The end of summer should have heralded a new season of wonder and adventure. But as I experienced it, school disconnected learning from joy. It somehow separated education from what stirred in me when I experienced beauty in nature or found goodness in a hero or encountered a truth that changed what I believed. The discoveries in good books, earnest conversation, and long days exploring the woods near our home seemed, paradoxically, to be less valuable to my school. Of course, certain teachers brought glimmers of excitement, but on the whole, school was unsatisfying and incomplete. I felt tension between the joy of learning and the place where that was supposed to happen.
Only years later did I realize the incongruence arose from confusion about the ultimate end of education. What was school for?
Old School
There’s a hint to school’s purpose in the term itself. Our English “school” comes from the Greek scholē, or “leisure.” That origin may seem surprising, but in ancient times leisure wasn’t kicking back and watching Netflix or playing a round of golf. Leisure meant stepping away from ordinary work to observe the world and to contemplate the most important questions of life.
The study we refer to as science, the ancients called natural philosophy. They understood what many have since forgotten — that questions about gravity, planetary motion, animal husbandry, or agricultural productivity are intimately related to questions about God, human purpose, evil, and the like. To be a scholar was to set aside time to contemplate these transcendent realities — what was true, good, and beautiful. But not to contemplate alone.
Contemplation has never been a solo project. The joy of discovery was meant to be shared. Education (from Latin educatus, meaning “to lead or draw out”) was the process of discussing, cultivating, challenging, and inspiring one another in the joyful quest for truth. It reflected the fundamental reality that a student was not a vessel to be filled with facts but a soul to be drawn out in wonder and joy. Education required the dedication of both the student and the mentor, the latter guiding and exemplifying the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. For much of Greek and Roman history, this vision of deliberate education centered on cultivating moral excellence and shaping a person for the good (beatific) life. Such instruction was available only to a privileged few in the classical world, but it reflected a vision for life that predated even the Romans and the Greeks, originating in the garden itself.
True School
God instituted leisure from the beginning with a very specific purpose: that we might know him and enjoy him forever (Genesis 2:1–3; Psalm 37:4; John 17:21–23; 1 Corinthians 10:31). The heartbeat of Israel’s life was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). For this reason, the practice of Sabbath and the festal calendar required God’s covenant people to step away from ordinary work to consider his works, words, and world (Exodus 20:8–11; Leviticus 23; Deuteronomy 16:13–17; 31:9–13). The tribe of Levi was specifically commissioned to educate God’s people both in didactic instruction and in song (1 Chronicles 9:33; 2 Chronicles 17:8–9; Nehemiah 8:7–9). Thus, it is no surprise that the psalmists frequently express delight over the majesty and intricacy of God’s good creation (Psalm 8; 19; 104; 139). “Great are the works of the Lord,” Psalm 111 declares, “studied by all who delight in them” (Psalm 111:2).
In the New Testament, Jesus makes even more explicit the duty of loving God with our minds (Mark 12:29–31). The apostle John points to the triune God’s creation of the universe through the Son, who himself entered into creation as both God and man (John 1:1–5, 10, 14; Philippians 2:6–11). Nature indisputably points to his lordship, a reality that no man can deny (Romans 1:19–20). Paul brims with exultation over the sweep of Christ’s creative activity — that the eternally existent Son, the exact imprint of the Father, has created “all things . . . visible and invisible” and is so active in sustaining his work that “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16–17). Unlike the ancient Greeks or Romans, Christians understood that the universe was orderly and rational because a personal God designed and upheld it for his glory and their joy.
For millennia, this basic conviction fueled Christians in joyful study: in movements like monasticism with its preservation of ancient learning, in missional expansion with its language acquisition and translation, in the reform movement of the sixteenth century and its retrieval of doctrinal orthodoxy, in the seventeenth century’s Christian humanism and quest for discovery, in the scientific advancements of the long eighteenth century, and in the great technological and political developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All study, all scholarship, all education is for our joy in God — and therefore, school is ultimately about him.
New School
This is what I was missing during those frustrating years at school. The great disconnect was between education and its ultimate end. Universal public education was and is a remarkable blessing — one which the sixteenth-century Reformers and even our colonial Puritan forebears would have rejoiced to see. But unfortunately, the prevailing approach to school prioritizes important but inferior ends. It prepares students for making a living rather than making a life. It values crucial skills — mathematical competency, scientific reasoning, reading and analytical ability, independent thinking, strong written and spoken communication — but for the wrong ends. Modern education prizes workforce-readiness and responsible citizenship, which are instrumental, even noble, outcomes, but they’re not ultimate. The chief goal of education is a beatific vision, the good life: enjoying God and, in him, everything else.
If done rightly, school tunes our admiration of the One from whom and through whom and to whom are all things (Romans 11:36). “He is that Object to admire,” C.S. Lewis writes, “which is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all” (Reflections on the Psalms, 107–8).
We may be tempted to think that seminaries or Bible colleges are the only places where education is all about God. But in reality, all education is about God. Whether in grade school or graduate school, consider the wonders yet to be discovered in a world ringing with his beauty. If we have eyes to see it, then the start of school will be a cause for celebration.
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Growing up, August was a month for lamentation. It signaled the rapid approach of the school year and the end to summer’s leisurely days of wonder and adventure. The start of school, C.S. Lewis once quipped, teaches one to live by faith, “for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far off that it is as hard to realise them as to realise heaven” (Surprised by Joy, 42–43).
The end of summer should have heralded a new season of wonder and adventure. But as I experienced it, school disconnected learning from joy. It somehow separated education from what stirred in me when I experienced beauty in nature or found goodness in a hero or encountered a truth that changed what I believed. The discoveries in good books, earnest conversation, and long days exploring the woods near our home seemed, paradoxically, to be less valuable to my school. Of course, certain teachers brought glimmers of excitement, but on the whole, school was unsatisfying and incomplete. I felt tension between the joy of learning and the place where that was supposed to happen.
Only years later did I realize the incongruence arose from confusion about the ultimate end of education. What was school for?
Old School
There’s a hint to school’s purpose in the term itself. Our English “school” comes from the Greek scholē, or “leisure.” That origin may seem surprising, but in ancient times leisure wasn’t kicking back and watching Netflix or playing a round of golf. Leisure meant stepping away from ordinary work to observe the worl
