Education is Joy

The whole goal of education is to make us into who we were created to be

Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown. It has been a couple of weeks since I last wrote because I have been slammed with work. I spoke at a school in South Carolina this past weekend, so I wanted to share the transcript of the second part of my speech here. While it does not start at the beginning of the speech, the part before was me listing off a bunch of statistics about how anxious and depressed young people are today, so it should make sense with that in mind.

Joy

Joy is meaningfully important, particularly for young people today. In education, we cannot be content with treating joy as secondary to an education, certainly not a classical education, which seeks to create flourishing human beings, but we must view joy as inseparable from education.

This requires us to think a little bit about joy.

Joy is a funny thing though, at least on this side of eternity, because it isn’t something you can pursue for its own sake. In a way, it is always a by-product or effect. Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning writes of joy (using the word happiness), “happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

Think about the times in your life when you have experienced the greatest joy. You’ll notice that in each instance there was a sense of “getting lost in that moment”. You weren’t consciously thinking about experiencing joy, it was simply happening to you without you thinking about it at all.

For example, as I’m sure many of you have experienced as well, one of the most joyful moments of my life was when my son was born. In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything other than him. Looking at him, holding him, talking to him. My happiness or joy didn’t even cross my mind because I was simply fixated on him.

This is an example of one short moment of joy, but one of the profound things about joy is how we can experience it for long periods of time even when the short moments that make it up don’t feel like it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was with someone who was the youngest of 11 kids and he was talking about his mom who, in her 70s, said that she only regretted not being able to have 11 more. I’m sure it didn’t feel like joy many times over the course of raising 11 kids, but nonetheless she experienced immense joy over the course of her adult life.

What’s even more interesting about this example though is it hints at another aspect of joy that seems counterintuitive: namely, that joy brings with it a sense of more longing. Yes, I was full of joy when my son was first born, but I also wanted to hold him more, love him more, talk to him more. Not in an ungrateful or unsatisfied way but in a way that can’t really be described.

C. S. Lewis in his book Surprised by Joy gets at this idea:

“Joy is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.”

He goes on to say that joy must have “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” because it is never a “possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be’.”

You see there is an aspect of joy that leaves one longing but in a fulfilled kind of way. It’s an oxymoron.

Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, this fits with what scientists have observed about human happiness. You see psychologists have studied what makes human beings feel fulfilled. What they’ve learned is that achieving a goal that you've set is actually not that fulfilling. That’s because, and I think we can all recognize the truth in this, once you’ve accomplished a goal, you are pretty quickly left with a feeling of “now what?” The goal gave a sense of purpose and striving before we attained it, but once it’s been attained that sense of purpose and striving is no more.

You can see this in the famous 2005 60 Minutes interview with Tom Brady after winning 3 Super Bowls in which he says “there’s gotta be more than this.”

While achieving a goal is not fulfilling, it turns out that pursuing and making progress towards a goal is fulfilling. This means that in order to feel ultimately fulfilled or have joy, we need a goal or aim or ideal that we can’t fully achieve but can always make progress towards.

I’ll come back to that later.

Goal of Education

So that’s a little about joy but what does have to do with education?

This brings me to the goal of education. The ultimate end or goal of education is to cultivate wisdom and virtue through nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty.

To understand this purpose of education, especially in light of what it has to do with joy, we need to back up all the way to Aristotle and his view of virtue. You see Aristotle was a proponent of the idea that everything exists as it does for an end or inherent purpose, which he called telos. Something was virtuous when it was properly fulfilling its intended purpose or what it was created for.

So, think of a knife. The purpose, or reason the knife exists, is to cut things for the benefit of humans. Pretty straightforward. And, a knife that cuts things such as meat, cloth, or wood is a virtuous knife because it’s fulfilling its ultimate telos or intended purpose. However, if a knife stabbed another human being it would be out of step with its intended purpose of existing, so it would be lacking virtue.

To be clear, knives can’t actually be virtuous or non-virtuous because virtue requires reason according to Aristotle, but let’s just put that aside for right now.

An inanimate object, like a knife, is simple but let’s consider something living such as an acorn. What would be the telos or intended purpose of an acorn? According to Aristotle, we can tell the telos of a natural object by observing what it turns into when it has reached its full potential. In the case of the acorn, this would be a fully flourishing oak tree. An acorn that does not develop into a fully flourishing oak tree has failed to reach its full virtue (again, putting aside the need for reason). To be virtuous within this framework means to reach completion.

