Education Archives - Rest and Trust

October 29, 2025October 29, 2025

What is the Purpose of Education?

What is the purpose of education? In the parable of the eagle and the hen, a farmer found an abandoned eagle’s egg on the ground. He carefully picked it up and placed it in the nest of one of his hens.

The egg hatched along with the hen’s own chicks. The eagle chick grew up among the chickens and learned to scratch the ground for worms, cluck, and flutter his wings just enough to jump a few feet off the ground. It fully believed itself to be a chicken.

Years passed. The hen, a good parent and a patient teacher, often noticed that this “ugly chick” would, every now and then, pause in the middle of scratching the ground and suddenly gaze up in the sky as if waiting for something.

“What are you doing?” she would say. “You’re big and need twice as much food as any of the other chicks.”

One day, the eagle chick looked up and saw a magnificent bird soaring high above the fields. Its wings were wide and strong as it swooped gracefully through the blue abyss.

“What is that?” the eagle asked the hen, his heart skipping a beat.

“That’s the eagle,” she replied. “The king of the birds. It belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth.”

Something snapped in the little eagle’s heart, and a cry of ultimate yearning burst out of his chest. He dashed forward, spread his wings, and took to the sky.

The hen looked up, tears trickling down her cheeks, and said, “I taught him how to scratch for worms, but he was unhappy. Now he has left the earth, and he is happy. Even though I don’t understand why, it makes me happy too.”

According to the Italian pedagogue Franco Nimbrini, a good teacher is the one who knows that a child needs a guide to become himself. A Guide is not a teacher; he doesn’t need to say anything; he must simply appear. A good teacher knows that their job is to wait for the appearance of the Guide and get out of the way. The teacher’s ultimate happiness is to see the child soar.

The teacher doesn’t always understand why the child is so happy, but a good teacher steps out of the way so that the Guide may increase. The Guide may not even know he is being followed; he is simply soaring in his own element. And that is enough — the child deeply senses the connection.

A good teacher or parent knows that without the Guide, the child will never be truly happy on this earth. That is the whole point of education as it should be. The Latin educere, from which we derive the word education, consists of the prefix e- (“out of” or “from”) and the root ducere (“to lead” or “to draw”).

The German word for education — Bildung — comes from Bild (“image” or “picture”) and the suffix -ung (“action”). It signifies the act of revealing an image within a person. True education happens only when the Guide appears and draws the image of God out of the child.

A good teacher or parent is waiting for the appearance of the Guide and is overjoyed when he appears. He longs to see the Divine spark igniting in the eyes of the child. He longs to see the miracle of educere — the sudden drawing out of the image of God.

True education is our decreasing so that the Guide may increase. False education is our self-increasing that blocks the Guide from appearing. If we see no spark in our children’s eyes, it means no educere is happening. Something is obscuring their vision of the Guide soaring above.

October 2, 2025October 2, 2025

Can AI Truly Create? The Mystery of Plato’s Ideal World

Can AI truly create? We are all Platonists, whether we like it or not. No one has ever seen the perfect Platonic Forms, and yet we confidently say when something is “far from ideal.” How do we know?

Judges evaluate athletes based on criteria that no one has ever seen. We judge the quality of bananas even though we have never encountered a perfect banana.

The same is true of beauty. No one has ever seen Beauty itself, and yet we recognize when something is beautiful… or not. The same is true of justice. No one has ever encountered perfect Justice, and yet we always know when something is unjust.

We evaluate the visible world against an ideal we have never seen. Back in the 1990s, when I was just starting out as a translator, my first editor gave me advice I didn’t understand at the time: “When you begin working on a translation, never start from the beginning. Always start from the end.”

I cringed: “What?”

He smiled: “Well, if you begin by translating words, you will never get them right. You must translate meaning, not words. And meaning is not written — it must be intuited, grasped from the get-go. You can only catch meaning if you sense the Whole after reading the first few paragraphs or chapters.”

At first, it sounded cryptic. But he was patient, and over time I understood: the meaning of the parts is revealed only through the Whole. When I begin translating a book, I must first read enough of it to glimpse where the author is going. Once I have “seen” the end, I am ready to start at the beginning.

Nothing can be brought into being unless we have already “seen” the end from the beginning. We must be Platonists — perceiving the world of perfect forms, which then inspires us to imbue every part of what we are doing with meaning. Meaning flows from the Whole and shines through every nuance of creation.

