A Little Encouragement for the First Day of School

As Matt and the children were chauffeuring me around on my endless list of errands yesterday, we passed this amazing thought posted on the local elementary school sign.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

Matt shouted in my ear, ‘Reason number 5,556 why we’re not sending our children to public school.’ Besides agreeing wholeheartedly with him, I thought to myself, ‘what a miserable reason to get up in the morning. I couldn’t possibly motivate myself to educate my children, to get out of bed, to do any work at all if the reason for that work was to be more ‘tolerant’ myself and produce it in my children. Honestly, I can’t think of a more boring reason to learn anything.

Apart from pursuing knowledge of God, which is really the goal of all education, as far as I see it, what about Truth, Beauty, the fact that there are so many interesting things to learn? What about being educated for its own sake because otherwise you can’t do anything interesting in life? What about wisdom and understanding? What about being able to read books because they’re Wonderful books and it would be heartbreaking to go through life Not having read them? But ‘tolerance’? Of what? sin? mediocrity? What are we to be tolerant of?

Oh I know, I know, its each other. But not really. The local elementary school isn’t really interested in total tolerance of everyone. They want the children filling those rooms to be ‘tolerant’ of some things, maybe I even agree with some of them. I don’t want my children to be ‘tolerant’. I want them to be respectful and honoring. When they meet other people they don’t agree with or understand, I want them to make good eye contact, listen carefully and take that person seriously, not just ‘tolerate’ them. How unloving! How boring! How miserable a reason to engage in so important a task as learning something.