Education: Principles

What is it that constitutes education? What ought the focus to be? We have lost sight of the foundations we once saw so clearly, and our thoughts have turned to shallow, egalitarian pursuits, which should on their very face be contradictory to good education. Education, in its nature, is discriminatory. It is based upon the idea that the better is preferable to the worse, that knowledge and understanding are goods to be pursued. Now, though, we see more than anything a desire for sameness. The structure of the school system is geared towards achieving equality among the students. Rather than pushing each student to excel as much as possible, we push each student to reach the same goal. To make this possible, we set that goal so low that the very worst students may reach it, and then require the bright minds in the classroom to slog along drearily through topics that they mastered upon hearing. This problem exists in private schools as well as public; it is structural. The best intentioned of teachers, the most Catholic of schools, still struggle to overcome this basic egalitarian structure. And so those inquiring minds, who could swallow algebra and geometry whole, who read classical literature for fun because it is intelligent, literate, and substantive, these minds are stifled by boredom and left to rot on the wayside of the highway to sameness.

A properly educated child is a dangerous weapon. A boy, once taught to read, will soon discover worlds of adventure laid at his doorstep – if, that is, he can escape the hatred of reading instilled in him by the politically correct, empty hogwash forced down his gullet by a system that does not want him to be a man. Tales of adventures, of heroism and fair maids, of treasures and scoundrels, will inspire him to be a man to match his heroes. Indeed he runs the risk of misbehaving horribly and turning into something not at all effeminate. Worse, this love of reading may wax non-discriminate, and his wandering eye may fall on some volume that contains more profound ideas and fewer adventures. He might perhaps read it without proper supervision by an amateur expert in interpretation, and he might, just might, form his own ideas without regard to what everyone else in the class is told to think!

Likewise a girl might discover that there is beauty in being feminine. She will perhaps find in Mary the ultimate model of a mother. She may read Jane Austen without being told how horridly sexist her novels were. She may expect men to be men, rather than wishing they were girls. She runs the risk, terrible indeed, of wanting to conform to traditional gender roles, because she recognizes that in being a woman she is fulfilling a unique and precious place in the world, one which will earn her the respect, admiration, and love of every man worthy of the name.

Words are dangerous, for they convey ideas. There is a reason that education once centered around Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Language is the means by which ideas are exchanged. A word written speaks through time. The dead cry out to the living, saying, “Look, here is truth, here is beauty, here is wisdom.” Through reading we learn to think about meanings. Reading alone is not sufficient, though, for many of the dead and living lie. We must learn to discriminate between truth and falsehood. We must learn to take the good because it is good, and to leave the bad because it is bad. Usually, we take the bad because we are told it is good, and leave the good because we are told it is bad. Arithmetic (and ultimately higher mathematics) is vital to education because it teaches one to think with discrimination, to discern proof from sophistry, to know that begging the question is not a valid argument, and to reason about truth from first principles. A mind that devours inputs as a child’s will must be well-ordered. A well-ordered mind is capable, not only of absorbing old ideas, but of forming new ones; not only of reasoning about truth, but of expressing that truth to others in words. A child who reads and thinks clearly can, in turn, cry out to future generations, “See, here is the truth, here are beauty and goodness.”

Anima Christi, sanctifica me.