
My instinct, which is surely not infallible, suggests that this book could be huge. If it is not huge, it certainly should be. Anyone thinking about the formation of human beings, particularly with respect to the connection between ideas and desires, would be well-advised to pick it up. I am thinking not just teachers, but religious leaders, parents, graduate students, professors, coaches...basically anyone who has a vested interest in why people do what they do.
Smith's book explores questions of the education of the soul from the point of view of the Christian tradition. The author is a philosophy professor at a Christian college in Michigan. He offers a sweeping perspective of the very deep resources of two millennia of Christian reflection on these questions. These reflections would be of real interest to any open-minded inquirer who is not convinced that human beings are most completely understood as sentient factories of ideas and social productivity.
He is also a huge fan of March 16-20, 1992 by Uncle Tupelo. This means he is wise, tasteful, and worthy of high regard.
Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction, in which Smith unpacks insights from George Orwell on education and the situation of the working class in England in the early 20th century in his book The Road to Wigan Pier.
...The first half of the book is Orwell at his finest as an investigative journalist, filling in the picture of the plight of the working class from firsthand immersion. It is a harrowing account of malnutrition, illness, and the debilitating psychological effects of persistent unemployment and poverty. But in the second half of the book, Orwell takes a surprising turn: he takes on the supposed middle-class champions of the working class, the intellectual Left, and challenges their sympathies. In particular, he questions whether they're really ready to jettison the class structure that they renounce in the parlors and lecture halls of London.
It is in this context that he provides a powerful portrayal of the effects of education. Orwell captures the odious nature of this caste system by seizing upon an axiom that eludes simple propositional articulation. As he puts it, "The real secret of class distinctions in the West" can be "summed up in four frightful words" that are often left unuttered: The lower classes smell. ... Orwell's point is that the root of class distinctions in England is not intellectual; it's olfactory. The habits and rhythms of the system are not so much cerebral as visceral; they are rooted in a bodily orientation to the world that eludes theoretical articulation, which is why theoretical tirades also fail to displace it. Thus Orwell notes that we run up against "an impassable barrier": "For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling." Almost every other kind of discrimination could be countered theoretically, with the weapons of facts, ideas, and information, "but physical repulsion cannot."
But then, how does such a visceral stance get embedded in the middle and upper classes? It is a matter of formation ("in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty"), and more specifically, education. Thus Orwell recounts:
When I was fourteen or fifteen I was an odious little snob, but no worse than the other boys of my own age and class. I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English "education" fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school...but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.
The information that the public schools provided--like Latin and Greek--didn't really take root. What did get inscribed in the pupils, however, was an entire comportment to the world and society, a training in "snobbishness" that could not be easily overturned or undone by new facts or data or information. What would be required to "root out" such a visceral orientation is an equally visceral and physical education or counter-formation. Thus Orwell...illustrates our core intuition that education is an embodied formation that captures our very being and shapes our orientation to the world.
James K.A. Smith, Desiring The Kingdom (Baker Academic, 2009), p. 29-30.