I hope you've had the opportunity to read Pupils Delighted: On Wondering or Wandering Through College Education by Touchstone senior editor Anthony Esolen in the most recent issue. I would like to point you to another one of his articles on education—originally a graduation address—recently made available on the Touchstone website (from September/October 2009).
Except the Lord Build
Anthony Esolen on Education & Houses of the Lord
Ladies and Gentlemen, parents, friends, and graduates, hear the word of the Lord as the Psalmist speaks it to us:
Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it;
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows; for so he giveth his beloved sleep.Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. (Ps. 127)
My family and I used to play a game sometimes as we went out driving on a sunny afternoon. We would see in the distance, set far away from a country road, a sprawling, low-lying, brick complex, looking as if the chain-link fences might be intertwined with barbed wire. The trick was to guess what it was before we saw the sign.
“It’s a prison!”
“It’s a factory!”
“No, it’s a school.”
Sure enough, it would be a school, more often than not. We concluded that the builders were wise to construct the vast, modern, soulless school to look like a prison or a factory, because the three institutions serve many of the same functions.
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