Every school operates from the beliefs it holds about the purpose of education. Whether explicitly stated or not, a school’s purpose shows up in what it measures, what it celebrates, and what it is willing to sacrifice. So it is worth stating plainly.
Quintilian (~35-100 AD), the Roman rhetorician, stated it about as plainly as anyone ever has:
My aim is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man… For I will not admit that the principles of upright and honorable living should be regarded as the peculiar concern of philosophy. The man who can really play his part as a citizen and is capable of meeting the demands both of public and private business, the man who can guide a state by his counsels, give it a firm basis by his legislation, and purge its vices by his decisions as a judge, is assuredly no other than the orator of our quest.
According to Quintilian, education has four main objectives: moral virtue, knowledge and skill, integrity and responsibility, and citizenship. Let’s look at each in turn.
Moral Virtue
Note where Quintilian begins. Not with intelligence, not with talent, not with charm. A student may possess every other gift, but without moral uprightness, the rest falls apart. It is the question Jesus puts in Matthew 16:26, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
I have said it often and will keep saying it. We do not simply want our students to be good at what they do. We want them to be good, and then to do what they do. We want them to be morally upright, first and foremost.
Aristotle explained moral virtues — such as courage, moderation, generosity, and justice — using the golden mean. On either side of a virtue sit two vices, and the virtue is the ground between them. Courage stands between recklessness and cowardice; temperance, between self-indulgence and a joyless asceticism that refuses every good thing.
But consider what has actually gone wrong on either side of that mean. In each case it is misguided affection: the thing is loved too much, or not enough. The mean, then, focuses on rightly-ordered affections. Disordered affection distorts the object of the affection. The thing we love is deformed by the manner of our loving. We see this most clearly in sin, which so often consists of taking what God created good and loving it wrongly.
This is why character must come first, and not only for our students. If our own affections are disordered, the pursuit of excellence in our work becomes a vice. Classrooms cease to be places of curiosity and wonder that lead us to the living God, and become soul-crushing exercises in check boxes and meaningless assessment. The work begins in our hearts, or it does not begin at all.
Knowledge, and the skill to use it
Quintilian does not stop at character. Later in his treatise, he asserts that he wants students to possess “the greatest mastery of all such departments of knowledge and the greatest power to express it in words.” There is a knowing, and there is a doing.
We can connect this to what Aristotle called intellectual virtues: episteme (reasoning), techne (craftsmanship), phronesis (practical wisdom), nous (intuition), and sophia (wisdom). What stands out to me in this list is techne, or craftsmanship, from which we get the English words technique and technology. It refers not merely to knowing something, but to putting it to good use.
Wisdom is knowing the right thing to do in a given situation, which makes it far more practical than we tend to assume. Proverbs instructs us not to answer a fool according to his folly, and in the very next line instructs us to answer a fool according to his folly (Proverbs 26:4-5). This is not a contradiction. It is wisdom. And it is inherently practical and actionable — putting all of the intellectual virtues to use.
A teacher may have a beautiful lesson on paper; yet every teacher has also left a room knowing the lesson did not land. The plan is only half the equation. A ballplayer knows which base the throw belongs to and must still turn the double play. A parent knows a child requires correction and must still deliver it so that the child is guided back toward what is good and true rather than merely rebuked. Knowledge and skill, wisdom and its application, belong together.
Integrity and Responsibility
Quintilian's third claim is that an educated person is “capable of meeting the demands both of public and private business” — able, in each setting, to meet the demands placed upon them. That is what responsibility means. Things are asked of us, and we answer.
But notice how this is connected with integrity. We ordinarily use integrity to mean consistency between public and private conduct, and that is right as far as it goes. But the word itself, means wholeness. Not one person here and a different person there, but a wholeness of being. The distinction matters, because it is possible to behave properly in two settings while remaining divided underneath — to manage each set of demands by becoming, in effect, two people who happen to conduct themselves similarly. Quintilian is after more than that. He wants a man whose public life and private life issue from the same source, so that the demands of both are met by the same person, the same convictions and values.
That is what a truly educated person looks like. And it is closely bound up with what comes next, because a person who is whole in this way is a person who can be relied upon beyond the walls of his own house.
Citizenship
Observe how quickly Quintilian moves from private business to the guidance of a state. To modern ears the leap is startling. But look at the greater goal to which he is pointing: purging vices from society.
I do not know whether any of our students will become legislators or judges, and that is not the point. The point is that wherever they go, whatever they do, we want them to be a blessing to those around them. I want them to be small glimpses of the kingdom of God moving through the world, carrying the light of Christ wherever they happen to be.
Good citizenship, in the end, is not merely about governance. It’s the work of bringing the kingdom of God to bear here on earth, one conversation and one relationship at a time. That is the work we do daily, and by God's grace we are equipping students to carry it forward wherever they land. I can conceive of no loftier goal. It is an awesome thing to share in, and a humbling one.
Be encouraged. Take heart. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time.
To God be the glory.