Enter the Tradition:

Learning with Your Feet

The weather of New England can be cruel is held much more dearly when views have met with students near the Lyceum-a
in springtime, with nature's elusive dance been framed and approached on foot and grove and a gymnasium in an area dedicated
between a showy spring and a prudish over time. Reality is manifest on foot. The to Apollo ofLycia. The students of Aristotle
tum back to a puritanical frost, but, as in whirl of car travel and the homogenized and his successors were known from
summer, the walking is almost always vision of a route traversed at 60 mph is classical times as peripetetikoi: ramblers or
good. It is good because the land reflects no more memorable than the GPS images walkers. Why this is so is not entirely clear,
that primal desire of man to explore the which flicker and fade. but the emphasis on outdoor movement
landscape, trace waterways, and weave In education, there is something and exploration (as opposed to chambered
along ancient footpaths. analogous to the replacement of footpaths lectures), on thinking while pacing and
Most towns and villages in New and tradition by highways and municipal observing (as opposed to being told about
England boast hundreds of miles of trails codes. Highways are well-engineered abstractions) was a mark of the followers of
which move through conservation land, for vehicles, consistent, systematic, Aristotle. His own foundational orientation
wilderness preserves, human settlements, predictable.· Travel is dominated towards biology and natural history, or
farms and forests. Outside of a handful increasingly by the ideology of redundant his emphasis on change, motion, a "prime
of cities, New England remains a map signage which marks, and marks, and mover", etc., are all a piece with an
marks the highway. Even minor roads are
increasingly choked with signs and safety
device to ensure that the vehicle moves
from "A" to "B" down through "D" until
arriving at "F". All this movement is to be
Lcindsccipes fix upon the done safely without requiring thought or The option of online
memory cind the sense of encouraging reflection of the mind moving educcition, in the Age of Covid,
plcice is held much more his body through space. If anything, the beccime something required
human forgets his body as his vehicle
decirly when views hcive been safely rushes along. So too in education. of cilmost cill-cind becciuse
frcimed cind cipprociched on The option of online education, in the Age required, hecivily regulcited cind
foot cind over time. of Covid, became something required of over-plcinned.
almost all-and because required, heavily
regulated and over-planned. Here, as
with the modem highway, the concern is
for systematic movement towards a safe
and predicted conclusion. The human
fashioned by the beaten track. To the qualities of digression and reflection, the approach to learning that blended walking,
vexation of visitors, Boston remains very simple acts that recognize the bond the outdoors, conversation, a resolution to
incomprehensible by car because it largely between person and person, teacher and observe and carefully describe nature.
defies the anti-human scale and devilish student, are quantified, neatly wrapped into This, I suspect, is not the vision of
grid that the auto conjures up and which timed "zoom" meetings, and stripped of all school and education that many readers
marks much of the West and Midwest. the memorable danger and pleasure of real have in their mind's eye. What of
The old common law about rights of way human fellowship. desks and classrooms? Regulated bells,
still animates much of the New England One of the earliest and greatest schools in precisely arranged linoleum tile, the hum
countryside affording in a small space an our western civilization was the Peripatetic of florescent lights, the scrupulous note­
infinite number of journeys. As Belloc School of Aristotle. The name comes taking of chalkboard dictums? These safe,
once wrote at the head of an anthology on from the Greek verb peripateeir.i-to walk homogenized mills were late in the age
the subject, when walking "you are doing or ramble about. Aristotle, not being an of our educational history. Certainly, the
something native to yourself'. Landscapes Athenian, could not own property as Plato flashy grand standing of Peter Lombard
fix upon the memory and the sense of place had with his Academy. Instead, Aristotle (fl. twelfth century) began the tum of

