Remembering the purpose of education
Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P.
What is the point of education?
It is a question students sometimes ask in low moments, but the ancient Greeks would have phrased the question differently. They would have asked, what is the end of education? What is its telos? Where is it heading? Phrased like that, the question becomes positive, even inspiring.
And they would have asked it in the context of a broader question: what is the end of human existence? The simple answer to that complicated question, Aristotle said, was happiness or human flourishing.1 For humans to be happy and flourish, we need the best that education can give us: not qualifications or even knowledge but wisdom or, to give it its Greek name, sophia.2
But who is Sophia? What is wisdom?
We need a whole lifetime to answer that question, so for the time being we will limit ourselves to saying that wisdom is an understanding of the whole of reality.3 Modern education tends to fragment knowledge into separate subjects, separate lessons, and separate pieces of information which are learned for exams and then discarded. But that’s not how it should be. In Stratford Caldecott’s wise words, “The fragmentation of education into disciplines teaches us that the world is made of bits we can use and consume as we choose. This fragmentation is a denial of ultimate meaning. Contemporary education therefore tends to the elimination of meaning—except in the sense of a meaning that we impose by force upon the world.”4
Another way of understanding wisdom is suggested by this piece of ancient poetry:
Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her,
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
He who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
for he will find her sitting at his gates.
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding,
and he who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her,
and she graciously appears to them in them in their paths,
and meets them in every thought.5
The word he used was eudaimonia, which is difficult to translate into English. The process by which Aristotle arrived at this answer is at least as interesting as the answer itself. Have a look at his Nicomachean Ethics if you want to find out more.
So philosophy is the love of wisdom. See Out of the Classroom and Into the World: how to transform Catholic education, Chapter 3, for more on wisdom as the end of education. See also Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the value of school.
See The Thomistic Institute’s ‘Science and the Search for Wisdom’
Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education.
The Wisdom of Solomon: 6:12-16