freedom, truth, and education

From Stratford Caldecott's, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education:

"The modern mistake about freedom...is that freedom has nothing to do with truth.  We imagine that the more choices we have, the freer we are.  In reality, a multitude of choices makes us no freer than we were before unless we have the freedom (that is, the power, the ability) to choose between the right action and the wrong action.  Thus the truth about good and evil is intimately bound up with our freedom.  It is the quality not the quantity of our choices that counts.  A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all.  Aquinas writes: 'Liberty or free will does not essentially consist in the power of choosing between good and evil.  All that is required is the power to choose, without being forced by necessity, one particular good rather than another.  To possess the power to choose evil is a sign not of perfection but of weakness.'"

Freedom and truth go hand in hand.  "A myriad of evil choices is no choice at all."  An education that severs truth from freedom and celebrates the quantity of choices over quality is going to deform students.  Every form of education is based on some set of values, that is, it is implicitly or explicitly based on an understanding (whether well thought out or half-baked) of what people should be like.  An education that is relativistic or skeptical about truth is a deeply moral education.  I wish every parent would ask their principals and teachers, "What does it mean to be free, and how will your class or school help my child be freer?"

"Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Romans 6.16)