Education as Orientation
One of the most important questions a man can ask is, “What do I love?” For in understanding what he loves, he understands what he is ultimately oriented toward, and if he fails to understand the things, people, and pleasures that habituate him, he fails to understand how he is being shaped in the world. If the goal of life is ultimately to come to love that which is true, good, and beautiful, then the highest good one can pursue is the right orientation to those proper goods. Education, as was understood for the longest time, shapes the mind so that the heart can rightly know what is true. Education is the leading out of ignorance into the reality of life. It seeks to change a self-consumed and aloof individual into a truth-loving, responsibility-seeking man. If the turning of a person's heart toward what is lovely includes the guiding of one's mind toward what is true, then the interplay between coming to know and coming to love is inevitable. Education is a multi-prong war that understands the whole person as the project before them. An education that fails to understand the intellectual, moral, relational, and cultural aspects of the person will fail to actually lead the whole person out of ignorance. In order to rightly educate the whole person, the whole of the person must be rightly understood.
Importantly, the sequence that turns the heart toward what is true starts with the truth revealing itself to the mind of the person. For if a person does not know anything about something, there is no way that they could come to love it. Apprehension of what is true must proceed the thing that ought to be loved. For the moment the mind is presented with the truth, the heart is acting both as a filter for what the mind receives and as a companion to how the truth is handled. Perhaps the most important art for an educator to master is presenting truth in a compelling way. Thus, showing the mind what it ought to perceive to be true and coaxing the heart into loving what the mind knows.
When it comes to understanding how children or adult are educated, the principal concern is the way the information is presented. For, and Augustine understood this, the goal of the Christian life is to rightly order one’s loves toward the proper end. And a prerequisite for the changing of a person's love toward what is truly good takes a change of knowledge. It takes the heart and the mind working in tandem to open itself up to what reality is actually like. Whether it is a propositional truth or not, the reordering of a person's love only happens when new information is presented. When we think about how men change, there must constantly be in the background an understanding that the whole person must be addressed. Whether it is the color of the walls, the smell of the classroom, or the intonation of the teacher, when a learner is presented with a truth claim, how that truth is received will depend on both the mind and the heart. Part of what modern education has failed to understand is the dual nature of how men change. They rightly understand that correct information must be acquired in order for people to change, what they fail to understand is the reception of what is true is correlated with how the truth is perceived by the heart. It is not merely the mind which comprehends what is true, it is the whole person who receives the information and decides whether to integrate it into their personality. And in order for the whole person to integrate something into their personality, all of the aspects of the person must be aligned with the truth
.