The end of summer approaches, and vacations that took months of planning are now nestled in camera rolls of our iPhones. The baseball season that began with hope for every team now holds promise for a remaining few. And, the season for summer squash and tomatoes is coming to a close. But, as with all things in life, the end of one chapter marks the beginning of another. With the coming fall, we look forward to football, the changing of the leaves, and school.
It’s natural to be nostalgic at the beginning of the school year. The next incremented grade is a hard number that reminds us that our little ones are taking slow but inexorable steps towards adulthood. For some of us, there aren’t many more steps to take. As those steps slowly add up, we parents hope that we’ve given our children the education they’ll need to make it in that adult world.
Education: How we fret about it. We try to buy our houses in neighborhoods with excellent school systems, or we select the best private schools we can, all in the pursuit of a good education for our children. But what is a good education, really? What is the value of it?
When I was in school, the common answer to that question was, “You need a good education to get a good job.” For the most part, this is true. Doctors are in school for years before they can practice medicine. Postgraduate work is necessary to become an attorney, and most C-level executives have an MBA. But there are some for whom this rule doesn’t hold. Bill Gates is Harvard’s most famous dropout. There are electricians who make good livings without incurring student loans, and, in the IT world, I’ve personally worked for people who didn’t have degrees. So, perhaps, education for the sake of promising work isn’t the best reason.
There was a time when education was viewed as important for the cultivation of virtue. In those days, pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True was the noblest goal anyone could have. Of course, these concepts were never quite definable, but at the time, it was thought that people had a sense of what they were and, perhaps by doing our best, we might get a little closer to the lofty places where those Ideals were actualized. For me, this is still the true goal of education.
I realize that a fealty to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True is a bit anachronistic in this day when we don’t even capitalize those words any more. In the modern Western world, we are uncomfortable with things that defy definition. This is the age of the internet, after all. If it can’t be found via a Google search, what good is it? My own response is that, perhaps, a little mystery in life is a good thing.
If the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are, ultimately, undefinable, it doesn’t mean that such things don’t exist. It’s entirely possible that such things, the most important of things, simply escape our language and exist beyond the boundaries of words. The pursuit of these things is why I want my children to receive a good education.
I know that education only promises knowledge, but knowledge can hint at greater things. Along the way to learning arithmetic and algebra and calculus, we encounter beautiful equations that only work if there is some idea of truth and that point to the concept of infinity. In the sciences, we see how nature is described by these beautiful equations. In English, we read all sorts of literature, the best of which tackles head-on the idea of good. And all of the other subjects, properly studied, hint at the three transcendentals.
If education can lead my children to even the faintest glimpse of the True, Beautiful, and Good, then it will have been worth everything that it required of us. And maybe, after years of study, my children will turn their keen insight into themselves and discover there the lofty place where these Ideals dwell. What more could a good education offer?
Austin Wimberly is the father of four adopted children and the author of Sobornost, an adoption-themed novel that was a quarterfinalist for the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.