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western education towards something
large-scale and, for the learner, impersonal.
But it required a Prussian push from the
Enlightenment into the dark heart of the
nineteenth century for the slow, ambling,
realism of the Peripatetic and Benedictine
traditions to be systematically exiled into
far provinces. Go back and read over the
dialogues of Cicero or of the Cistercian
writer St. Aelred of Rievaulx-there you
will see that learning occurred in gardens
and while on country rambles, not in tidy
rows of uniformity.
It is strange that most people think of
modem America as an outdoorsy and
fit culture. Over the past fifteen years,
according to the data from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, the number of fifteen- to
twenty-four-year-olds who do any form
of physical activity hovers around 25%;
increasingly, that activity is indoors and, on
average, for less than two hours a day. This
may seem reasonable until we recall that
"screen time", the amount of time a young
adult spends in front of a digital screen each
day, is approximately 8-12 hours, with 3-5
hours of that the watching of movies and
television programs.
The strange movement of school children
into controlled online learning over the
past fifteen months is not, I would suggest,
the intrusion of COVID into an otherwise
healthy way of life. It is rather the solution
to a problem of how specialized power
could breach the barriers of the household
and enclose it within the safe ambit of
control. Those barriers had been long
weakened by parents who themselves
embrace and indulge a digital dream life.
Fear not! The human response is at hand, or
rather ... at foot.A sound mind, heart, and
soul exist with specificity in a particular
person and in a particular place. Time to
walk back into reality.
William Fahey is President ofThomas More
College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.

Prison Journal, Volume One: The Cardinal Makes His Appeal

By George Cardinal Pell
Ignatius Press, 2020
348 pp., $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-62164-448-4

It might seem odd that visiting the imprisoned is a corporal work
of mercy to itself. Lawyers say that nine of ten clients are guilty.
Don't we have enough difficult love already to mete out on nas­
ty friends and family? Shouldn't you gamer your agape close to
home before you start peddling Christian pity off on reprobates?
Indeed, even many Christians find this Catholic practice bizarre
and unique.
Of course, Christ commanded leaving the ninety-nine obedient
for the one lost sheep. The Gospel abounds in solicitude for the
marginalized and abandoned. Moreover, in particular, from the
time of Paul to this day, our innocent Christian brothers have been
imprisoned specifically for their fidelity to Christ so that visiting
a prisoner might well be to touch the humble garment of a martyr.
To be sure, George Cardinal Pell is no lost sheep. After four
hundred days of mostly solitary confinement, the last judgment
of the Australian High Court was that this orthodox prince of the
church and original member of Pope Francis's inner circle was not
guilty of the crime of sexual abuse of a minor. George Weigel in
his justifiably indignant introduction lays out a compelling synop­
sis of a "sleazy trolling expedition" to bring down a strong-voiced
churchman who defended the family, Christian rights, and the nat­
ural moral law against the ravages of the Sexual Revolution down
under, After several years of active advertisement for a victim to
step forward, a somewhat reluctant plaintiff was finally found,
prepped, and financed, whom Pell names "J" and for whose men­
tal imbalance he has pity (and also for the prosecutor, who simply
"did his job" under intense pressure from the blood-thirsty media).
It is no surprise then to learn that the former professional Austra­
lian football recruit for the Richmond powerhouse team, to whom
trenchant words come easily, was able immediately to deflect
something that by nature is "no picnic" into an agreeable "world­
ly retreat", thanks to the ageless fact that the "Christian package
works". One person wrote him that, while incarcerated, he was
living the happy life of "a seminarian or a Trappist monk". Pray,
read, meditate, answer your mail, exercise your temple of the Holy
Ghost, offer deprivations as penance, know that God is "not cru­
el"-these are the imperatives of an infallible program for earthly
happiness, even though Pell knows that his sentence was light in
comparison with that of many other Christian martyrs.
Day by day, the journal demonstrates how followers of Christ
(He who "didn't get a very good run") can manage suffering, both
physical and mental, by clinging to God's complicated provi­
dence. Pell is hopeful, along with many of his correspondents (he
received a hundred letters a day), that his unjust imprisonment
will serve as a penance for the sins of the institutional church and
that his ultimate vindication will restore some honor to its self­
wrought daniage.The certitude of innocence finds friendship, even
distant, with the just and the Just One, who Himself was unjustly

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