Contrary to many discussions about education, focused as they are upon the latest method or the newest technique, the proper place to begin is not with the means but with a renewed understanding of the end of education. So then, let us ask, what is the end of education?
To discover the answer to this most important question we are driven to deeper questions, more inconvenient ones like: why are we here? What is the purpose of life? How do I become good? Within the Western Tradition many thinkers have addressed these questions.
In short, those answers are summed up in the idea of happiness and the good life. These ideas are beyond this post, but I want to draw our attention to the connection between happiness and virtue, namely, without virtue there is no happiness. Reflection on this point brings out the problem and disfunction of our age. We've divorced truth and happiness, knowledge and morality, success and goodness and the results are a morally confused society that has lost its roots; insert a million statistics here on the ills of our society or just pick up a newspaper for proof.
So then, I start in a discussion of our nature, and thus our end. In the tradition of the West, happiness is the end of human existence. How does one attain this end? Saint Thomas wrote that, “Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will.” So, if man can attain to virtue and virtue has to do with being happy, then we must understand what virtue is. Virtue is essentially about right living and to live rightly we need to be taught. Who will teach us virtue, for we aren't born with it? No wayfarer finds his way in this valley of tears without the wisdom of a good guide.
Now virtue is not just mere information; we cannot download it into our heads, or acquire it like a product or through three easy steps. Virtue is that knowledge of the ends which equip us with the power to discern the right course of action for the right reasons. Like the vinedresser who knows the telos of the vine and who could walk into my backyard, look at my grapevine, and immediately tell me what is right and wrong with my vine and what to do about it, so too the virtuous person can look at culture and life and discern where we are flourishing, where we are floundering and what to do about it. Virtue is vision. Without virtue we are blind and unable to find our way. In an illuminating and ironic aside, I have heard many students over the years explain, thinking it profound, “Life is journey not a destination!” But who wants to go on a journey without a destination? I say, usually sarcastically, that without a destination it wouldn’t be a journey –it is called being lost! As Virgil led Dante through Hell to Purgatory, and thereby prepared Dante to journey on his own to that ultimate destination, Paradiso, so education is that guide on the journey to the only good, true and beautiful destination – the happiness of man in the City of God.
In this essay, Part 1 of 2, I wanted to direct our attention onto the end of education, not the means. I tried to say that the end of education must be related to the end of man, that is, happiness. Happiness, as traditionally conceived, is connected with being virtuous; therefore, to attain our human end we must get virtue. It is this end that education must lead to. In Part 2, I'd like to discuss HOW we might engage in this project, this kind of education in virtue.
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ReplyDeleteI corrected a few grammatical mistakes and added a word or two to your essay.
I think your focus onto the end is right on and your connecting that end with the end of human life is also little understood these days. 'School' is thought of as where a student goes to begin learning skills necessary, ultimately, to land a job or a career, and that, it is thought, is the end of education (in more ways than one!). I think it is a misunderstanding, therefore, of human nature and development, that clouds the eye even of a passionate educational reformer. The misunderstanding is that 'education' is something done primarily to the head. It is, as you suggest, aimed at information distribution or training students how to acquire needed information.
'School' however doesn't exhaust education, where education is just that part of a person's development whereby he comes of age, to possess the capacity to conform to reason. And to conform to reason *is* to conform to the end and goal of human life, just as you suggest. The process whereby a child, unable to conform to reason on its own, and by which it is brought nearer and nearer to his independence and self-direction is nothing other than parenting. Now of course there is higher education and there is apprenticeship, but those are not necessary for every person to acquire happiness.