What is education for? This question is not easy to answer. Our ancestors had a tradition of responding to questions with the phrase, “We distinguish the answer.” In other words, there’s more than a single right answer.
If my dad is teaching me to change a tire, is he educating me in tire-changing so I can help someone who doesn’t know how? Or so I can help myself? Or so I can be a mechanic? All three? The answer is, it depends—the answer is, “We distinguish.” It all depends on what we’re really asking.
Capstone looks at education starting with heaven rather than with earth. We start with why everything exists, and work backwards in a kind of “reverse engineering” of “education.” In a Christian view, nothing exists for itself. Everything exists because God wants it to, and He wants it to so that all these “things,” including education, become magnifying lenses to show how marvelous He is. By starting with God and letting who He is inform what we do every day, we see some things become bigger than we thought, and some things we thought were big might shrink in importance. Our educational aims come into clearer focus.
Science? It shows the marvel of a universe of order. Can you imagine if today water is needed to survive, but tomorrow it becomes poison because the universe is one of chaos, not order? We need order to be able to trust that the water will keep us alive. He gave us this true and good reality. Art? It shows that God is a person of beauty. Did He make us blind? He could’ve given us eyes but made everything black. If He had done so, we would never see anything in three dimensions, and we would never stop at a sunset and say “Wow!” However, He gave us eyes, color, and shape. This is beauty. How marvelous!
So what of education? What is it for? “We distinguish.” Yes, education should give our children life skills. But YouTube can do that (and my car engine filter would agree, since YouTube taught me how to change it). What are we doing at Capstone that cannot be done in the same way in some other format?
A Capstone education, if done well, should ignite the heart to love good, jealously guard the truth, and be enraptured and enthralled at what is beautiful. This requires more than information downloads. It requires living examples in community experiences—teachers, parents, and coaches patiently, repeatedly, in every grade, in every moment they have with students, loving what is good, cherishing truth, and showing how they are enthralled by beauty.
We’re not merely providing information. We’re seeking to give students encounters with the best information in a way that stirs the heart, not just the head. Our education is for what we love, not just what we think. Love and Truth are married (1 Corinthians 13:6). We aim to liberate students from the mundane, false, and ugly curriculum of information without wisdom so that they recognize, love, and pursue the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that give meaning and purpose to what would otherwise, at its best, only amount to information.