Luceat!

As we continue our quest for the answer to the purpose of education, I would like to take a step back and ask how one becomes educated.  I don’t aim to become too philosophical here and enter into an array of pointless definitions.  What I do intend is to strike at the heart of the desire for knowledge.

There are many reasons why a person desires education.  They could want a good job, they could love knowledge, or they could see how it would lead them to have much power and honor.  But those who seek riches, power, and honor will become misguided in their educational pursuits.

Education must be directed towards the common good!  We must realize that we are created as communal beings that within in our own nature desire to share the good in which we explore or achieve.  If you look at the university today, what you will mostly find is professors who care more about their own particular research the forming the minds of their young pupils.

We have drifted from the original plan for knowledge that we were created for.  This we see in the beginning, as Adam and Eve sin consist in taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  We desire to posses knowledge that will bring us powers and make us little gods among men.  In this pursuit of self seeking knowledge, we begin to fade from the foundational virtues needed to become well educated: docility and humility.

Today, we live in a time of scholarly ambition that leads people to saying anything to back up their “original finding.”  We have forgotten the past and the tradition of the men who came before us.  GK Chesterton once said, “Tradition is the democracy of the dead.”  We have put on hopes in a progressive individualism that is leading people into scholarly arrogance.

We will never be able to build a society upon arrogance or individualism. Both of these vices are detrimental to society and the common good.  They lead to destruction, unhappiness, and division.  Our hope is setting tradition as the foundational stone in which to build our progressive pursuits.  There is no doubt that we need progress and new developments in all fields imaginable, but these pursuits must be based in the truths of the past.

With the docility and humility on our side, we become true pupils that offer our minds to the common good and the development of a good and health society.  It no longer becomes about the “I” but the “We.”  This “We” is what we need to help form a healthy educational center in our culture.  We must pull together with the voices of the past and the hope of the future for the sake of the well-being on the world.