Education is indicative of a fact tried and constantly tested by sundry of mankind’s experiences: that man is an imperfect and unfinished being. All philosophies, religions, sciences, and cultures testify to this. Man is something that has to be perfected and completed. The main goal of education is, therefore, to perfect and complete man. But an irresistible question mercilessly obtrudes: by what can man become perfect and complete?1
Thus begins the chapter on humanistic and, what St. Justin Popovich calls, theanthropic education. The question he poses is one that must be answered by all of those who teach:
What is the purpose of education? What is the purpose to what I am doing?
There is an overemphasis on the wrong kind of education in our culture. Our educational system was shaped by the Prussian model (which will be addressed in another article), which has as some of its primary goals behavioral conditioning and the deadening of imagination. These goals are problematic for many reasons. For one reason, it is a system not based on timeless classical education but finds social Darwinism as its comfy bedfellow. Even if the Prussian model being inextricably bound up with the likes of Spencer et al doesn’t cause a disturbance in your soul, it is nonetheless a system created by man, and all of man’s creations are imperfect because mankind has yet to reach perfection. As St. Justin said, all of man’s philosophies, religions and cultures testify to the imperfection of mankind. This implies that these systems of belief and traditions are in-themselves incomplete and imperfect. There have always existed different approaches on the role of secular education for Christians. Sts. Basil and Gregory believed in the “two paths” of education, the church and the academy–the former even wrote a treatise in the defense of a correct use of Hellenic (pagan, secular) literature. This treatise has been held in high regard and has set the standard for how the Church is to read texts outside the Christian tradition. However, there are warnings from Church Fathers such as St. Isaac the Syrian2 and St. Gregory Palamas3 that secular education can be harmful to salvation, even though both of these giants of the Church were well educated. The question, therefore, is what form education should take, and what should be the very content that education?
This blog has often written concerning the importance of reading literature, both realist and fantastical, both mythic and philosophic. The key to reading such texts is to read them with the Orthodox phronema.
In upcoming articles, we will flesh out both the form and content of education that should be happening at the parish level and within the home.
- St. Justin Popovich, Man and the God-Man (Alhambra, CA, Sebastian Press)
- For St. Isaac all knowledge is subsumed under higher knowledge, that is knowledge of God, theoria, all other human knowledge does not aid in one’s salvation. This idea is found especially in Homily 1 in his Ascetical Homilies.
- This can be found throughout St. Gregory’s answer to Question 1 in the First Triad