The Right Kind of Education

Education is not job training. It is the cultivation of wisdom and the preparation of the individual to be virtuous through the long task of transferring the knowledge, traditions, and mores of one generation to the next.  This is important to recognize for at least three reasons.

Humanely Skilled

First is the obvious reason that an intelligent and highly-skilled physicist without values, for example, results in the human experiments that took place in the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Poland. The ancients taught us this much—the only thing that will bridle science is the sacred—and so did C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he said, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” A liberally educated person doesn’t just ask can we do this?, he asks should we do this?

Autodidactic

Second, someone with a liberal education can typically learn just about any skill a (liberally) uneducated person can learn, and often more easily because he’s learned how to think well: how to dissimulate information, cultivate understanding, and apply wisdom, as a way of being. And, if given access to the right information, he can usually learn that skill, autodidactically. In other words, the more valuable kind of education is the kind of education that teaches one how to be rather than how to do. A liberally educated person asks what kind of person should I be? instead of merely asking what kind of job should I do?

Rational and Artistic

Finally, a liberally educated person sees the world as an integrated whole rather than a collection of random and unrelated parts. For this reason, the liberally educated person is able to maintain his wonder and curiosity, and his desire to pursue that which is true, good, and beautiful; whereas, the person simply trained to do a job often takes a very utilitarian view of his work and of the world. In other words, having the right kind of education, says Stratford Caldecott, enables “a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it.” A liberally educated person loves math and science not only for their practical and certain applications but also because their forms are beautiful and their functions are delightful. Put another way, one shouldn’t be surprised to find a liberally educated person writing a poem about the quadratic equation.