Author’s Note: this is the third column in a mini-series on education. 

You can’t tell a young Helen Keller that education is about just getting a job. To her, it was the joy of life. If we stop long enough to think about it, it should be part of ours too. Research ought to be part of our workflows; note-taking should be part of our daily impulse.

I don’t use the words “ought” and “should” in a moral sense (though several philosophers have, arguing that education is a moral imperative—see the Schott Foundation out of New York), but I use them out of necessity.

The reason this series is important to me, and I believe worth your time, dear reader, is because the joy of learning brought me through dark times, personally, and while I’ve been through some of the best of our education system, it was only after my formal education that I learned how to do it and how desperately I needed it.

But there are challenges: we have forgotten what education is, its purpose, and how to attain it. Let’s look.

What Education Is

Education isn’t the stockpiling of data; it’s the process of becoming more truly human. Education is a humanizing endeavor—meaning it deepens the human spirit—whereas a lack of education takes away the human spirit, or dehumanizes. 

Language turns our grunts into communications, which in turn helps our brains form clear thoughts. As words increase, so do thoughts. 

Helen Keller taught us a lot about that. The passage from her autobiography recounting her discovery of “water” is worth printing here in total:

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.”

Purpose of Education

Wendel Berry, in his 1987 essay ”The Loss of the University” writes, “The inescapable purpose of education must be to preserve and pass on the essential human means—the thoughts and words and works and ways and standards and hopes without which we are not human.”

Education is a holistic struggle for vision, a wrestling with the scope of human thought and finding the truth, the coherent, total, absolute truth about life. 

The University was founded for such a pursuit. Philosophers of education have pointed out that the word “university” means finding unity in the diversity. It was meant to gather experts from every field so that they would talk, struggle, and find the truth, together. A far cry from the lines drawn between today’s education system.

This cross-pollination between educational branches was meant to lead the student to attain a holistic view of life, a perspective he or she was convinced was the truth, and from that place, build for the rest of his life. 

The goal of education is this: vision. “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” ~Helen Keller

How to Attain Education

Wendell Berry points out that students of the past read a book to learn from it, whereas modern students read in order to learn about it.

The first step is to get out from behind the barrier setup between our students and the raw materials. Students are no longer expected to come to a knowledge of the truth, they are merely encouraged to grapple. My own professors told me, “Look you don’t have to be right, just show that you can grapple with the content.”

Once we step out, we need to hunker down. 

See, if education is the process of learning to see the truth, the holistic picture, then each part must connect to the next part. Making those connections is the whole game, which is why education is really about imagination, not raw intellect.

IQ won’t help you, really, because the imagination is the organ of meaning, and meaning is what we are humans are after. C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about that, funny enough, through fairy tales.

Which means we need to focus our efforts on the imagination, not the intellect.

And the imagination is very visual and fun—who says this has to be boring?