Education can never be passive: it demands an active mind and an active method with both teacher and student. Lux Mundi’s founders have observed how students read less and less each year and how their scope is narrowing. Dante and Homer are replaced with Tik Tok and Instagram. Education becomes programmation: humans as programmes.
Lux Mundi chooses a different path. We draw inspiration from Saint John Henry Newman (The Idea of a University):
A liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form […] perceiving things as they are.
Today, more than ever, the world is in need of people who are courteous, polished in word and action, who perceive things as they are. We believe that the object of true education is ‘to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things—not merely industrious, but to love industry—not merely learned, but to love knowledge—not merely pure, but to love purity—not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice,’ as John Ruskin so poignantly put it in The Crown of Wild Olive.
Human beings are often guided by their desires; yet a ‘liberal education’ is designed to cultivate the mind — to let the ‘recta ratio’ reign. ‘Liberal’ as in truly free. Free to choose Good instead of being enslaved to the banal.
We also believe that our environment reflects and shapes who we are. In a world that is drowning in noise, we provide tranquillity. Our spaces of learning are oases of rest, where students can focus on their readings for a prolonged period of time. Surrounded by nature, by beauty, by history, we follow in the footsteps of the learned men and women of the past.