Our intelligence is God’s greatest gift to us – for it is a reflection of His Image in which we have been made…
My mother was a kindergarten teacher for about ten years before she married my father. After their marriage, they pretty much had their own kindergarten in their family and my mother was responsible for our upbringing in much the same way that women of that generation were.
My father was educated by the Christian Brothers, and as a result of that education, he was the first person in his family (and in my mother’s family) to attend university.
I have been involved in education in one form or another for most of my life, either as a student or educator – pretty much since I was five years old and walked into Kindergarten for the very first time.
The other day I was reading the story of Saint John Baptist de la Salle. Saint John lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France. He was born a nobleman and was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-seven. His parents had made a significant investment in his education, as was the custom of his time. During this time, the poor were not educated. Saint John established as home and school for poor boy orphans and dedicated his life and wealth to their education and betterment. Much of his work revolved around recruiting young men to work with him to educate the poor. He formed an institution called the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, or Christian Brothers. Parish priests would send their young men to be trained by Saint John and then return to the villages as principals and tutors. This standard of education, established by Saint John, became the standard adopted in France and soon spread internationally.
And I have been reflecting on the education and work of Saint John Baptist de la Salle. You see, over the years as I have interacted with young people, I have invariably heard that their education was a waste of time. After all, they have often reasoned with me, when will I ever need Shakespeare or trigonometry in my ordinary life…?
And truly they are correct. In an ordinary life they will not require complex mathematics, English literature or even to understand or appreciate great art. Perhaps, science will be useless to them as well and history is definitely a waste of time.
But it is only people who have the luxury of an education – the privilege of it – who can feel that their time is wasted in pursuing it. We – who live in the developed world in a place like Australia where our government provides a free education, can complain about it.
But four hundred years ago, when Saint John was educating the poor, he was doing this not only for the luxury it afforded – for the sheer privilege of being educated and understanding about the world – but he was doing it to elevate their human dignity and make them realise the significance of their intelligence. For our intelligence is God’s greatest gift to us – for it is a reflection of His Image in which we have been made…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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