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.
