Education and the Human Soul

Introduction

Education as a cultural activity is organized in pursuit of what people believe to be good, since the good is "that at which all things aim."¹ As a social enterprise, education requires a generally shared conception of the good sought through it, for without this it is difficult to decide such matters as curriculum, method, teacher training, and the like. But a socially shared understanding of good is more difficult to achieve and to maintain than an individual apprehension of good because it requires widespread agreement on substantive questions concerning human nature and the kinds of life that are proper to it. The liberal commitment to procedural good is an attempt to finesse this difficulty, but it fails because it is in fact an attempt to advance a particular notion of substantive good under a putatively more agreeable label. The view that a society can embrace a large and even contradictory universe of personal conceptions of the good and still be coherent and civilized rests upon a substantive assumption concerning the human person that is by no means obvious: there is no good for man arising from shared human nature, and so that which is called good is a matter of personal, private election. This view has led to an embrace of autonomy understood as the right to idiosyncratic and even shifting ideas of the good and of meaning in human life. Thus the procedural approach to the good is mandated by a particular, substantive notion of human being. Indeed, it is instructive to see that this nihilistic position on the good has issued in the identification of a good—autonomy—that rests upon substantive convictions about human being and its good while claiming for itself a substantive "thinness" sufficient to attract a large following. This thinly masked reality attests to the fact that a substantive conception of the good for the human person is necessary if a society is to organize in pursuit of such inherently moral ends as public order, the administration of justice, the rendering of medical care, and education. If education is to be done well, it must be informed by a sense of human nature and its good. When education is done well it helps equip the human soul for pursuit of its good. In short, education is concerned with the properly developed human soul, and this concern reveals education to be first of all a moral and a spiritual enterprise depending for its well-being upon a philosophy of the human person.

In practice, public educators seem to be about the business of preparing young people for productive economic lives. Training young people to be productive and self-sufficient is a necessary task, so one should expect that some portion of educational time be given to it. But contemporary education is defined by a nearly total devotion to vocational training and an equal disregard for the moral life. I do not mean to say that educators aren't interested in "values," since it is clear that they are. But values as discussed by educators operate within the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism at its most benign is agnostic concerning philosophical or moral truth because these tell against the notion that all cultures are equally well grounded, and thus values are little more than the sentiments and manners thought necessary for getting on in a global economy. The "moral life" as I am using the phrase is life in pursuit of the chief good of the human person. This is a good given in our nature and is thus the same for everyone. The reduction of education to an adjunct function of the economy is a logical extension of a materialist view of the human person that knows the person only as a reasoning and acquisitive animal. The loss of a philosophical understanding of the human person as a created spirit having a transcendent perfection withers the "reach" of education beyond the satisfaction of temporal needs and desires, and this is why education spends itself in the service of work and pleasure.

This article is an attempt to describe education...