An Experiment in Tradition Nurtures Wonder

The radically traditional educational model of John Senior

Biba Kayewich

In 1936, a 13-year-old boy from New York, who had run away from home, walked down a lonely road in South Dakota while a storm menaced in the murky clouds above. A trucker pulled over by the wayfarer and shouted, “Kid, there’s a tornado brewin’. Get in!” The boy did so and was saved from the tornado. The trucker, Morgan Tinzer, took him to his house and eventually contacted the boy’s parents.

What was the young New Yorker doing out west on that stormy day, without his parents’ knowledge?

It was simple. The boy—named John Senior—wanted to be a cowboy.

In his own words, as recorded in Fr. Francis Bethel’s book, “John Senior and the Restoration of Realism”:

“Having had from childhood an urge for good times lost, I satisfied it first with poetry and then with cowboy stories ... and at thirteen ran away from home and the encroaching city which by the 1930s had metastasized suburban cells in our rural fields. But by that time fenced farms had pretty much destroyed the open range ... so it was something of a miracle that as late as 1936 I found a ranch in the Dakota Badlands where cowboys still rode horses on roundups.”

The episode ended well for all parties: Senior was recovered by his parents, but they agreed to allow him to work on a ranch in the summers as long as he returned home for his schooling the rest of the year.

It’s a striking image—this renegade boy on a dusty Dakota highway, facing the oncoming storm. But in some ways, it’s a fitting emblem of Senior’s life and work, since he would grow up to be a teacher who would stand in the face of the tornado, as he perceived it, that had gone through modern education. And he was so successful and touched so many lives that in 2019, a memorial was erected to the educational program he and his colleagues created.

Standing Against the Storm

That program was the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas, inaugurated in 1971 by John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Franklyn Nelick. All three were teachers of English or literature who shared a growing unease over the state of incoming freshmen. In the words of James Conley, a former student: “The professors saw that the modern students who came to the university might be very bright academically, but their memories and imaginations were so affected by the modern world. They were sort of bankrupt when it came to the imagination.”

The professors also shared a common, if unconventional, vision of the remedy. They called it “an experiment in tradition” because their model was based on long-abandoned Greek and medieval philosophy and pedagogy.

Through the program, the professors sought to reshape their students’ imaginations through contact with the reality around them and the great books of Western civilization. The program aimed to “situate students in reality sufficiently that they would be able to fully appreciate good books, and then the great books, and to lead lives of gentle men and gentle ladies,” according to the IHP Memorial website.

Above all, Senior and his colleagues sought to inspire in the students a sense of wonder. Indeed, the motto of the program was Nascantur in Admiratione, which means, “let them be born in wonder.”

Wonder for John Senior isn’t mere curiosity, but a proper response to the marvels of the world around us, a sense of awe and longing for higher things. Senior is quoted in Bethel’s book as saying that wonder is “the reverent fear that beauty strikes in us.”

We might say that wonder is what gives purpose and meaning to all learning, so that learning is not merely the gathering of abstract knowledge or stale facts, but a process of falling in love with the truth. Senior wanted to restore philosophical realism in the face of the gale of relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism that had swept over society. He wanted students to believe in and love truth.

But how to instill this wonder, belief, and love?

Fostering Wonder and Wisdom

The program's motto was Nascantur in Admiratione, meaning “let them be born in wonder.” The professors would engage in unscripted conversations about the books that students were reading. Biba Kayewich

To accomplish this goal, the program offered a unique style of lectures (see below), poetry memorization, discussions, conversational Latin, rhetoric classes, studying abroad, and also more unusual activities such as stargazing, fall festivals, singing, and dancing. These were all meant to capture not just the students’ minds, but also their hearts.

Senior knew that intellectual formation wasn’t enough for the reality-starved generation he was dealing with—they needed something even more fundamental. They needed to encounter the real with their whole being and have their imaginations and emotions captivated by it—as one is captivated when looking at the bejeweled night sky—or else true intellectual formation would be impossible.

Senior and his colleagues called their teaching style “the poetic mode,” which we might define as a contemplative and unstructured encounter with the subject matter that engages the emotions as much as the mind. Bethel summarizes Senior’s approach as follows.

Drawing on the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, Senior saw three stages to education: gymnastic (physical), poetic, and philosophical. In the gymnastic stage, the student has “hands-on” experience of reality—using tools, playing sports, feeling grass, studying plants and animals, developing his or her body. As Aristotle says, all knowledge begins with the senses.

The next stage, the poetic phase, forms the imagination and emotions to respond appropriately to reality and to yearn for it (wonder). The final stage is the more structured philosophical stage, dealing directly with intellect and the acquisition of wisdom and knowledge—which can now grow in the fertile ground of well-trained senses, imagination, and emotions. Bethel puts it this way: “Gymnastics begins in experience and ends in delight; poetry or music begins in delight and ends in wonder; philosophy begins in wonder and ends in wisdom.” In Senior’s own words, quoted by Bethel, “The first two stages of education allow the mind to become awake” in order to truly benefit from the pursuit of wisdom at the highest level.

The primary way the professors operated in this “poetic stage” was through “group lectures.” These lectures were unscripted conversations among the three professors about what the students were reading (by classic authors such as Homer, Plato, Herodotus, and Shakespeare). They believed that this was a more “poetic” way of teaching, as opposed to a standard methodical lecture by a single teacher.

The spontaneity, friendship, surprise, humor, and spur-of-the-moment connections and epiphanies of this conversational method produced delight in the students as they worked through the texts. The professors didn’t let students take notes, according to Bethel, but encouraged them to practice the art of observing, listening, seeing—simply being present in the moment as their teachers explored the ideas and feelings the texts evoked.

The IHP became more than just a Great Books program. It was a community of friends and truth-seekers. The IHP became very popular; for instance, it quickly grew from 20 students in the first year to 140 in the next. The university eventually discontinued the program, but in the years that it ran, it affected many lives and generated unparalleled results in restoring education and culture. Those who participated in the program speak of it with a kind of awed reverence.

Conley, an alumnus who later became a Catholic bishop, attests to the profound effect of the unique experiences and enduring community that were the fruits of the IHP. “I was with others who were on the same journey searching for the truth. That combined experience really changed my life.”

Isn’t that the goal of all great educators, after all? To change lives for the better? If so, then there’s much that teachers can learn from Senior, Nelick, and Quinn and the adventure of the IHP.