The Uselessness of Education, or Adventures with Reepicheep
Perhaps the question every high school student asks at some point is this, “When will I ever use this?” Utility is such a driving feature of the modern world, that we expect all things to be useful. If we cannot see a lesson’s immediate use, then it must not only be useless, but also worthless. Utility and worth have become synonymous. And this causes problems in education, especially in classical education. While many schools shift primarily to a use based curriculum where technical reading replaces literature and useful math replaces geometry, algebra, and calculus, classical schools are doing the opposite. We foreground the useless. Christian classical schools take it even further by adding classes on philosophy and theology. How likely is it that someone will ask you to define the Trinity while you’re shopping for groceries? How important are competing conceptions of the Good when what you really need to know is when an activity counts as time theft at your job?
C.S. Lewis gives us an excellent defense to these and similar questions in his book Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Toward the end of the book, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and crew are discussing whether or not to go on. They have achieved their goal, all seven Telmarine lords have been discovered. Why go on? Why not go home? After all, in this world, there is no knowing what lies further East. And so the crew asks, what’s the use? The answer is expertly given by the crew’s smallest member, Reepicheep the talking mouse.
“‘Use? […] Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honor and adventure.’”
Reepicheep gives the answer we all ought to give. Classical Education is useless. It fills neither our bellies nor our purses. We do not engage in it for any particular end. We do it because it is an adventure, done for its own sake. We study the stars because they are there. Number communicates something of the language of the universe and so we study it to learn that language. Latin and literature teach us about the nature of language itself, not so we can write a technical manual, but so we can write poetry to our lovers, to the beauty of creation, to our Lord. Queen Theology and her handmaid Philosophy are the most useless of all, trust me, I’m a theologian. And being one has not filled my purse or my belly, to be sure. Instead, the lessons of a classical education are taught to awaken wonder, to journey as a fellow pilgrim with our students. We teach them not because we earn a paycheck and not because our main objective is to get our students into college or a good job, but because we are true philosophers, lovers of wisdom, who want to share the honor of our Beloved with others.
In this way, teachers of classical education are like Don Quixote. We are a people out of time, running around and telling all who will listen about our Dulcinea. The difference, of course, is that our Dulcinea is real and is truly beautiful. And thus we hope our students are a better Sancho Panza. Panza followed Don Quixote because of the promise of islands to govern and princesses to wed. Our students are meant instead to journey with us for the sake of adventure God has ordained for us. This was the outlook of many of Arthur’s knights. Whatever adventure presented itself was to be undertaken, even if it might lead to death. Survival was not the goal, adventure was.
Of course, none of this is to say that classical education will lead to the metaphorical death often ascribed to philosophy or liberal arts majors who, according to the joke, ought to practise saying, “Would you like fries with that?” A true and proper classical education will likely lead to all the good temporal things a student and their family hope for. Classical education is just as likely, if not more so, to prepare students to do well on standardized tests, to gain them entry to the college of their choice, to “prepare them for the world” as a non-classical education is. The difference is in our purpose, the end we are trying to achieve is none of those things. Our end is adventure and honor. Our end is human flourishing writ large. Our end is the Beatific Vision.
So, the next time you find yourself or your student asking the question, “When will we ever use this?” Give them Reepicheep’s answer. We are not interested in use, not in the first case. First, we must ask, what is the adventure God has set before me? Then, as we journey on, we will find many kinds of uses. Reepicheep made it to Aslan’s country, Edmund and Lucy had to learn to find Aslan in our world, Caspian returned and found a wife. But they did this, not because they sought to break a curse as their main goal, but because adventure, honor, glory, beauty was their end. Make it yours, and your life will be fuller. This is the point of an enchanted education
