Love Leads Learning

Dr. Timothy Dernlan
3 hours ago
8 min read

Education Forms Loves, and Loves Form Education

We Are Formed by What We Love

Every educational system—whether candid or coy—rests upon a vision of love. What we love determines what we pursue, what we neglect, and what we are willing to sacrifice to obtain. Education, therefore, is never merely a transfer of information; it is a shaping of desire. Long before a student can articulate an argument, he has already learned what is admirable, what is tedious, and what is worthy of sustained attention. In this sense, education is always moral formation.

Augustine saw this with piercing clarity. In The City of God, he argued that the difference between a good life and a disordered one is not the absence of love but the misplacement of it. Virtue, he insisted, is a matter of rightly ordered loves—ordo amoris. We do not become good by loving nothing, but by loving the right things in the right way and in the right order.

Education, then, cannot escape the task of love formation. It either orders the soul toward what is good, true, and beautiful—or it leaves the soul to be ordered by lesser goods.Students are constantly being trained in affection. They are taught what deserves wonder, what merits repetition, what is worth memorizing, and what can be skimmed or discarded. These cues are subtle but powerful. The subjects that receive time and care are honored; those rushed or marginalized are quietly despised. Even boredom is pedagogical.

When students are consistently bored, they are being taught—perhaps unintentionally—that the content itself is not worthy of delight.

Classical Christian education makes explicit what all education does implicitly: it forms loves. It refuses the modern fiction that schools deal only in neutral facts while values belong elsewhere. Instead, it recognizes that every lesson is a liturgy of the heart, training students to love something. The central question is not whether education will shape desire, but whether it will shape desire toward what is worthy of a human soul made in the image of God.

Eduction Is Never Value-Neutral

Modern educational theory often claims neutrality, as though schools merely provide tools and information while students decide later how to use them. This claim is comforting—and false. Education always catechizes. It forms habits of mind and heart whether it intends to or not. As Aristotle observed, we become just by doing just acts; formation precedes reflection. The classroom is no exception.Every curriculum answers moral questions long before it answers intellectual ones.

What knowledge deserves sustained attention?

What stories are told again and again? Which skills are praised, tested, and rewarded? These choices reveal a hierarchy of value. A school that gives pride of place to technical proficiency over wisdom, or novelty over permanence, is training students to love certain ends and ignore others. Even the organization of time communicates value: what is rushed is deemed less worthy; what is given space is honored.

Stories are especially powerful in this regard.

We remember what we rehearse. When a curriculum repeatedly centers certain narratives—of progress, power, self-expression, or success—it quietly instructs students on what kind of life is admirable. Conversely, when students are steeped in the great stories of the past—epics, histories, tragedies, and saints’ lives—they are drawn into a conversation larger than themselves. They learn to love courage, faithfulness, sacrifice, and wisdom because they have encountered them embodied. This is why the claim of neutrality is so dangerous.

When schools deny that they are forming values, they simply outsource formation to the loudest cultural forces. The result is not freedom but confusion. Students emerge with strong desires but little discernment, passionate commitments but shallow roots.Classical Christian education rejects this abdication. It acknowledges that formation is inevitable and therefore must be intentional.

Rather than pretending to stand nowhere, it stands somewhere—on the conviction that truth is real, goodness is objective, and beauty is formative. By naming its loves openly, it invites accountability and coherence. Education, rightly understood, does not hide its values; it embodies them, patiently and persuasively, in the daily practices of teaching and learning.

Loves Shape the Classroom

What a school loves becomes visible in its culture. Loves are not abstractions; they take on flesh in schedules, assessments, conversations, and expectations. Walk into a classroom and you can often tell, within minutes, what is most prized there. The tone, pace, and posture of learning reveal the heart behind the pedagogy.If efficiency is loved above all, speed and output will dominate. Lessons move quickly, coverage is prized, and lingering questions are seen as obstacles rather than invitations. Students learn to value completion over contemplation and to fear silence. If utility is loved, learning becomes transactional.

Knowledge is justified primarily by its immediate payoff—grades, credentials, or career prospects. The implicit lesson is clear: what cannot be monetized is not worth mastering.If prestige is loved, achievement replaces wisdom. Students are trained to perform rather than to understand, to compete rather than to commune. Success becomes the measure of worth, and failure a kind of moral blemish. Even virtues like diligence and excellence are hollowed out, severed from humility and love of truth. But when truth is loved, a different atmosphere emerges. Patience replaces haste. Rigor is joined to humility.

Teachers model the willingness to dwell with difficult texts, to revise judgments, and to submit their own opinions to reality. Questions are welcomed, not as disruptions, but as signs of genuine engagement. Students learn that understanding takes time and that the best things are often the hardest.The culture of a classroom is not accidental. It is the fruit of what educators themselves love. Teachers cannot form in students what they do not cherish themselves. As Plato suggested, education is less about filling a vessel and more about turning the soul toward the light. That turning happens through imitation.

Students watch what their teachers honor, what they rush past, and what they return to again and again.Classical Christian education calls educators to examine their loves honestly. It recognizes that pedagogy flows downstream from piety—from what the teacher believes is ultimately worth knowing, loving, and serving. When loves are rightly ordered, the classroom becomes a place of formation rather than mere instruction.

