Prominent American politicians have decided education has only an economic and utilitarian purpose. Barack Obama, in 2014, essentially declared a degree in art history a waste of time, because it wouldn’t give people a chance to make money. And during a debate in November, Marco Rubio said we “need more welders than philosophers” because “welders make more money.”

Both meant for their comments to encourage people to enter the trades. But both were also expressing a widely-held belief that the humanities are for navel-gazers. Studying them will get you a job at Starbucks and nothing more.

But they, along with others in the culture who endorse this view, are wrong. A full education is one that results in formation. It teaches us to be better human beings and better citizens, and it would do much to address the spiritual malaise facing the United States today.

This is not a particularly new or even revolutionary claim—especially to students of political science or philosophy. But people don’t need to read Aristotle and Milton for answers to the critics. They need only look to a nineteenth-century Frenchman who is uniquely qualified to help us find a way forward. It is not Alexis de Tocqueville. It is Emmanuel d’Alzon, founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption.

Pressing Priesthood

d’Alzon was born in 1810 to an aristocratic family and grew up amidst the tumult of post-revolutionary France. As a young man, he considered careers in the military, in law, and in politics.

Eventually, though, he realized he was not called to a job but to a vocation. France had become a “decrepit machine,” one that was “dangerous to try to repair.” At that moment, “political movements engross everyone’s thinking.” France suffered a “state of turmoil” that sent “the best minds … in radically different directions,” a world filled with “opinions…at cross purposes,” and “political systems [that] denounce each other.”

The priestly life, he reasoned, would allow him to separate himself from his culture and press “on it with all the weight of the rights it had no authority to give.” For d’Alzon, only the man of God—the priest—could save the culture.

He later realized the crisis in France and in Christendom was, at root, one of a lack of education. Humanity, he wrote, is “deeply wounded” by both “indifference and ignorance.” Some, he said, “say the world is evil [and] no doubt there is much that turns it away from what is good, but I believe that the world is oblivious, ignorant of the truth.”

Therefore we need to teach it, and to do so in words it can understand. The deepest desire of my heart is that the world needs to be penetrated with the Christian idea. Otherwise it will fall apart. And the world will not receive this idea except through individuals who will be taken up by it.

He made this dream or project a reality when he founded the Augustinians of the Assumption in 1845.

Humanity Needs to Be Taught

“Humanity needs to be taught, but first we need to give humanity a heart of flesh, as Scripture says, to replace the one becoming like stone in its chest,” wrote d’Alzon.

The heart is the hearth, the center of warmth and of life. Only God can supply these when they are lacking. For that reason I am convinced we will need to suffer great evils before our minds are compelled to return and find their rest in truth. For the moment, political movements engross everyone’s thinking. God has to hit very hard for us to seek refuge in a place of rest.

Then he added “Good God! Look at me, telling Providence how to handle the situation. I don’t really know what I’m saying by all of this.”

Here’s what he meant by this: human beings are too self-involved. People “love too little, and our knowledge is so deficient.” Thus they occupied themselves with politics and other pursuits and not with higher things.

But d’Alzon didn’t condemn. Quite the contrary. He said people needed to be properly formed.

For him, a soul is like “a block of marble,” and “marble differs from granite, and granite from plaster. In other words, we must treat each one differently.” Some blocks are harder to work on than others.

As the editors of Emmanuel d’Alzon: to Educators at Assumption, a collection of his letters, note, he wanted to develop a family atmosphere, one that was quite different from the reigning methods of instruction, which made schools more like “military barracks.”

So, unsurprisingly, he encouraged originality and liberality. Students should learn Greek, philosophy, mathematics, science. Teachers should familiarize themselves with both new and old things—and, in the classroom, they should be unafraid “to say something fresh” and should “avoid using hackneyed expressions.” They should try to be indirect, lest they turn “every class into a religious class.”

But education does not take place only in the classroom. Indirectness also means being present to students and exemplifying a virtuous life. “We are teaching more than docility and good behavior,” d’Alzon said.

Restorative Education

What d’Alzon had to say looks like any other program to educate students. But it was more. d’Alzon was trying to restore French society, for he recognized that a lack of education in the tradition leads to a great unmooring. It makes people dull. d’Alzon wanted to show people what it meant to be human.

We can take lessons from d’Alzon, especially since he faced a situation similar to our own. Many in the United States wish to see better schools and citizens. But education in this country is too often about careers and test scores, the antithesis of what d’Alzon wanted to achieve in France.

If we would like to see a population that is well-educated and well-read, one that understands the importance of virtue, we should stop turning our schools into business-like enterprises, fainting every time we hear that a country has passed us in science or in math. We should understand, as did Fr. Emmanuel d’Alzon, that all subjects lead to human flourishing. We should look to the classroom. Lighting souls aflame is a good place to begin.

For Further Reading:

Writings by and about Fr. d’Alzon, with notes from the postulator of his cause

d’Alzon’s Letter to Luglien de Jouenne (quoted above)

A biography of Emmanuel d’Alzon and introduction to Assumption College (video)

Jon Bishop, vocation coordinator for the Augustinians of the Assumption, has written for Boston Literary Magazine, PJ Media, FreightTrain Magazine, Crux, The Mitrailleuse, and newspapers.