Something Always Resists
Form without encounter, the illusion of control, and why true education can never be tame
In my last essay I argued that the professor’s work is cultivating a fidelity to truth rather than a love of knowledge alone. That sounds noble in the abstract. In practice, it is disruptive. Fidelity to truth means you cannot guarantee what your students will become. This essay is about that cost, and about why so much of education is designed to avoid paying it.
The Bible College in Missouri: A Wager on Control
I first ran across the Josh Ritter song “Getting Ready to Get Down” on a road trip out to Seattle in the summer of 2021. My first listens put it squarely in the camp of songs deconstructing purity culture. It still fits well there. But a different aspect of it has been gnawing at me since I began this series. The song tells the story of a young woman whose mama, papa, and pastor each take one look at her, get worried, and ship her off “to a small Bible college in Missouri.” The education is supposed to polish off her rough edges so she can fit neatly into a church pew. Instead, she comes home knowing all the things they hoped she would never figure out, having found more in the Golden Rule than anyone had told her was there.
An institution designed for control became an instrument of liberation. Formation isn’t tame. Something always resists.
And formation is always taking place. Just as how we sit day after day shapes our posture, the choices we make each day form us into the people we become. One mark of maturity is noticing this and steering it. Choosing to work out regularly forms a body capable of more. We do this for ourselves, and the systems we join do it to us. Faith communities have their liturgies, families have their traditions, and schools have their schedules and curricula. At a basic level, formation is another word for impact. And of course we want schools to have an impact. We want students to learn.
The trouble is that intentional formation slides easily into control. I want my students to be educated, so I reach for the tools of the classroom: syllabus, assignments, lectures. I want to be as effective as possible so I can be as confident as possible that learning is actually happening. Nothing about that is wrong. But there is a subtle distinction hiding inside it. We can steer formation toward a particular end, or we can steer it toward a way.
When we commit to a way, we loosen our grip on the result. Helping someone follow a way does not tell you where they will end up. It tells you something about the kind of person they may be when they arrive. The possibility of the unknown remains. This is the difference between the Bible college the parents thought they were paying for and the education their daughter actually received.
Cultivating the Chest: Formation vs. Management
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote of “men without chests”: people trained in technique and information whose sentiments were never formed. They know facts but were never taught what deserves their love. The chest, for Lewis, is the trained heart that connects intellect to appetite, desire to reason. Remove it and you get cleverness without character, wit without wisdom.
This is what Bildung was always trying to cultivate. Not merely knowledge or technical competence, but a formed way of seeing, judging, and inhabiting the world. The academy’s formation work has always been chest cultivation.
I linger here because there is an unpleasant side to this kind of formation that needs acknowledging. Formation toward truth, goodness, and beauty is disturbing. It does not leave you comforted. Consider how we actually talk about an encounter with beauty as haunting, aching, piercing, or overwhelming. It is not all warmth. Beauty asks something of us.
To hide from that disturbance, we reach for shallower imitations of the transcendentals, choosing comfort over the uncanny encounter. Propaganda sounds a lot like truth, but it moves the listener toward certainty rather than openness. Performance can look very good, but it cares about perception rather than transformation. Borrowing a distinction from my work on eucontamination, what I will call the pornographic can be alluring, even aesthetically accomplished, but it invites consumption instead of encounter. None of these is necessarily evil. But all three cultivate a chestless people: belief without critique, behavior without virtue, consumption without connection. They insulate us from more.
Insulating the Soul: From Encounter to Consumption
Where this lands in education is not surprising. A school in Tallahassee made international news in March 2023 when principal Hope Carrasquilla was forced to resign after sixth graders were shown Michelangelo’s David in a Renaissance art lesson. One parent called the image pornographic. The irony is hard to miss: this happened at a school explicitly devoted to classical education and the transcendentals. When actual beauty showed up, with its nakedness and its refusal to be tame, the institution chose control over fidelity.
Same form, opposite function. The parent saw pornography because they could not imagine nudity that disturbs rather than titillates. Confusing art with pornography is precisely the inability to distinguish encounter from consumption. Without a fidelity to beauty, everything reduces to surface, to image, to first blush.
Recent research on AI in education shows what this insulation looks like at scale. Jesper Tække analyzed 88 exam papers from a university course where AI use was permitted and found that fluent academic form had come apart from actual understanding. Papers read smoothly but had no grip on their particular case. References looked plausible but crumbled under verification. Discussion sections were generic enough to attach to any topic, because they had never encountered none.
An LLM is a perfect engine of form without encounter. It can reproduce the language of disruption, but it cannot itself undergo disruption. Left unexamined, it forms us toward the insulated versions of the transcendentals: truth as settled fact, goodness as correct behavior, beauty as whatever pleases.
Which brings me back to the song. The Bible college was supposed to be a tool of conformity, shaping a young woman into someone who would make her parents and pastor less worried. Something resisted. She was sent to be controlled, but formation can never be fully controlled. And I like to imagine there was a teacher somewhere in Missouri who stayed faithful to the way rather than the outcome, who taught the Bible without managing how it would leave her.
The professor who chooses formation as liberation makes this same wager: fidelity to the means without control of the ends. Instead of the countable and the guaranteed, the professor trusts in the hope of more.
That trust is precisely what makes formation different from management. Management seeks predictable outcomes. Formation remains open to surprise. Every institution is already forming people, whether it intends to or not. The question is whether we are willing to trust truth, goodness, and beauty enough to loosen our grip on where they may lead.
I don’t know where truth will take my students. But I trust it will be good.
📚 Works Cited & Suggested Reading
Brandser, Gry Cathrin. Humboldt Revisited: The Impact of the German University on American Higher Education. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.
Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Gafney, Wil. “Wisdom’s Table is God’s Table.” Sermon. September 19, 2018. https://www.wilgafney.com/2018/09/19/wisdoms-table-is-gods-table/
Hoard, Paul, and Billie Hoard. Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life. Cascade Books, 2025.
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. HarperOne, 2001.
Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, 1996.
Ritter, Josh. “Getting Ready to Get Down.” Sermon on the Rocks. Pytheas Recordings, 2015.
Tække, Jesper. “Generative AI in Education: The Reorganization of Contingency.” Paper presented at the 27th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, June 25–28, 2026.
Winfield, Nicole, and Kate Payne. “Visitors Flock to See Michelangelo’s David Sculpture After School Uproar in Florida.” NPR, March 29, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/29/1166735136/visitors-flock-to-see-michelangelos-david-sculpture-after-school-uproar-in-flori