LETTER TO EDUCATORS - DEAR EDUCATORS INTEGRATE TRUTH, GOODNESS AND BEAUTY IN YOUR TEACHING (EXCERPT FROM MY NEW BOOK TO BE OUT SOON – THE EDUCATION)

LETTER TO EDUCATORS - DEAR EDUCATORS,

INTEGRATE TRUTH, GOODNESS, AND BEAUTY IN YOUR TEACHING …

(EXCERPT FROM MY NEW BOOK TO BE OUT SOON – THE EDUCATION)

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We all as educators have a better idea of how Truth, Goodness, and Beauty can recalibrate our teaching to foster awe and wonder within our students. By awakening our students to Beauty, they encounter that which awakens an eros, a desiring wonder and awe, which provides the momentum, the attraction that draws them into communion with the True and the Good, thereby cultivating their intellectual and ethical capacities. We need a - Aesthetic Theory – in our teaching?? summed up in representation, formalism, and expressionism, which provides processes by which students learn to contemplate, to see each subject of the classical? curriculum transformed into a portal for divine purpose and presence, which in turn causes students to see themselves as microcosmic parts of a wider world of meaning. Each subject in its own way points beyond itself to cosmic realities, represented in the subject itself; each subject exemplifies the processes of the original creation by which students can transform disorder into order, chaos into form; and each subject serves to unite us together in a common purpose of a shared lifeworld that manifests in the present the beatific vision yet to come.

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Students thus encounter the manifestation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in every area of their lives, sanctifying the senses and imagination alike with a synthetic vision of the glory of righteousness.

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The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things.

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Thus, we must ask ourselves:

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Are we presenting music and mathematics, Beauty and symmetry, Science of Humanities? and management as inseparable?

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Do we teach our students to see athletic skill as an embodiment of control over chaos and thus exemplative of the processes of creation?

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Do our science classes teach that discovery of the workings of the world not only gives us knowledge but awakens us to the awe and wonder of the Incarnation itself?

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Do our history classes present the totality of history as an eschatological narrative from Garden to city, from creation to communion, from water to wine?

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Do our Ethics? classes present theology as rooted in philokalia, the love of Beauty?

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Do we teach our students that there is something extraordinary about the imagio Dei, that we yearn for a meaning and a purpose outside of ourselves, that we long for a Beauty that awakens us from our self-centered slumbers, that our hearts ache for a life filled with wonder and awe?

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Are we cultivating an insatiable desire in our students to encounter the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in a life-transforming way, a way that enables our souls to reach for and embrace a state of being than which none greater can possibly be thought?

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The purpose of education is to make students masters of method, guardians of utilitarianism and pragmatism, equipped to deconstruct human nature and cultural endeavour as? social constructs.

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The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things—not merely industrious, but to love industry—not merely learned, but to love knowledge— not merely pure, but to love purity—not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

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Our task as educators is nothing less than to awaken students to the self- replenishing fountain of indescribable delights of a new vistas of self- development, to give them the gift of the freedom to be human again, and in so doing to watch their lives blossom into rational, poetic, worshipers of TRUTH, GOODNESS AND BEAUTY !!

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?This is my calling, and it is beautiful.

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much love

sudhanshu