Education, A Risk

It is important to know that there are fundamental limits on governmental power in a democracy, and particularly to the question of whether a state monopoly of education can exist in a democracy. The United States of America is not an autocracy. "Liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is not historical rhetoric, but an idea that gave momentum to the founding of our nation.

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in our nation repose, excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture them and direct their destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare them for additional obligations. It is unreasonable to interfere with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.

First the student must be educated to identify and pursuit the desire for rationality, a desire for clarity in the understanding of rationality, and a desire to continually practice and experience rationality in our actions. To be rational means to search for an authentic way to grasp reality: by evaluating events, by trying to grasp their correspondence to the needs that constitute our soul and our hearts. Truth is a correspondence between the object and self-consciousness; that is, the awareness we have of ourselves and those needs in our heart that make us persons, without which we would not exist.

A true education is an introduction to total reality. Education means to develop all the structures of an individual until they are complete, while at the same time affirming all the possible active links those structures have to reality. The same phenomenon will unfold the entirety of his links to the environment and within the environment.

Education is about the future, about educating the young for the future. Without education there is no future. But more importantly it is importantly for ourselves, if we are not continnuously educated we become fuzilized.

Ideas for this section were taken from various authors but most importantly from the book by Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education.