Things I have learned from teaching.

1. Economics. “The real meaning of costs [is] the foregone opportunities to use the same resource elsewhere…every benefit has a cost in the alternative uses that could have been made of the same resources that created the particular benefit.” (Sowell, Basic Economics) (These are sometimes called opportunity costs.)

The value of a class that I teach is in what I could have taught those students in that same time I used. Awareness of this helps motivate me to use time with my students in the most productive ways possible. This does not always mean stuffing them with information. Sometimes it means I need to stop and let them think about something for a while rather than pushing on to the next thing in order to get through the curriculum.

2. BibleQuestion: Romans 6: “What benefit did you receive from the things you are now ashamed of?”

Answer: The benefit I received from those things was real, but only as something ephemeral is real and beneficial, like a match that burns and then is thrown away.

Oppose this to Proverbs 4: “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.” The benefits of righteousness are not always evident at first, and the pains suffered in the short-run are often significant. (Compare the later lesson from Plato.) The benefits of evil are always short lived by comparison, but often vastly more compelling to the senses. This is the use of wisdom, which sees the benefits of righteousness over the long-term negative effects of “the things we are now ashamed of.”

3. Government (Plato) (Justice)We often value the benefit of something based on how much pleasure or pain (in the short or long term) it brings us. Most likely, our students do this even more than we do, and part of our job is to help them understand better and through faith the relationship between the present and eternity. The less mature they are, the more their good behavior should be associated with immediate benefit. But part of the lesson of the gospel is that our present pains are not as weighty (on a negative scale) as the eternal weight of glory that awaits us. (Cf. 2Cor. 4:17) A mark of the mature Christian is the ability to experience the sufferings of Christ in hope.

Some of the pleasures we experience are not so much pleasures in themselves as they are the privation of pain (like drinking a large glass of water when you are thirsty).

On the flip side, some of the pains we experience are the loss of pleasures, as when a drug addict stops taking his drugs. We seem to deal with this kind of pain a lot in a tech-dependent age, when we are deprived of some technology (a TV show, an ipod, a video game, a cell-phone, a computer). The pains of Hell in Lewis’s The Great Divorce are mostly of this sort, and the book illustrates well how just how horrific these can be. The problem is even worse for us when, again like the drug addict, we don’t experience the same amount of pleasure with the same happiness, but require a constantly accelerating dosage of pleasure to allow for the same amounts of happiness.

The dependencies of our world today seem to have stunted the process of the world’s maturation, so that it is much more difficult today to grow in a healthy way. Since we are in the world, we inherit these same problems.

It has made it harder for us (and our students) by multiplying the kinds of things that can potentially be painful. If we are always being entertained and comforted, there are many more opportunities to experience the pain of losing those forms of entertainment. (Perhaps this is why Lazarus had such a greater capacity for comfort in the bosom of Abraham than the rich man could have, even if he had been there.) So our tech-obsessions, our modern luxuries, by multiplying our pleasures, have multiplied our pains while at the same time made us softer to pain’s thorniness and less able to face it boldly.

So if the modern world has expended it enormous resources multiplying our pleasures and comforts, the effect has been to stunt our ability to deal with pleasure and pain appropriately—which is to say, has made it harder to think in mature, Christian ways about the value of eternity.

1. Part of maturing properly in Christ is learning to experience and think of pleasure and pain properly. This is one of the main things we train our children.

2. Pleasures are not only the increase of something pleasant, but the privation of something good to which we have become accustomed. Likewise, pains are not only the increase of something bad or painful, but the privation of something good to which we have become accustomed.

3. Consequently, when a society increases our capacity for pleasure and comfort, it also increases the number of pains possible for us to experience without providing the resources to deal with them, but in fact lessening them.

4. The effect of this has been to drastically increase the difficulty of adequately appraising the relationship between our present sufferings and eternal glory (for both us and our children/students).

5. What is the answer to this problem for us and our students?