Everyone wants a great education – much like everyone wants a great car, a great house, a great vacation, etc. But whereas these latter pursuits are a matter of maximising economic resources in order to satisfy individual goals and preferences, education is radically different. Education is radically different because it is a transformative process through which these goals and preferences are formed — education shapes our very way of seeing and understanding the world and thereby determines who we are as human beings. For that reason, every education implicitly presupposes or explicitly answers the question what it means (or should mean) to be human.
Moreover, that same question is precisely at stake in much of human history, philosophy, science, politics, literature, theology or economics. Hence, not only is the educational process one that questions, forms and reforms the human person, but the very content, material and subject matter of an education in the humanities deals with the human person in its myriad aspects, especially in how they are intertwined with countless controversies over man’s true nature and purpose. Hence, it is impossible to somehow safely ignore these existential and overarching questions, both as to the process and content of a true education. Every education, every educational practice or content rests on a foundation which a good education should uncover and question.
So that is precisly what Lux Mundi has set out to do – forming a curriculum, a method, an infrastructure, a transformative process, through which young minds are confronted with these great questions on man’s truth and freedom, history and future, meaning and purpose. That is how not only their minds, but through their minds also their character and soul can be truly educated and enobled.
Doing so requires the greatest teachers and thinkers ever, but short of bringing in Moses or Plato, Dante or Shakespeare themselves, we can get to know their minds through the works and words they have left us with. That is, their great books have a mediating function, in between the mind of their authors and that of the students. Along with proper guidance and contextualisation by contemporary teachers and tutors, it enables a direct and extended confrontation with their thought, through their words.
This very points already illustrates how a vision for a truly great education rests on foundations which that very education should seek to explore and understand. The idea that education ultimately means being taken up in a community of learning, vis-à-vis other persons – the great authors, and the countless others that have continued and contributed tot he ongoing dialogue — is an idea with deep philosophical and theological implications. What if truth itself is, ultimately, a person one can come to know? Such a vision for learning stands, for example, in contrast with seeing education as a way of increasing knowledge and thereby increasing power or control over nature.
Recognising these ideas, their authors, their influences, knowing when and where they were written down, seeing their historical implications and how they continue to inform contemporary tensions and challenges for our personal lives and societies, such is the goal of a truly great education. Such is the goal of Lux Mundi.
Michaël Bauwens