Faith and education

IT’S graduation time, and with all the flurry of activities related to it, one can’t help but ponder again on the nature, purpose and meaning of education.

I think it’s an exercise that has perennial value, worthy of resorting to from time to time if only to be reminded of certain basic aspects of education that tend to be taken for granted.

To ignore and even forget these things is not a remote possibility. With all the pressures coming from different sources, everyone in the education business—from management to faculty to students and parents—can reduce his understanding of education even into precarious levels and degrees.

How many times do we get the impression that the main concern of education is shrunk, for example, to just how to send the most number of children to school, or to provide the necessary infrastructure, or to have adequate budget, etc.?

Education is not just transmission of some ideas. Nor is it merely an acquisition of skills. It’s not just a business enterprise, nor a human endeavor with strictly material, social and natural purposes. For sure, education involves all these, but it goes much further and deeper.

Especially if seen in the light of Christian faith, it assumes a much richer nature and character. For education would be understood as nothing less than forming one’s soul to conform it to the mind and heart of Christ, the living Christ, and not just the ghost of Christ.

St. Paul somehow expressed that idea well in his Letter to the Ephesians when he said: “Until we all meet into the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.” (Eph 4,13)

So education does not only affect the minds or the hands of people, nor their economic or social aspects. It affects the very of seat of a person’s being, the very principle of his life—his soul that needs to be as much as possible consciously and freely patterning itself to Truth and Wisdom.

The development and maturity of a person’s soul does not come about automatically or simply by being itself. It has to relate itself to the ultimate source of truth, goodness, wisdom, beauty, etc. It’s never a solitary or isolated affair. It necessarily connects us with God, or our concept of God, and with others.

We, by nature, tend to these perfections. Thus, we have to understand that education is a life-long, abiding and vital process. It’s always a work in progress. It employs and uses everything simply because it actually involves everything in our life.

It touches on our material and spiritual aspects, our personal and social dimensions, our temporal-and-eternal, local-and-global, sacred-and-mundane, contemplative-and-active, theoretical-and-practical concerns, etc.

For believers of Christ, this education is animated by faith and charity, which is made possible only if there is a living and loving relationship between Christ and the person concerned.

For Christian believers, this education offers them a universal and complete vision of things. It truly brings them to the real world in its entirety, where there is unity and consistency amid the great diversity and growing multiplicity of data and information from different fields.

It keeps them away from repeating the story of the Tower of Babel, creating fantasies and what are now known as parallel universes. It can accommodate fiction, but precisely as fiction, not mistaking it for reality.

It’s an education that, while grounded on the here and now, would go all the way to the hereafter. It does not remain on the purely human and natural levels, but relates them always to the divine and the supernatural.

Sad to say, nowadays we are witnessing a creeping tendency to do away with God, with faith and religion, in order to create a new world order according to our own human standards, reached not by adherence to truth but more through consensus.

Thus, we now have a “culture of death” instead of a “culture of life.” Immoralities are now considered mainstream morality. Abortion rights are expanded, designer babies are now made while euthanasia is increasingly legalized. And more barbarities are still in the pipeline!

We need to give our Christian education a shot in the arm to counter these disturbing developments. We have to know how to get our act together to make that education a functional one, converting a dream to reality.