Educated Into Folly

Reflections on Education, Virtue, and the Western Canon

Around two decades ago, I found myself unexpectedly surrounded by a small cadre of young adults—some nearing the end of high school, most just emerging from the hothouses of college—who were desperately seeking conversations about things of a heavenly nature. These were millennial children of a fractured age, the offspring of political and educational systems that seemed to have lost their way, and yet their eyes were still bright with curiosity, their hearts still willing to pursue truths that reached beyond the immediate and the mundane. They came from a variety of religious backgrounds and political persuasions, and what drew them together—and perhaps what drew them to me—was nothing more than my peculiar brand of ordinariness: a man of the nineties, approaching thirty years old, molded by a culture of late-night coffeehouse conversations where debate was gentle, and tempers seldom flared.

To these young adults, I was something of a novelty. They were accustomed to the world being painted in rigid strokes: left or right, Christian or atheist, Marxist or capitalist. Into that landscape, I arrived without a badge, without a label, and, for the better part of two or three years, we would gather a few nights a week, either in the dimly lit corners of a local coffee shop—where smoking was still permitted until the mid-2000s—or in my own living room. There, ten or twenty of us would speak in earnest, attempting to dissect philosophy, religion, and the questions that so often linger at the edges of human consciousness.

As the weeks turned into months, one young man came to occupy more of my attention than any other. He was curious to a fault, insatiably so, and he became known to me as Catholic J-.

A high school dropout who was probably a little too intelligent for the type of public school he attended - he learned you don’t need a high school diploma to go to college, and so at age 18 he enrolled at a community college, eventually obtaining both an undergraduate and a graduate degree—a trajectory that, in its own way, mirrored the restless pursuit of knowledge that characterized his youth.