This brings us to human beings. What is the telos of human beings? According to Aristotle, the telos of humans is happiness which Christians have long recognized reaches its full completion in union with the ultimate good: God.

To be in possession of this ultimate good is to enjoy it or full of joy. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “The possession of God is happiness essential.”

So, if we recognize that the goal of education is the cultivation of virtue, then I hope we see that joy is its necessary end, not secondary to it.

It’s Perfectly Designed for Joy

Now, not only is joy the necessary end or goal of education, but it should be unsurprising to us that classical education pursues this goal in a way that is perfectly conducive to achieving this end.

What do I mean? Remember earlier that I said psychologists have observed that humans feel most fulfilled not when we achieve a goal but when we are pursuing and making progress towards a goal. In classical education, the goal we are pursuing is the ultimate good of all things, God, but we pursue this goal by nourishing the soul in truth, goodness, and beauty.

If you’ve been around classical education for any length of time, then you've heard these words “truth, goodness, and beauty” thrown around and for good reason. These are what philosophers have called the transcendentals. A transcendental is that which goes beyond the material realm and empirical experience of man. To be more exact, they are notions that transcend our human capacity to categorize them. In other words, they escape our words.

I want to focus on that idea of the transcendentals going beyond the material world and our understanding. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t present in the material world or that we can’t comprehend them at all, but rather that they surpass the bounds of the material world and the limits of our mind. We can know them, both intellectually and in the depths of our being, in an ever-increasing way, but we also know that we can never know them in their entirety, at least not on this side of eternity.

This means that by nourishing our students' souls in truth, goodness, and beauty, we are providing them with ideals that they can never fully comprehend but can always grow in understanding- the exact conditions that psychologists have found lead to human happiness or joy.

Practical Applications of This

I am fully aware that all of this is incredibly theoretical and abstract, so I want to bring this down to the practical level. I can’t help but think of the middle school classes that I taught with middle schoolers who were completely disinterested and did not see any value in the things we were learning. Those moments did not feel like they contributed in any way to my joy or the ultimate joy of my students. It felt like drudgery.

And yet, just like the mother in her 70s after raising 11 kids, I know that those students have a greater disposition to truth, goodness, and beauty having taken my class, which will lead them to greater joy even if it didn’t feel like it to me or to them.

That’s not to say that the classical classroom never feels full of joy. There are many times over the course of my teaching career where I and the students got “lost in the moment” as we engaged in the contemplation of truth, goodness, and beauty. These moments, just like when my son was first born, are ones that I cherish and treasure and keep at the forefront of my mind, and I hope the students do as well.

And while these moments should be cherished and used as a reminder to us why we do what we do, the pursuit of a joy-filled education cannot be dependent on just recreating these moments. Remember, joy isn’t something we can pursue for its own sake. If our view of a joyful education is limited to these short moments, then we can end up like the parent who only ever treats their child like a baby because they want to keep reliving those joyful moments of having a baby. And they limit their child’s understanding of what substantive joy looks like because they don’t make room for the necessary suffering that pursuing the good, true, and beautiful requires.

When I still lived in Louisville, whenever someone from another school would visit Highlands Latin School up there, I would be the one who gave them a tour. Usually, this entailed going from class to class for a few minutes with a brief explanation of what was happening between each class. On these tours, I always made it a point to spend some significant time in an upper school literature or classical studies class, especially if the teacher was a lower-school teacher. This is because those classrooms are typically where joy-filled discussions about truth, goodness, and beauty are the most obvious and, in a sense, the easiest to create.

And I would always tell lower-school teachers that the work they were doing with those young children is what makes those upper-school classes possible. Elisabeth talked about this yesterday. She said that primary teachers are the hardest workers and she couldn’t be more right. Primary teachers are instilling into the students the most fundamental intellectual skills and planting the initial seeds of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Those seeds are watered and those intellectual skills are systematically built up and rigorously trained in what can feel like suffering. Then, one day, you walk into the upper-school classroom of those same students that you had when they couldn’t hold a pencil and they are contemplating Dante’s depiction of the soul’s journey to God - completely lost in the moment.

We will never get those moments without the gravitas and hard work that Elisabeth talked about yesterday. We will also never get these moments if we pursue them for their own sake. But, if we make it our goal to help our students grow in virtue and wisdom by nourishing their souls in truth, goodness, and beauty, then the end result will always be joy, because it’s what we were created for.

And, considering the statistics I began with, it’s something that is desperately needed today.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett