Midnight Thought: Education

(I am much indebted to Richard Mitchell and his book, The Gift of Fire, for my thoughts on education.)

I have come to the conclusion that education is simultaneously much more difficult and also much simpler than we tend to think. What makes a man educated? Is a man educated if he's a mathematical genius but a perfect barbarian at the dinner table? Is a man educated if his manners are aristocratic in their perfection but he can't tell a Greek temple from a pagoda? Or is the educated man someone who is both socially adept and has studied some of history and some of science? Is that man educated?

I think all of these are inadequate tests for education. I think so because I do not think that education is, in its essence, about learning facts or skills. Education, at its most fundamental level, is a sort of alignment. You don't climb toward an education as if it were at the top of a ladder of lectures. I prefer to think of education in terms of magnets. Bits of steel, as you know, become magnets when their randomly pointed molecules uniformly align themselves. You might say that steel learns to become a magnet, not by having anything added to it, but by rearranging itself. This is how a piece of metal learns to attract other bits of metal; this is how a piece of metal learns to love (if you'll indulge me in my use of this word).

What I mean to say is that I think that education is about learning to love. But love is large, and being such a large activity, it brings other activities along with it. For instance, it is often said that love is blind. This is nonsense. Infatuation is blind, raw desire is blind, but love is neither of these things. It is impossible to love something you do not know. Someone might argue that it is possible to love someone that you do not know very well. No, it is possible to imagine that you love someone that you do not know very well, but upon close inspection, you will find that that which you think you love is only a reflection of yourself. Because it is impossible to love that which you don't know, your imagination will compensate for your ignorance and you will find yourself staring into your love's face, only to find that her face is a mirror.

I must make a brief distinction before I continue. I am using the word love broadly and with a variety of different meanings. The clever reader will point out that I am drawing false parallels by using 'love' to mean a natural attraction one moment, and then using it again in an erotic or romantic sense. I, however, do not think this is a false parallel for the following reason: both loves are, at their roots, a type of desire for and toward a specific end. So although I use love to mean different sorts of love, I cannot see how it is possible to separate them entirely and call one 'carrots' and the other 'Tuesday.' They are related.

Love then, is not blind, but requires close attention. You often know best the persons you love most. Love studies. This is why I believe that love is the root of education. Let me clarify further by explaining directly what I believe an educated man to be.

A perfectly educated man is a man who loves everything perfectly. That is, he loves nothing too much and loves nothing too little. He hates nothing which should not be hated and hates everything that should. A perfectly educated man loves himself only as much as he should, and no more. But this means that he must also know himself if he is to love himself, and he must know himself fully if he is to know how much to love himself. He must know that in himself which is good and he must know that in himself which is evil. The irony is that a perfectly educated man would also be a perfect man, and a perfect man has no evil. But the nearly educated man is an imperfect man, and he sees with imperfect eyes the monstrosity of his imperfection. The perfect man loves as he should and knows it. The nearly educated man knows that he does not love as he should, and weeps. The uneducated man thinks himself educated and good--not perfect, he's far too enlightened to imagine himself perfect. Only a perfect fool imagines himself perfect, but every uneducated man imagines himself to be acceptably good, adequately good, moderately good.

Of course, the (nearly educated) Christian immediately recognizes the irony of the uneducated man's position. Good is perfect. Imperfection added to perfection is imperfection. Move the bar one notch down from goodness and we immediately discover evil.

I must clarify something, lest I be accused of arrogance. The nearly educated man is not higher than the uneducated man. I call the nearly educated man 'nearly educated' because he has discovered something that the uneducated man has not: that he is uneducated. As soon as an uneducated man discovers that he is uneducated, he is nearly educated. Half of the education is in discovering that you haven't got it.

This brief post is woefully inadequate to convey all that I mean (which is also why I'm writing a novel on the subject), but I hope that it has perhaps caused you to think again about that which you have already thought. To summarize, education is about love, and love is about everything else. True education is learning to be good, not learning how to multiply and divide. Learning to multiply and divide will come as a natural consequence of loving and seeking that which deserves love and attention. A man who loves the universe as he ought will also love its ordered chaos, and his drive to understand it will lead him to math.