Back to School

The last post was a bit much, I know.  “It took you long enough to get around to it,” I hear you say. “You asked one little question and yet it took you a good 1300 words to establish one conclusion. Couldn't you have skipped all that stuff in the middle?“

And I apologize for this extended meditation. But people, I find, sometimes balk at Catholics who quote pat answers from the Baltimore Catechism, so I decided that it might be prudent, illuminating, possibly inspiring, to journey the road that leads up to the simple (and true) answer.

Also, I wanted to explore the idea of the relational identity of the human person, because I have a feeling that “relation” and “relationship” and finally “communion” will be the watchwords of this blog, and a vital preoccupation of my home education endeavor.

But let’s get to it, shall we?

What have we learned?

That the end of education is:

to equip the individual to fulfill her end, namely 

“to know, to love, and to serve God.”

But how does education accomplish this end? If education is the “act or process of imparting or acquiring…knowledge,” then what knowledge should be taught? What must be learned? As I muse on these questions three types or rough categories of knowledge seem to suggest themselves: 

1. what I will call the “useful” knowledge,

2. “liberal” knowledge and

3. holiness, or the “knowledge” of virtue.

“Useful” education I define as the imparting of knowledge necessary for survival. For survival—life, existence itself—is the basic good, upon which all other goods depend. The end of man might be “to know, to love, and to serve God,” but he cannot know, love or serve unless he first exists. So a child must be taught to survive, and to survive independently, survive in the society in which she was born. This aspect of education then includes first and foremost imparting to the child the knowledge necessary to acquire  food and shelter, and therefore includes the development of skills (professional, etc.) aimed to accomplish this goal. It also, I would argue, includes what we would call “socialization,” in that the child must learn to speak the language of her native place and function in its structure.

Useful knowledge is necessary in the most basic sense, as we all can agree, but just because it flows from necessity does not mean that it cannot aspire to beauty in its own right. Humans possess the ability to turn necessity into art: culinary art, architecture, and gardening, to name but a few. Animals are perfectly able to procure food and shelter their young, but only people can make a meal a work of art, only people can create a home which is also, in its union of function and form, a thing of beauty.

“Art is the signature of man,” Chesterton argues.

But this ability suggests a further type of knowledge, a knowledge that is not only useful, that points beyond mere survival, and is able to inform our daily and necessary toil. This is the knowledge of “the good, the true, and the beautiful;” the philosophers call it “liberal.”

*NOTE: not technically knowledge in the sense that Newman uses it, but formation of heart and of will, it is the will working in cooperation with divine grace to use knowledge in service of God and man.