What is education for?

It's truth, not power, that will set us free

My most recent graduation was for my doctorate, in 2012. I had to kneel with my hands together in front of the Vice-Chancellor’s representative, who then admitted me to the degree in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This had nothing to do with the fact that I had studied theology, nor with my personal faith. Nor does the university style itself as an explicitly Christian institution, such as Rikkyo (where I presently work) does. I might have been an atheist studying engineering: the Christian trinitarian formula would have been used all the same. It was simply what the institution had inherited from its mediaeval founders.

What might those founders have meant by the practice of graduating students, whatever their field of study, in the name of God? The answer will tell us something about what they thought universities were for, and their perspective may awaken us to some of the limitations of our present day assumptions.

The word “graduation” deserves attention. Deriving from the Latin word gradus, or “step,” it indicates a hierarchy of degrees through which one ascends, from bottom to top. This hierarchy was expressed in graduates’ academic dress. Academic hoods were differentiated by the value of the materials, ranging from simple lambswool for bachelors to silk or ermine for masters and doctors. These hoods were originally clerical garments. All students were assumed to be part of the religious community of the university. Only by the 15th century were they associated with academia per se rather than with clerics. So, Church of England canon law dating to 1604 still stipulates that graduate clergy wear the hood of their degree as part of their vesture. It is not, as some suspect, intended for clergy to “show off” their academic credentials in church. Conversely, it is a sign that all knowledge is in the service of God. Further, knowledge is hierarchically ordered towards God as the source of all that is, and therefore towards truth.

Nowadays, you are more likely to hear that “knowledge is power.” The 16th century originator of this phrase, Sir Francis Bacon, believed that humans could find true freedom only by subjugating the world with technology. The natural order for him was a prison to be escaped. His successors, particularly the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau, extended this principle to the social realm. Social convention was an unbearable constraint on individual liberty. One way he escaped the burden of social convention was by forcing his wife to abandon five of their children as soon as they were born. The French revolutionaries followed his philosophy and executed at least 50,000 civilians, women and children included, for refusing to abandon the outdated social construct called the Church. But it was not until the 20th century that Bacon and Rousseau’s thought came into full fruition. Communism, Fascism and capitalism alike are driven by the ideal of humans using technology to liberate themselves from nature and society. Freed from old restraints, we developed technologies unsurpassed in dealing death to our environment and one another. Around 123 million people died in war and Communist regimes killed at least 100 million civilians in peacetime in the 20th century alone. This may exceed the death toll of all previous centuries added together. For all the beneficial technological advances of medicine and automation we enjoy, it is hard to argue that liberation from God and nature has been an unqualified success. Our supposedly “free world” even now leaves millions in conditions of economic servitude worse than slavery.

Knowledge for the sake of the power to exercise untramelled liberty is an unworthy motive for any educational establishment, let alone a Christian one. Indeed, the mediaeval founders of European universities would have seen this as a Satanic, rather than a Christian, prerogative. It comes down to a mistaken understanding of what God is. For the likes of Rousseau, to be God means to have absolute power and so absolute freedom. If God wanted to say that actually, murder is good, then it would be. But this is not the God in whose name I received my degree. That God was not some dictator, but three-in-one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is, it is in God’s nature to love, and so to create. God’s freedom consists in acting in accordance with his nature and his will, not against it. When theologians say that humans are created in the image of God, this is the image we mean: the image not of a tyrant, obsessed with self-power, but of one whose essence is relationship, and who empties Himself in creative love.

The mediaevals would consider it absurd to suggest that the purpose of study was to enable people to follow their desires, whatever those might be – say, for wealth or political gain. How can it be “freedom” to indulge a craving for such external and transient things? Where money and technology serve the soul, they may help us to find freedom; but when our souls conversely depend on technology as a means to fulfilling a desire for money, we are not free at all. The first element of knowledge that can set us free is the knowledge that the quest to control and possess the material world is a kind of slavery, and that its results are fundamentally evil. Never before has society encouraged humans to become such thoroughgoing consumers – as though our greatest freedom consists in defining ourselves by our favourite “brand.” Yet even pigs can consume, and few pigs are free. As humans, we have the higher spiritual power of creating. We have the power to give. As we do so, not only our minds but our bodies begin to feel joy, and we come to know in a way that surpasses anything we can learn in the classroom what it is to be truly human. Step by step, we come closer to that higher truth which is beyond words, but which we learn through the practice of virtue.

This practice depends on limitations. As God is by nature three and one, so we are by nature social creatures. There are bad social conventions which can deform and distort us, but social conventions grounded in love are necessary for the flourishing of the human. Misery can be caused by excessive social expectations, but in the West, we are seeing how equal and opposite misery infects people, especially children, when all social expectations are thrown off. Just as a pianist cannot improvise without first learning scales, or a martial artist fight without learning kata, we must learn the patterns of virtue if we are to become truly good. The beauty of a bonsai tree cannot exist without any supports. Likewise, the human cannot become one’s fullest and most beautiful self simply by being left alone in a vacuum.

Since Christians worship the One who called Himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life,” a mature Christian faith has nothing to fear from any educational establishment which prioritises the pursuit of truth as the means to real freedom. But any institution which prizes knowledge for the sake of power and prioritises freedom as an end in itself will ultimately only succeed in condemning its students to slavery: slavery, that is, to the desires manufactured by the reigning technocracy. Authentic freedom is found only the pursuit of goodness. Such was the ambition of the founders of the ancient universities. And whatever their historic failings in achieving that ambition, it is a nobler one than the pursuit of liberty conceived as the maximization of unfettered, individual power.