Loving and learning - Some thoughts for Freshers' Week

The beginning of the academic year coincides with the season for Harvest thanksgiving. Although I live in the country, where the size and quality of harvest depend on the climatic vagueries of the British Isles, I am also aware that harvest is not just a matter of crops, livestock and garden produce. It is about life itself. Our whole lives are a harvest, at whatever stage they have reached, and in them we are responsible for the lives and harvests of others.

Those who are either returning to university, or going there for the first time, are embarking on a new stage of life’s harvest. Academic work, like the physical work of farming, is concerned with sowing and reaping, to borrow from a well known harvest hymn. It is primarily concerned with being open to receiving the seeds of wisdom, the kind of wisdom which will help today’s students shape their future and with it that of society.

Society is composed of human beings. It is made up of a dense web of interconnected relationships, beginning with those of a person’s immediate family. That primal family relationship connects persons to each other and, over time, integrates them within the system we call a free and democratic society. Integration is not about being subsumed or swallowed up by the greater whole, still less by any one ideology or political system. It is about being a mature human being, ready to assume responsibility for other human beings, beginning with our immediate neighbour. It means knowing that we can make a difference to society.

The purpose of education is therefore to prepare people, from the age of about 5, or perhaps younger, to take their place in a free and democratic society and to work towards enhancing and preserving it. When it comes to higher or further education, enhancing and preserving the things which make for democratic society are not only a matter of acquiring skills and qualifications, important as these are in their particular contexts. They are a matter of learning how to think in a way which is worthy of our humanity. In other words, the purpose of higher education is to learn how to think in order to be able to help others to become fully human. This ultimate end is also God’s purpose for his world, and hence for society, because God is concerned with our humanity to the point that he assumed it himself.

Where learning is undertaken for the sake of the other, in other words for the greater good of society, it acquires the characteristic of love. This changes the way we think about the subject being studied. First, because allowing love to motivate our learning takes us out of our individual selves. Loving what we learn, or learning with the heart, inevitably distances us from our own individual objectives; my career, my earning power, my status and standing vis a vis that of others in my peer group. Secondly, it motivates the learning process. The love of learning makes clear our reasons for choosing any given subject and provides the focus and energy needed to stay the course to the end.

Many people starting their university life are not at all sure why they are studying the subject they have chosen. Perhaps someone has advised them that it is what they are most suited to, or it was a spur of the moment decision. They somehow fell into the subject and, as a result, may never engage with it in any depth or with any degree of real love.

Learning has to be undertaken for its own sake, in other words in love, before its harvest can be deployed for the good of others. The love of learning for its own sake imparts a deeper meaning to the subject chosen, because love involves self giving. Every minute devoted to the study of any one subject, every lecture to which full attention is paid (including the less interesting ones), every seminar or tutorial, every essay or presentation, is a visible enactment of the love which powers the work and will continue to power whatever it becomes in the coming years.  

Self giving love expresses itself in learning as disciplined argument coherently expressed. Disciplined thought and clarity of expression give us permission to feel passionate about the subject we are studying. Passion follows discipline, and not the other way round. Passion without discipline simply degenerates into opinion. A university degree is therefore not a piece of paper certifying that we have a right to an opinion. It certifies to the fact that we have learned to think rationally and that we are considered ready to put our intellect, or whatever professional skills we have acquired, to the service of others. It also signifies that our learning is ongoing, that we are always learning in order to understand more deeply the purposes of God for the world of today.