the hand he held as paralyzing.
It is the gift he gave a young graduate student, intimidated by the ivy-covered walls of the University of Chicago and struggling to feel worthy of having earned the right to study there.
And it is the gift he gave to countless Americans and people around the world to whom in spoke in universities, lecture halls, churches, public squares, and coffee shops. Fredericksburg was one of those stops.
Rigorous intellectual work in the humanities, Marty learned and taught others, is what leads us to reach our potential.
It was once fashionable, he wrote, “to see the humanities, including history and religious studies, as postmodern games which have no anchor in reality beyond the text. … [B]ut the perspective of history helps one outlast such contentions and see a return to the ‘human’ in human learning.”
When we cast off history as a glorified game of Jeopardy, and embrace its depths and mysteries and inconsistencies, we “increase our distinctively human potential” because we are “awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture.” And in so doing we come to see that these stories “tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”
There is no “Great Man,” Marty believed, because when we are willing to tap our human story, we all have the potential to be “Great People.”
Martin Davis is Editor-in-Chief of the Advance, and a former student of Martin E. Marty. Read more about Mr. Marty’s extraordinary life, his thought, and his legacy. All quotes from his “A Life in Learning Lecture.”
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