Education and the Human Soul‪.‬

Introduction EDUCATION AS A CULTURAL ACTIVITY is organized in pursuit of what people believe to be good, since the good is "that at which all things aim." (1) As a social enterprise, education requires a generally shared conception of the good sought through it, for without this it is difficult to decide such matters as curriculum, method, teacher training, and the like. But a socially shared understanding of good is more difficult to achieve and to maintain than an individual apprehension of good because it requires widespread agreement on substantive questions concerning human nature and the kinds of life that are proper to it. The liberal commitment to procedural good is an attempt to finesse this difficulty, but it fails because it is in fact an attempt to advance a particular notion of substantive good under a putatively more agreeable label. The view that a society can embrace a large and even contradictory universe of personal conceptions of the good and still be coherent and civilized rests upon a substantive assumption concerning the human person that is by no means obvious: there is no good for man arising from shared human nature, and so that which is called good is a matter of personal, private election. This view has led to an embrace of autonomy understood as the right to idiosyncratic and even shifting ideas of the good and of meaning in human life. Thus the procedural approach to the good is mandated by a particular, substantive notion of human being. Indeed, it is instructive to see that this nihilistic position on the good has issued in the identification of a good-autonomy-that rests upon substantive convictions about human being and its good while claiming for itself a substantive "thinness" sufficient to attract a large following. This thinly masked reality attests to the fact that a substantive conception of the good for the human person is necessary if a society is to organize in pursuit of such inherently moral ends as public order, the administration of justice, the rendering of medical care, and education. If education is to be done well, it must be informed by a sense of human nature and its good. When education is done well it helps equip the human soul for pursuit of its good. In short, education is concerned with the properly developed human soul, and this concern reveals education to be first of all a moral and a spiritual enterprise depending for its well-being upon a philosophy of the human person.