What is Education?
In Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott looks at education through the lens of sacramental faith. Several definitions of education are sprinkled throughout. These provoke us to consider the many aspects of education, which is often reduced from a multi-faceted gem to an easily-dismissed pebble. Education is, among other things:
Waking Great Questions
Education at its best deals in great questions. Not only the existential questions of mankind, like “Who am I?” “What is my purpose?” “How and why do I have being?”, but the nitty-gritty questions of life and interaction with Creation. “What is the role of an ‘image of God’ within the created order?” “How does my becoming affect the world?” “How is a Catholic (teacher, artist, , accountant,…) different?” “What is the meaning of the order we find in living beings, the Fibonnaci series, the Platonic solids, the Table of Elements, the Liturgical cycles?”
Becoming More Your True Self
Unless education is a context that supports a student in becoming more fully realized, it does him a disservice. Unless it directs a student toward his eternal destiny, virtue, obedience to God’s authority, it leaves him flat. Unless it draws him beyond his current capabilities, and toward freedom, it leaves him impotent.
Becoming Capable of Theology and Philosophy
We don’t just fill a student with true content. We help build in him an infrastructure that supports his openness to and resonance with Truth. We cultivate his capacity to receive, to surrender to Beauty, and his power to move toward what draws him up and forward.
Becoming Courteous
Good education involves the expectation and practice of common courtesy. The forms (formal invitation and response s’il vous plait, thank-you notes, introductions of persons, returning borrowed books, taking turns in conversation, for examples) are practice for liturgical life. They empty unless continually refreshed by the higher meaning they are meant to carry into the meaning-starved world. They are practice for freedom.
Systematic Ordering of the Soul
Education is not a haphazard wait for the emergence of a fully formed being, but a cooperation with the design of the human person who, through various stages, pursues growth in correspondence with both his interior and exterior realities. Classical education arose from consideration of both natural growth patterns and high ideals, and proceeds systematically from an organic poetic stage, toward a formal capacity to wield words well and beautifully. In the natural stages of human becoming are seen patterns for the ordered movement by Man to appropriate all things and to be structured by Reality. Christianity further develops the notion of virtue to include “growing up in all things unto Christ,” and calls man into creative responsibility for reality.
Pursuit of Integrity – True Freedom
Rather than aiming toward a far-off goal, education aims toward the person’s own growing freedom as its constantly-being-realized goal. We don’t turn out a product at the end of a manufacturing process. A free and well-integrated person emerges in the movement between our calling him toward high ideals and his own struggle to appropriate and respond to reality. This movement, and his growing power of self-possession, is supported by and cooperating with the unceasing action of Love upon his soul.
Learning to Perceive the Logic of Creation
The world exists to call man to himself. He is meant to rise into his full stature by means of interaction with reality that begins in sensory contact and awakens his questions, his reasoning, and his ability to interest himself in Creation’s logos, discovery, exploration, finding answers, and applying what he learns. As he knows, he helps to realize the world. Creation awaited the coming of Christ with longing for the restored human person, who was meant to exercise his reason to fully realize it as his beloved domain.
Pursuit of Integrity – True Freedom
As students are educated in the use of good judgment, they grow more and more capable of acting in true freedom. Not left to their own whims, they learn to reason with the mind of the Church – in correspondence with what is True, Beautiful, and Good. The transcendental ideals, the provocation of reality, the demands of social belonging, and the struggle to express unique and unrepeatable individuality all must be integrated through, in, as the human person. He is thus made free to inhabit the full ‘territory’ of Self, to live in communion with Christ and His Body, the Church, and to serve the world as free agent of the living Lord.
Education is NOT SCHOOL
Caldecott offers several other definitions of education: becoming acquainted with the highest realities, becoming able to endure the sight of being, learning to love what is beautiful, developing harmony of the soul, learning to think, speak and write. In all, we see that education cannot happen at school! It begins in the womb, the home, contact with Creation, conversation, and the Sacramental life of the Church.
School is an opportunity for the formal structuring of time and demands to pivot a developing child into a self-aware adulthood of full engagement with reality, lifelong learning, and contribution to culture. It is necessarily narrow, formal, limited, tight, tough, strictured, structured. School, like Church, like Liturgy, is not free to be everything, but is a form – a very specific something – designed to help make students free for everything. School, at its best, is a work of art.
Charlotte Ostermann is a Founding Board Member for CASPN. She shares more of her work on Substack: look for her newsletter, Living Poet.