Joshua originally delivered this in the form of speech for The King’s College student body during the 2012 Vision Week Speech Competition.

King’s aims to make you, its students, the most intellectually astute infiltrators the world has ever seen. You won’t just marginally change society, you will transform it. You will leave your stamp on America as Lacedaemon did in founding Sparta, or Napoleon did in revolutionizing France. It sounds like you want to take over the world!

Is that really the purpose of education? To give you the tools, the thundering prose and delicate eloquence to persuade, to carefully and calculatingly manipulate the reigns of power, guiding the nation’s strategic institutions with your sagacity, as though they were great, lumbering, benighted beasts?

There has been a substantial amount of debate over the past few years regarding the King’s vision. The vision’s focus is on the product of the student after college, which is understandable, since we’re a good free-market school. But the King’s vision notably doesn’t say anything about the educational process. When I ask, “What does it mean to be educated?” the King’s vision implicitly seems to define education as, “Whatever is necessary to influence strategic institutions according to a Biblical worldview.” That doesn’t really answer the question, “what does it mean to be educated?”. “Whatever is necessary” means that there is no such thing as education, or it is education in name only. If not attending college were necessary to transform society, then that would be education. In other words, education, is whatever produces results.

It appears then, that education cannot just be the slave of another end. So what is it? I ask you to recall, for the Freshman, recently, and for the upperclassmen, from ages yore, the final cause, introduced to you in Dr. Kreeft’s venerable Logic class. The final cause, or the telos, is the perfection, or the end goal of a thing. The easiest way to illustrate it is to use the concept of health. If you break your leg playing on our illustrious King’s soccer team, you will not wish for a healed leg just so you can play soccer again. You recognize that a healed leg is not only useful, but it is the way you were created to be. Brokenness and illness are not just inconvenient, they are deformities; we say that is not the way it “should” be. We acknowledge serious instances of these problems as not just inconveniences, but as moral injustices.

Like the body, the mind too, has a final cause: to truly understand all the knowledge it embraces. In my somewhat hyperbolic opening, students were not leaders, they were slaves. Slaves of their presuppositions, slaves of their philosophical preferences, perhaps slaves of their parents’ ideologies. They were also slaves of their learning. John Henry Newman says, “The learning of Salamasius or Burman, unless you are its master, will be your tyrant.”

Have you ever met someone who knew everything, but knew nothing? He could discourse on a variety of topics, but could not explain to you what truth is? He could tell you the artist of every painting in the Met, but had no concept of beauty? He is a slave to his so-called education. His knowledge is useless. He mind is an immaculate library of meticulously filed, disconnected, lifeless facts. When the zeitgeist storms his age, he will be unable to resist and he will find himself swept away into the dustbin of history.

Robert Frost illustrates this phenomenon beautifully:

“How shall a man go through college without having been marked for taste and judgment? What will become of him? What will his end be? He will have to take continuation courses for college graduates. He will have to go to night schools. They are having night schools now, you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They don’t know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They don’t know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They don’t know how to judge a political campaign. They don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable.”

What’s the alternative? The liberal arts education. When knowledge is not loved for its ability to produce results, but because it is truth, then it can be treated properly. The telos of the mind is not just to store information which it can tout about and whip out conveniently in cocktail parties or job interviews. The mind must conquer the material. The mind must examine each fact, understand it’s content thoroughly, and then weigh it appropriately and it put in it’s place in relation to other material. Knowing the relationships between facts is not merely an upgrade to your friend’s filing system. Understanding the weight of different pieces of knowledge and their relations to one another is what creates meaning and allows us to better pursue truth.

People tend to think of pursuing truth as merely a logical function. You just make sure the syllogism is logically valid and the propositions are reasonable, and boom, you have truth. On the contrary, evaluating truth requires drawing on other truth. The liberal arts gives you a broad scope of training that acquaints you with the narrative of philosophic history, which you can trace all the way to the present. It shows you the limits of each kind of discipline: theology is not a replacement for medicine, nor is medicine a replacement for theology. So when you encounter seemingly “transformative” new ideas, you will recognize their place in the grand tapestry of all intellectual history and you will treat them accordingly.

You, the astute and educated mind, will not be swept away like our ignorant friend. You have watched as Machiavelli sowed the seeds of modern politics, you watched Horace Mann deliver fiery stump speeches on behalf of the common schools, and you watched the Israelites melt their precious gold into the golden calf. So when your snobby Harvard friends visit your pad out in Sunnyside, Queens and start talking over Moscato about how elated they are about the government ban on circumcision, you won’t be cowed into silence. You’ll remember the class when Dr. Bradley introduced you to Abraham Kuyper, and he in turn, introduced you to sphere sovereignty. You’ll also remember your pleasant interlocutions with Pope Pius XI, who introduced you to Subsidiarity. You know that your friends, possibly “educated” as social scientists, engineers, or politicians, who claim to be utilitarians, are actually disagreeing with your good friend John Stuart Mill.

To bring this back full circle, there’s nothing wrong with understanding the machinery of politics or the art of persuasion, the problem comes in when these are substituted for genuine education. When the levers of power are handed over to slaves of the times. The King’s vision seems peculiarly means-oriented, but I think our collective experiences in the classroom have been different. King’s itself sometimes articulates the liberal arts vision, but the rhetoric of how the liberal arts shapes us, inspires us, frees us, seems to have fallen by the wayside. The common core makes The King’s College unique among schools by setting this liberal arts foundation, and although it’s imperfect, anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Dr. Loconte does an excellent job of drawing for his students the broad strokes of history which provide a scaffolding on which to hang the knowledge of other disciplines. Professor Blander shows students the roots of ancient philosophy, and students begin to see the ghosts of the ancients throughout the modern world. Drs. Rabinowitz, Bradley, and Johnson show how the truths of the Bible interact with the other disciplines we study. Dr. Innes especially, in Foundation of Politics, explores issues such as the theological-political problem, that is, our dual citizenship in heaven and on earth. The list goes on an on. These are the kinds of understanding that help us understand our knowledge and treat it appropriately.

My most ardent wish for us all as students is that we grasp the full meaning of our education, so that we can approach our classes with an attitude of openness and humility. Articulating the purpose of education is critical to preparing ourselves to be transformed by it.

Rudyard Kipling has a poem called Gods of the Copybook Headings. It describes the tumultuous ebbs and flows of the “market of ideas” from age to age. It also describes the gods of the copybook headings, phrases from McGuffey’s reader, that timeless collection of wisdom. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are the distilled knowledge of thousands of generations who have reflected on the thousands of generations before them. This the kind of knowledge, the liberal arts kind of education, will not be swept away with the times:

“As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race
I make my proper prostrations to the marketplace
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.”

Joshua Linder is a junior at The King’s College and a member of the House of Bonhoeffer.