Right Use Of School Studies With A View To The Love Of God

What is a good education? What constitutes a good education? Dictionary.com defines education as the act or process of acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life. While there are many ways to obtain an education and a variety of subjects that can be studied, to have a good education one must learn how to think. Simone Weil and David Foster Wallace prove this in their essays on education and its importance in life. In Simone Weil’s essay “Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” the idea of education relies on the ability to develop the “faculty of attention”. She describes how students and teachers alike focus and measure the level of education on grade-marks …show more content…
He breaks down the phrase learning how to think into what it really means which is “learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think”. It other words, it means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Wallace argues that as long as a person tries to adjust their natural settings and alter the selfish thoughts they have, they can be considered as more adjusted individuals. He uses an example of being stuck in traffic, while the natural response to being stuck in traffic is to be upset and miserable he urges us to look past our anguish and think about the people that are also stuck in traffic. We come to understand that not only we are frustrated but those around us are too. Ultimately, individuals who are able to break free from their default stetting are “more adjusted” and have educational freedom. Educational freedom involves the understanding that being educated means being able to understand how to