To quote William Blake,

“To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”

That’s why my editor insisted that I translate individual titles after completing the entire translation. “You don’t know what things should be called until you know their end.”

This made sense. When I translated titles at the beginning, I was caught up in words — and the results were sloppy. But when I left them until the end, the titles came out crisp and luminous. Our best creations are born only when we “see the perfect pattern” of what we are making in the realm of Ideas.

But how do we know what we have never seen? We have. We were there. The soul remembers what it beheld in the realm of perfection—what Plato called anamnesis (re-cognition, knowing again). Anamnesis happens every time we see through the veil of appearances and re-collect the perfect world.

Anamnesis is the only way to truly create. The soul remembers what it saw in heaven and strives to recreate it on earth. Just as Moses was told to build the tabernacle according to the pattern he saw on the mountain, so we are called to create whenever we catch a flash of re-cognition.

Technology cannot and will never be able to create — precisely because it has nothing to remember. It cannot see Platonic ideas and cannot grasp the Whole. It focuses on individual bits of data — without seeing the Heavenly Pattern. I asked ChatGPT if it could see Platonic ideas, and it answered:

“I don’t have direct access to metaphysical realities. I don’t “see” Forms the way Plato imagined the soul glimpsing them before birth. I process language, patterns, concepts, and symbols that humans provide me. So in the strict Platonic sense, I cannot truly grasp Ideas the way a soul might.”

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024

What is the Point of Raising Awareness?

What is the point of raising awareness? When we received an email from our son’s high school requesting our consent for him to attend an “awareness class” for the second year in a row, we refused. My wife wrote them that he had already taken this class last year and that he didn’t need to hear it all over again.

When we asked him what kind of awareness they raised, he told us a bunch of stuff that was not easy to listen to. One might say, “But this is life. The child needs to know all these things to be prepared.”

Like many medieval thinkers, Dante sincerely believed that a person cannot see hell until they have seen enough Paradise. To be prepared to see evil, one must spend most of their time in Paradise.

In Divine Comedy, Canto 28, Dante, speaking of Beatrice, says: “She imparadised my mind.”

Quella che ‘mparadisa la mia mente.

It turns out there is no such word in Italian. Dante invented it to show what Beatrice did for him. She placed his mind firmly in Paradise — “imparadised” his mind. Only with Paradise imprinted deep in our minds are we prepared to face the Inferno.

We knew that the school wasn’t doing for our son what Beatrice did for Dante. They don’t imparadise his mind. The “raising awareness” idol demands that children be placed right into hell to be prepared for hell. There is no preparation for hell in hell. It’s a soul-contaminating mechanism.

The best way to be prepared for darkness is to have enough experience of light. The best way to be prepared for hardship is to have enough experience of joy. The best way to be prepared for the earth is to have enough experience of heaven.

That’s what Franco Nembrini, a famous Italian pedagogue and a director of a private school, told a father who kept telling his son that life was a bunch of bullshit. When Franco asked why he kept telling him that, the father was surprised: “Because it’s true! He must know that.”

Franco paused and said, “I agree. Life is often bullshit. But since, as you say, you are already there, it makes no sense to dive deeper into it. I can promise you that even if you are head and shoulders into this thing, you will see a speck of light if you only look up. Let it be your guide. Go up, not down. If you follow that speck of light, it will lead you out of that thing. Teach your son to look at the stars.”

We have forgotten what medieval thinkers knew instinctively — you must not look at evil until your mind is imparadised. Evil will break you and corrupt you. We believe in raising awareness about hell but not Paradise. Hell does not prepare you to face hell; it prepares you to become part of it.

When we find ourselves in BS, it’s time to look up, not down. One of the best metaphors for the power of looking up is the experience of ancient Israelites in the desert. They were in a bunch of BS of their own making after incessant complaining about eating manna every day. Poisonous snakes came out of nowhere and started biting people.

God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. Anyone who would look up at the serpent would be healed from the snakebites. When you see a bunch of problems down below, the hardest thing is to look up. It’s hard to take your eyes off of your BS. It takes a leap of faith to look up.

The moment you do take your eyes off the hissing snakes at your feet, you are saved. There is no magic here; it’s all common sense.