What is education?
Education has no rules, because it is personal. There is a Person to love who is wise, virtuous, joyful. There is a Word that undergirds the cosmos: Mind that makes my feeble mind possible.
I tire, the Word does not tire. I will die, the Word lives and so there is hope for life beyond death. I hate, fail, become confused, but the Word is love, power, and clarity. This is good.
Education begins in wonder, powered by love, driven toward the good. Plato saw this dimly, the Apostles saw in the flesh.
What helps one love the known Unknown?
I. Nothing is off limits to discussion.
The ideologue will limit the questions. When we fall in love with the good, unknown, there we will ask any question to find the truth.
II. The goal is to find truth.
There is a person who grasps that questions are most excellent and then hates answers. We become precious and so unable to stand tentative conclusions. This is a bad idea. Answers lead to better questions!
III. The worst student matters.
I have seen discussions delayed by folly. God help us, but the dialectic as dialectic cannot cast out any person. We listen, we push back, and we listen again. When we must expel a student, and sometimes we must, education fails until justice can abate to allow for the dialectic to govern again.
IV. Education comes in community.
God loves us. The individual matters, but learning must come in community. There might be a few saints who can dialogue with God alone, but the rest of us must talk to each other.
V. There are no administrators in education as education.
Of course, we must have rules, regulations, and administration this side of Paradise. The rules, regulations, and administration, however, are not education, but a means to the relationship between rabbi and student. My favorite University President is a teacher and pastor who helps as an administrator, not an administrator who sometimes acts as a teacher and pastor.
Everyone must be a teacher and a student.
VI. Joy
Joy is the incredible truth, feeling, reality that bursts in our minds and hearts when education happens. We do not study and work for the sake of the world, the flesh, and devil. We study for God, the beauty, the goodness, the truth. When we occasionally see God, then we feel joy.
VII. Wisdom
Education seeks wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and God is the end. We fear God, because we see who God is and who we are. He is awesome and we are not. This begins to show us self, fulfilling the Delphic admonition to know self. Having seen that, we then look to God. God is good.
VIII. Virtue
Excellence, virtue, is a way of being, not merely doing. Naturally when we are ourselves, we do best. Some do the right thing out of duty and this is better than doing evil, God help us. Still, we are fragile in this state. We do right, but against our ideas, emotions, and desire. The goal of education is to cultivate virtue so that virtue comes naturally to us.
IX. We must do.
God save us from the bookish type who shows his love is false, because he never makes us love.
X. Education is Orthodox.
There is truth. There is a Being so beautiful that to see Him is to love Him. He hides so we are not overwhelmed. There is a way of living, thinking, being that is all inclusive, glorious, true: One Holy Catholic and Apostolic life.
My idiot self wishes to turn these things into rules. Instead, they that love learning pursue the Good in a lovely way. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In