Meditations for Layfolks - Education

To educate is, as the Latin origin of the word implies, to draw out; it does not mean to pour in. Education and information are not the same things; nor should they ever be confused. To acquire knowledge means merely to absorb into our mental store a large amount of facts; even to retain such a knowledge, with the facts set in the right order and related to each other as causes or effects or occasions, may signify nothing more than a wonderful power of memory. It may be, indeed, a means of education; thus people are often described as being well educated, when they are merely well informed. To have read enormously and to be able to quote bits of classical authors may or may not be helps to education: in themselves these things are certainly not education. We cannot say of a man that his historical education has been completed when he has acquired a large list of dates and names, and can even draw maps; nor would the knowledge of a single period necessarily imply education. Even to have collected all this material, and to have fanned the imagination into flame with the grandeur and humour of the detailed past, and to have made the reason follow a whole chain of causes and effects in the prolonged account of some movement in history, do not constitute historical education, unless there has been produced in the mind a corresponding reaction. For education is not to pour in, but to draw out.

Education, then, to be worthy of the name, means that I have found in my soul all sorts of unexplored regions, tendencies, principles, yearnings, instincts, desires, hitherto unrealized and undeveloped. They lay there, dumbly felt, beating vainly against the bars of the soul, but utterly unable to give an account of themselves or to express themselves intelligently. They had found no language, were obscure; but by dint of training I find the meaning of myself and so of all the world. The huge and clumsy progress of the race, which we set out in scientific order under the name of history, may help me; the intricacies of translation, the beauties of art; but these are no use until something within me has responded to their call. Thus Socrates went about asking questions, getting his hearers to understand their own thoughts and to take the trouble to search the meaning of the words most frequently on their lips. Hence, too, religious education must be something after that fashion, if it is to justify its own name. Lists of Hebrew Kings, lists even of Commandments, Beatitudes, Deadly Sins, Sacraments, are not education in themselves. The knowledge of them may make us learned in our faith, which is a good thing in itself; but a true religious education must be discovered in the heart and developed, not poured into it from outside. Frequently in Catholic schools the children who get the prizes are not the ones who most live their faith afterwards. Hence to repeat education, religious or otherwise, is deeper than mere information.

I have, therefore, to realize that religious education has no age limits. I cannot suppose that because I have passed out from school or college, that my education has thereby finished. The principles, the direct guiding lines of life, ought to have been taught me from a consideration of myself. But that is merely the beginning of miracles. From that I must set out through all my days developing what is within me; trying to grasp the meaning of the motions of my soul. Thus my education will cease only with life if, indeed, it will cease even then: shall I not through all eternity be discover ing with unending surprise the depths and heights of my own created nature? The Beatific Vision means surely a more intimate know ledge not of God only, but, in consequence, of myself also. This education of mine must be effected by reading, by writing (at least for my own benefit, and for the making my ideas more clear), by conversation, above all by contemplation. To find the meaning of faith I must look within: the truth of the doctrine and its most accurate expression I shall learn from the Church, but its value I must learn from myself. I must examine under the light of infallible authority my own longings, hopes, aspirations, and find them answered or explained in the Creed. I must not only absorb the articles of the faith and be able to repeat them, but must discover them hinted at and suggested by my own human nature. For the light of God "enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world" not, indeed, as though Catholic doctrine could be achieved by mere natural knowledge, but because my soul itself has been supernaturalized.

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.