Saturday, December 01, 2007

A Little Schall (and Maritain and Aristotle)...

This is a great quote and somewhat related to my last post (which I posted, by the way, partly because the dichotomy in conversation is worth thinking about, I think)...

Jacques Maritain wrote one book (Education at the Crossroads) and several essays (collected in the Education of Man) on education. He considered education to be an art, perhaps in its own way the finest of arts because its object, when perfected, was the most beautiful of all the earthly realities. The closest analogy to teaching, Maritain thought, was medicine. Neither medicine nor education created its respective subject matter or what it was to be healthy or complete once it existed. Each sought to lead or guide a body or soul to what it ought to be when it functions normally. Once in its normal status, the healthy body or the healthy soul should be left alone to do its myriad things that healthy minds and bodies do. Given that the body was healthy, it - that is, the human incarnate person informing it - simply lived, did the things that healthy human beings do. When man, body and soul, was educated, he again simply lived, did the wondrous things free and healthy human beings can do or, more darkly, freely did the things they ought not to do. Knowledge per se, as Aristotle told us, does not automatically mean that we will be virtuous. (On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs by James Schall)


By the way, thanks to an anonymous commenter for recommending this book a while back.

No comments: