Only the educated mind is at home in the universe. A very crude example will make clear what I am trying to say. The human eye is very beautiful—in the human face. Put that same eye on a plate, and though in one sense it can be investigated more closely and thoroughly, it has lost its beauty and even its significance. A being who knew only eyes and not faces would not even know eyes. A being who knew masses of facts about each feature separately but did not know how the features were arranged in a human face, could imagine only a nightmare and no face.
The process of education thus requires two elements. First, the mind must see the universe of being as a totality, with all its constituents in right relation to one another. It does not know everything but it knows where everything is. Second, there must be the study of individual things. Given such a total view as has been described, then every new piece of knowledge is an enrichment.
But here again a careful distinction must be made: The new knowledge is of educational value not simply as an item known, adding one to the total of items remembered. Nothing is more instructive than to dig out the question—papers of old examinations—the examinations we passed in our youth. Usually we find that we do not know the answers; often enough we do not so much as know what the questions mean. Yet we knew once; we spent long years in acquiring the knowledge; education could not have proceeded without it. Education, then, is arrived at by learning things most of which we are destined ineluctably to forget, and this is not as wasteful as it might seem. Even the thing forgotten may be of high educational value.
Even if the individual fact or event or set of words in which that speck of being was clothed be forgotten, it is a great thing that the mind should thus have fed upon it. Fortunately we do not forget everything. Our minds hold on to certain truths, and the store of these increases. New relations of things are seen and new depths, carrying the mind further toward that right relation to all that is, which is its own special perfection.
What happens in the mind is educational. The really valuable knowledge is not that of which we can say, “On such a day, in such a book, I learnt this.” Facts can be shoved into the mind like books into a bag—and as usefully. Push in as many books as you please and the bag has still gained nothing
All that happens is that it bulges. A bag is no better for all that it has carried. Heads can similarly bulge from the mere mass of facts known but not assimilated into the mind’s substance. A phenomenon the student will have noticed, at first incredulously but with a growing callousness as the years pass, is that very learned people are often utter fools. And far from this being a paradox, one sees how it happens; so far from learning and foolishness being incompatible, they are frequently bedfellows. There is no fool like the learned fool.
A mind which merely takes in facts without assimilating them can obviously take in far more of them, since it can devote to learning new facts that time which better minds devote to nourishing themselves upon the old.
The man who rightly sees the whole will gain an enormous amount from a mere handful of individual things known. It cannot too often be repeated that the man who knows only the individual things will not know even them, for he will not know their context.
What then is this knowledge of the totality, and who can impart it? I was once talking on these matters at a teachers’ college, and, arrived at this point, I said that for the total view which education demands one must know God; the air chilled instantly; plainly the educators I was addressing were disappointed in me. What, they felt, had God to do with education? Education was a matter for specialists. Yet two things seem to me clear—that unless we rightly see God, we have no true view of the totality, and that one who does not believe in God is by that very fact stating the sheer impossibility of a total view and so of education itself.
For the theist, the matter hardly needs stating. God is not simply the supreme Being, enthroned at the apex of all that is, in such wise that the universe may be conceived as so many strata of being from the lowest to the highest and God over all. If that were so one might conceive of a true study of the lower strata which should take no account of God. But the truth is that God is at the very center of all things whatsoever.
They come into existence only because he creates them; they remain in existence only because he sustains them. To omit God, therefore, from your study of things is to omit the one being that explains them. You begin your study of things by making them inexplicable! Further, all things are made not only by God but for God; in that lies their purpose and the relation of each thing to all others. For the believer in God, therefore, a view of the universe unrelated to God is a chaos far worse than a vision of features unrelated to a face.
This truth, which to the theist is a positive reason for knowing God, that education may be a possibility, is for the atheist a sad condition making education impossible. If there be no mind directing the whole universe of being, then there is no universe, no totality. There is only a constantly fluctuating sum of individual things, accidental in their very origin (since no mind brought them into being), purposeless (since no mind meant them for anything and accidents have no purpose), a drift of things drifting nowhere. Nothing can be known save out of its context, for there is no context.
But the place of God in our view of the totality of things—and so of education—is not simply a matter of recognizing him as first cause and last end and sustainer in being more intimate to each being than it is to itself; there is also his revelation of the purpose for which he made man—not simply that he made man for himself but just what this involves in terms of man’s being and action. This question of purpose is a point overlooked in most educational discussion, yet it is quite primary. How can you fit a man’s mind for living if you do not know what the purpose of man’s life is? You can have no reasonable understanding of any activity—living as a totality or any of its departments—if you do not know its purpose.
You do not even know what is good or bad for a man till you know the purpose of his existence, for this is the only test of goodness or badness—if a thing helps a man in the achievement of the purpose for which he exists, then it is good for him; if not, it is bad. And the one quite certain way to kind out the purpose of anything is to ask its maker. Otherwise you can only guess.
The Catholic knows that man has a Maker and that the Maker has said what he made man for. Therefore, not of himself but by the revelation of God, the Catholic knows the purpose of human life, and, if he be an educator, he has the answer to this primary question. He may be a thoroughly bad educator—perhaps through being like so many of us a born fool—but he has the first requirement. For the life of me I cannot see how anyone else can have it or can even think he has it.