Formation in the Love of Truth: Principles of Orthodox Education

“In the West, traditionally, the educators want the students to become a part of this great conversation of intellectuals. That is not our goal. We want to have a great conversation, a truly great conversation, but not because we engage every prominent thinker, but rather because we are engaged by exceptionally inspired discourse of heavenly origins. The boast of Orthodox civilization is not the quantity of the works produced (you often hear that in classical circles in the West), nor the rate by which the ideas are exchanged, but rather the quality of the communion generated and the depth of the meaning attained. That is what we are interested in. It is better to have less but go deeper than to have more, have confusion, and have diversion from the one thing needful. So our end, in Orthodoxy, in educational enlightenment, is not merely to produce good wise men and much less good citizens. If this were the case, we would be impoverished as Orthodox, and the incarnation would be rather unnecessary—if that was the goal of our education. Just as the law was our pedagogue, until faith came, so too, the end of education must be initiation into the Spirit—the beginning of an endless ascent to divine humanity in the Church.” (From Fr. Peter Heers’ lecture “The Central Place of the Orthodox Academy in the Church’s Resistance to Secularism”).