Now I Know

I’ve been involved in a course about the development of education over the last hundred and twenty years or so. It has been a real eye-opening experience. For me, it goes a long way toward answering my questions about why people think like they do. The most import revelation was why I felt unhappy with the educational system into which I was thrown. It explains my fifty-some years of love for the idea never to let my schooling interfere with my education.

Schooling never instilled in me a sense of wonder or a desire to contemplate the importance of life. There was nothing taught me in a classroom that prepared me for standing on the summit of the Sierras and looking out at the world spread out before me and wondering where I fit into it all.

Until I read The Abolition of Man, I could not understand why well-intending people would deny me guidance in the pursuit of answers. The truth is that they did not know. They had been taught to ignore such frivolousness. What couldn’t be cataloged, measured, and its properties analyzed didn’t exist. “Follow the Science” was their mantra for a hundred years before Covid, as though science was somehow pure, untouched by human hands, and fixed forever.

People ask me where my stories come from and I tell them as truthfully as I can. But how a piece of music, a photograph, or a painting inspires a character or a story, I cannot say. This I know is beyond the reach of neuroscience too. It is something the workings of are known only to the One who created it. Honestly, that is all I need or want to know. That knowledge fills me with fresh wonder.

There is a scene in the Bible in which Moses says to God, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.” This is Moses, the man who wrought wonders in Egypt, who was with God on the mountain, the man for whom God divided the sea and brought water from a rock. Here he is, wanting to know more and to see more.

Learning for learning’s sake, knowledge, wonder, and contemplation are their own reward. They are essential ingredients for thriving as a human being and lead us to life.

Jack LaFountain

Author of Faith, A Mann of God novel.