Whole Food for the Soul

Is our education like our medicine?

Have you seen the RDA listings on a food label? They tell you that a particular food contains 50% of your daily recommended requirement of Vitamin C. I get 40% of my magnesium from a handful of pumpkin seeds. If I just go down the list and make sure I hit 100% on all of them, I should be healthy!

These are reference values that aim to correct deficiencies. They are not designed to promote optimal health. But at least you won’t get scurvy or ricketts.

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It’s a “whack-a-mole” model of medicine, where symptoms of deficiencies pop up, and then the deficiency is rectified by a pill. Similar is the pharmacological model of medicine, where a disease pops up and then is treated by a drug. See a problem, treat it. See another problem, treat that problem.

Foundational Nutrition

The wise among you are asking a question: why are these deficiencies and diseases popping up? Is it just for no reason at all? Random occurrences? The Fates?

The body is a complex system that reacts to the world as a whole. In this paper the authors argue that the mechanistic “whack-a-mole” model needs to be replaced. “It is time to consider that the current nutrient crisis is not a problem of just a few nutrient deficiencies; rather, it is a concert of multiple factors leading to a global reduction in the human quality of life.” Don’t just eat supplements, eat better, and live better.

Seems like a good idea to me. It’s why we’re homesteading, among other reasons. I want my family to live well, and this requires a more fundamental shift in behavior than popping a multivitamin.

Foundational Education

The way we treat the soul/psyche/person is similar to the whack-a-mole approach taken in medicine. Look at a group of children, find an educational deficiency, and then add a program to fix it. Usually it involves money, so there are likely perverse incentives built into the system. We add in remedial math, sex education, computer literacy. Pretty soon it will be “how to use ChatGPT”. During my career teaching in the university, my students displayed a stunning drop in the ability to read, to the point that they simply wouldn’t read any of the assignments. I polled the class one time. Not a single person had done the reading. Another time I offered a class the opportunity to get extra credit simply for reading books, any books, and telling me what they read. Very few of the students took me up on it. This is probably because they couldn’t.

Given the drop in literacy, what’s needed is clearly another program, right? Even The Atlantic has noticed the problem.

Doubtless programs will be proposed that won’t work, but will make some people rich. Hapless college professors will be told to teach reading instead of their chosen field. Instead of Philosophy 101, it will be “How to read a sentence.” Perhaps as seniors the students will take “How to read a paragraph.”

Let me propose an analogy: just as in health the way forward is to eat whole foods and avoid poisons, perhaps the way forward in education is to experience whole things and avoid bad things. Rather than a pharmacy of the mind, we need a whole food movement of the soul, a regenerative agriculture of the spirit, a holistic tending of the human person.

The whole person

What would that look like? Good question. A good first step would be attempting to figure out what a human being should be. The current model seems to see the person as an economic unit, something to be manipulated for someone else’s benefit, or at least managed so as to achieve the ends of the ruling class.

A human person knows how to think or at least how to recognize those who can think better and follow their lead, how to pray, how to find a mate, how to raise children, how to grow food, how to cook, how to find beauty, and what he or she may hope for. Such a person has a great respect for nature, out of which comes all that is good, and humility before the God who is the author of nature. I’m sure you can add more to the list. Aristotle says that virtues can be known by looking at the wise man and acting as he would. The difficulty is figuring out who the wise man is, and then the problem becomes more solvable. What does a good man look like? A good woman? Figure out the end, and then work back to figure out the beginning.

Nobody knows what the future will be like. The changes coming about from technology means that any particular educational advice is dated before it is uttered. But the eternal things are, well, eternal, and if you take care of those, the rest will take care of itself, at least better than from the pill-popping pharmacy of the mind.