Classical Christian Education Forms Right Loves

Classical Christian education is intentional about shaping desire before demanding critique. It understands, with both Aristotle and Augustine, that we must learn to love the good before we are competent to judge it. This stands in sharp contrast to modern approaches that prize early skepticism and constant evaluation. Critique without affection breeds cynicism, not wisdom.

One hallmark of this tradition is attention before acceleration. Students are taught to dwell with ideas, texts, and problems rather than skimming endlessly across the surface of information. Memory work, careful reading, and sustained discussion train the mind to attend—and attention is a moral act. What we attend to, we come to love. In a distracted age, the discipline of attention is itself a form of resistance. Beauty is also given a central place alongside truth. Poetry, music, art, and well-crafted language are not treated as ornamental but as formative. They awaken affection and shape taste.

As Plato knew, beauty has a unique power to draw the soul toward the good. When students encounter beauty regularly, they learn to desire harmony rather than chaos, coherence rather than fragmentation.Memory and imitation play a crucial role. Students memorize what is good—Scripture, poetry, speeches—not as a mechanical exercise but as an act of affection. They imitate models of excellence before being asked to innovate. This is how apprentices learn any craft. Only after the loves are trained does critical evaluation take its proper place.

Finally, order and coherence matter. A well-ordered curriculum reflects a belief that reality itself is ordered by God. Subjects are not isolated silos but parts of a meaningful whole. This structure trains desire by showing students that knowledge fits together, that truth is unified, and that the world is intelligible. In these ways, classical Christian education forms right loves patiently and deliberately, trusting that ordered affection is the soil in which true understanding grows.

Why Formation Must Come First

Modern education often assumes a simple sequence: if students understand rightly, they will love rightly. Give them the correct information, the proper arguments, and the necessary skills, and right affection will follow. Experience—and claims to the contrary—suggest otherwise. Disordered loves distort judgment. We rationalize what we desire and ignore what threatens our attachments.Classical

Christian education reverses the order. It insists that if students love rightly, they will come to understand rightly.

This is not an anti-intellectual claim; it is a profoundly realistic one. The heart is not a passive bystander in cognition. As Scripture teaches, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” What we treasure governs what we notice, how we reason, and what conclusions we find plausible.Augustine’s own intellectual journey bears this out. His errors were not merely logical but affectionate. He loved certain ideas because they flattered his pride or excused his desires. Only when his loves were re-ordered could his mind see clearly.

Education that ignores this dynamic mistakes the symptom for the cause.When loves are disordered, even brilliant minds can reason badly. Cleverness divorced from virtue becomes a tool for self-justification. But when loves are ordered—when truth is loved for its own sake and not merely for advantage—judgment is clarified. Students become teachable. They are willing to submit their opinions to correction and to endure difficulty for the sake of understanding.

Formation, therefore, must come first. Habits of attention, humility, and reverence prepare the soil for intellectual growth.

This is why classical Christian education is often slower, more repetitive, and less flashy than its alternatives. It trusts in cultivation rather than extraction, formation rather than manipulation.Such an approach requires patience and faith. The fruits are not always immediate or easily quantified. But over time, students formed in right loves display a steadiness of judgment and depth of understanding that cannot be manufactured by technique alone.

The Christian End of Education

For Christians, the goal of education is not merely cultivated taste, intellectual refinement, or even civic competence. These are worthy goods, but they are not ultimate. The true end is formation toward wisdom rather than mere cleverness, virtue rather than success, and a love of truth grounded in a love of God.All things were created through Christ and for Christ, and in Him all things hold together. This cosmic claim has educational implications. If Christ is the source and end of all truth, then education is never a neutral enterprise; it is an act of discipleship.

To teach rightly is to help students see reality as it truly is—ordered, meaningful, and sustained by God’s providence.This does not mean reducing education to devotional exercises or moral slogans. It means placing every subject within a larger telos. Mathematics reflects the order of creation. History reveals the drama of human faithfulness and folly. Literature explores the contours of the soul. Science uncovers the regularities of a world that is intelligible because it is spoken into being by the Word.

A simple diagnostic question reveals much: What does this system train students to love? The answer will tell us far more than any mission statement. Does it train them to love comfort, power, or self-expression above all? Or does it train them to love truth, goodness, and beauty—even when these demand sacrifice?

Education forms loves, and the loves we form will, in time, remake education itself. Classical Christian education begins not with methods but with meaning, not with techniques but with telos. It is slow, deliberate, and hopeful because it trusts that rightly ordered loves, sustained over time, can form souls capable of wisdom, courage, and faithfulness. In the end, education is an act of love—directed either toward lesser goods ortoward God Himself. The task before us is to choose wisely.

Questions

What do your students learn to love simply by how learning is structured?
If your school claimed to be value-neutral, what values would students still absorb by default?
If someone observed your classrooms for a week, what would they conclude your school loves most?
Do your students learn to love what is good before being asked to evaluate it?
Do we expect students to judge wisely before we’ve helped them love rightly?
What kind of person does your educational vision hope to produce?
What must they love to become that person?