The Chief Motive of Education
What is Education For? - Pt.1
Ironically, educators spend exorbitant amounts of money every year to pay for an education they intend to use to help educate others. Unfortunately, far too many of these same educators complete their studies ignorant of, or confused about, the meaning of education.
I realize some will find my claim arrogant or completely philistine, as the consensus today is to view education the same way some view democracy or justice, an “essentially contested concept,” in which people differ considerably. “Each to their own,” said the old lady as she kissed the cow!
And while classical Christian educators are typically far more adept to the meaning of education, there is still much disparity between statements of purpose and expressed methods of teaching among our ranks. (And that doesn’t include the many novel schools popping up calling themselves classical and/or Christian who are actually neither.)
To be sure, not all diversity in pedagogy or curricula is necessarily a bad thing. In many cases, there is more than one way to cook beans. But I’m convinced a lot of educational novelty merely serves as a public service announcement that heralds an institution’s ignorance of the meaning of education.
I assure you my claim, bold as it may be, is rooted in something much deeper than a high assessment of my own intellectual prowess or my preferential taste for a particular pedagogy. My claim for the meaning of education is founded on the nature of the cosmos, the nature of the human soul, and the nature of the Trinitarian God who created both, as revealed in Scripture.
Before reading further, I would invite you to indulge me by trying this simple exercise.
In one, or two sentences at most, write down the meaning of education—not necessarily the definition, but the meaning. The distinction I’m making between definition and meaning here is the difference between C. S. Lewis’s definition of a star and the meaning of a star as articulated in the conversation between Eustace and Ramandu.
Eustace: “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
Ramandu: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
I’ll wait…
The following is one of my favorite descriptions because of the manner in which it captures in a single (albeit complex) sentence so much of what education means.
Donald Cowan, the former president of the University of Dallas, gives the meaning of education this way:
The chief educational motive is the imaginative act we call learning; the chief educational responsibility is the perpetuation and extension of culture.1
There is a lot to unpack here but let’s begin by breaking down his explanation for the meaning of education into two distinct aspects: motive and responsibility.
In today’s post, I’ll treat the former, and in next week’s post, I’ll treat the latter.
The Motive of Education
The chief motive of education is learning, a process Cowan calls the imaginative act.
An act implies there is action or activity involved—learning is not merely passive—and the modifier informs us that the activity is the imaginative sort. Learning, then, is “the action or process of acquiring knowledge, understanding, or skill which leads to the modification of behavior or the acquisition of new abilities or responses.”2
Cowan’s explanation suggests that learning requires the faculty of the imagination to be used and developed. But a problem arises when we realize that in modernity the imagination has largely been mistreated in one of two ways.
The rationalists tend to subjugate the faculty of the imagination into the service of the faculty of reason. The postmodernists, whose philosophical great-grandparents are the Romantics, tend to divorce imagination from reason and elevate it to a status of pantheistic divinity. The problem with the former is a proclivity to mechanize the cosmos; and, the problem with the latter is that it advocates for the delusion that we can create new meaning ex nihilo.
In a classical Christian framework, learning is a dynamic process in which the imagination serves alongside reason to make sense of reality, including by means of sub-creative activity. Assumed here, but so far unstated, and not to be developed any further in this post, faith is the ballroom floor where the dance between imagination and reason takes place. Understood properly, we will easily see how the cultivation of imagination is essential to human flourishing. Here are just a few examples:
10 Ways Imagination is Essential to Learning
Learning as an imaginative act requires students to envision concepts and ideas that extend beyond their immediate experience. They endeavor to “see" abstractions in their mind’s eye (e.g., mathematical relationships, historical narratives, etc.).
Learning as an imaginative act means students build what some have called “mental models” of how things work. These models are integrated categories of thought that foster problem-solving and allow for the application of knowledge in new contexts (e.g., learning to write a research paper can provide categories of thought or mental models for negotiating a job interview, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, or rebuilding the motor in a car).
Similar to the previous example, learning as an imaginative act allows for the synthesis of disparate ideas so students are able to form new connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. This is the foundation for sub-creativity or innovation e.g., Tolkien’s example in On Fairy Stories where he says,
When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.
Learning as an imaginative act also involves reinterpreting familiar concepts in light of new information. This is the process whereby new information transforms a student’s understanding and reshapes or deepens his perspective of reality (e.g., planets orbiting the earth implies a certain meaning about our place in the cosmos, but discovering moons orbit Jupiter reshaped and deepened man’s understanding of the cosmos).
Learning as an imaginative act is philosophical. It enables students to visualize scenarios, hypotheses, and outcomes. Thus, one learns to envision what could be, which is just as important as understanding what is (e.g., What would the world look like if…?).
Since humans discover, relate, and connect through stories, learning as an imaginative act implies students will craft and interpret narratives—whether historical, fictional, or personal—by engaging the imagination to organize and find meaning in information (e.g., reading, textual criticism, socratic discussions about texts, etc.).
Closely related to the previous imaginative act, learning requires students to venture into the unknown, where imaginative courage is required to explore questions and mysteries without immediate answers. Plato suggested inquiry and elenchus was itself a means of learning, even when certainty about a conclusion could not be reached (e.g., Plato’s dialogues).
Since learning is often facilitated by experimentation, learning as an imaginative act implies playfulness. The imagination thrives in play; it allows the student to explore and experiment with ideas in a low-stakes environment, leading to deeper understanding of reality. Theatre and drama extending all the way down to children’s games of make-believe are just some examples of this kind of play.
Learning as an imaginative act allows students to apprehend and appreciate beauty. Whether it’s the elegance of a mathematical proof or the artistry of a poem or painting, students must "see" beyond the surface components of the artifact (e.g., sonnet or lyric, acrylic or oil, etc.) to grasp deeper significance.
Finally, as Classical Christian Education emphasizes the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), which involves not only acquiring knowledge (grammar) and deriving meaning from the relationships between facts (logic), but also expressing it wisely and eloquently (rhetoric), learning as an imaginative act is key to embodying and communicating learned truths effectively.
Next week, I’ll tackle the second aspect of the meaning of education as Cowan provided it—its chief responsibility.
Donald Cowan, Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age, (The Dallas Institute Publications: Dallas, TX), 1988, vii.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “learning (n.), sense 1.a-1.b,” December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8652315039 and https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9256142066.