Lesson 4: Measuring Success: Beyond Assessments, Achievements, and Accomplishments

I want to ask you a question that I suspect no one involved in your child's education has ever directly asked you.

What does success look like—not at the end of the school year, not at graduation, not when they enter college, not at their first job—but at forty-five?

What does success look like at forty-five? What kind of person do you want your child to be when they are forty-five years old? To clarify, I’m not asking, What do you want them to have achieved” I’m asking, Who do you want them to be—when they’ve hit mid-life?

I ask because the way we measure educational success almost entirely determines what kind of education we provide. And most of us, without realizing it, are using standards and measuring devices borrowed from a tradition that holds a very different vision of the human person than the one we actually profess.

The modern educational system measures specific inputs and outputs. Inputs include: seat time, curriculum coverage, instructional hours. Outputs include: standardized test scores, grade point averages, college acceptance rates, graduation statistics. 

Not these aren’t meaningless measures. They do track real things so they do have their place in the service of the greater good. But to track only these things is to prioritize the wrong things if what you actually care about is wisdom, virtue, and the capacity for a genuinely good life. 

Aristotle made a distinction that helps clarify this point. He distinguished between things that are good as means and things that are good as ends. Wealth, for instance, is good as a means—it enables other goods. But nobody in his right mind pursues wealth for its own sake; he pursues it for what it can provide. The person who pursues wealth as though it were a final good has disordered his loves. The one who treats accumulation as the point rather than the instrument has confused the means with the end. 

The modern educational metrics are almost entirely metrics of means. Test scores are means. Credentials are means. Even knowledge, strictly speaking, is a means. The end that we’re looking for—something Aristotle called eudaimonia, what we might translate as human flourishing—cannot be measured on a standardized test. It is not a score. It is a condition of the soul.

So what does this look like? What are the marks of a person who has been genuinely well educated?

I’m going to suggest at least four.

The first mark of a genuinely educated person is ordered loves.

The well-educated person loves the right things in the right order. He loves God above all, his neighbor as himself, beauty more than mere novelty, truth more than comfort, and goodness more than approval.

C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, makes a point that is worth contemplating here. Lewis is responding to a pair of textbook authors—he calls them Gaius and Titius—who believe they are doing students a favor by debunking emotional responses to the world, by teaching children that such responses say nothing about reality and everything about the person feeling them. 

Lewis's reply to this is pointed: the task of education is not to hack down the jungle of desires; it’s to irrigate deserts. His imagery here is powerful if we understand the ancient conception of the soul that recognizes noble sentiments (chest) and baser sentiments (belly). 

The problem with the modern student is not an excess of sentiment that needs pruning—what Gaius and Titius are trying to do; it’s actually an aridity of soul; the modern soul (the chest) is dried up and needs cultivation. We build up just sentiments not by dismantling the baser ones through skeptical critique, but by nourishing the noble sentiments and the student’s capacity for a right response to the world through long exposure to what is genuinely worthy of love, wonder, and reverence.

The goal of classical education has never been to extinguish desire. This is where modernist education, and frankly, fundamentalist Christianity, get it wrong. They are both out to kill desire, not to cultivate it

Classical Christian Educators, on the other hand, want to train the heart to respond rightly to what is genuinely worthy of response. The educated person’s desires are cultivated and shaped—not extinguished or hacked down—but nourished and formed by that long and patient irrigation of the soul. That shaping is what Lewis calls the stock of "just sentiments," and it is the indispensable foundation of a fully human life.

That’s the first mark of a genuinely educated person: ordered loves.

The second mark is intellectual humility.

Socrates said the beginning of wisdom is knowing that you do not know. But I want to be precise here, because intellectual humility is often confused with its opposite—a kind of performative self-deprecation that is really just arrogance in disguise.

I once had lunch with the wing commander of an F-22 fighter pilot training squadron, and he told me something I have never forgotten. He said their recruiters were always on the lookout for cocky pilots, never arrogant ones. When he said it, he got the curious pause from me he was looking for; and the distinction he made is worth the pause that it required. 

A cocky pilot is one who says, I have something to offer. He knows his skills, he trusts his training, and he’s willing to press the engagement. An arrogant pilot, on the other hand, is one who says, I have nothing left to learn. He stops listening. He trusts his instincts more than the instruments. He is, in the most literal sense, flying blind and is likely to get himself and other crew members killed.

That distinction maps strikingly well onto the intellectual life of a well-educated person. 

We stand in the tradition of the Western mind—a tradition that stretches back through Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer—and we may indeed have something to offer our present moment; so, we shouldn’t be timid about stepping up and engaging the disorders of the age. But we can never forget how many people have lived and thought before us, how much has been worked out at great cost, how much we have yet to understand. The well-educated person holds his judgments and conclusions with appropriate tentativeness. He listens humbly and carefully before he speaks. And, he recognizes that the tradition he has received is far larger and wiser than he is on his own.

The third mark of a well-educated person is the capacity for genuine conversation.

Not contentious or polemic debate, but conversation—rational public discourse. He possesses the ability to sit with another person, hear what they are actually saying rather than what he expects them to say, engage their ideas honestly, and allow his own thinking to be genuinely challenged by the encounter.

I want to be clear about what I mean by genuinely challenged. I do not mean the hollow affectation of open-mindedness that never actually changes anything. I mean something with real stakes: the willingness to have your assumptions examined, your conclusions tested; and, when something has been sufficiently demonstrated, the moral courage to follow the argument where it leads—even when that is inconvenient. 

Intellectual integrity is not a posture. It is a discipline of the mind.

This capacity for real conversation, for rational public discourse, is rarer than it should be, and it is almost entirely a product of formation—of having been in many conversations, with many interlocutors, including the dead ones we meet in books.

The fourth mark is what I call the long view.

The well-educated person is not owned by the present moment. He knows enough history, and has enough knowledge of the human condition and spirit, to understand that the crises of his age are not unique, that the tradition has survived worse, and that the virtues required to navigate difficulty are not invented; they are inherited. 

He is, in C. S. Lewis's phrase, a native of a larger country than the one his passport says he belongs to. He is cosmopolitan, not provincial, in his thinking. He is, like Erasmus, a citizen of the world and a patriot to the Republic of Letters.

Because he inhabits that larger country, he is not easily rattled by the shrill, inflammatory language of the media cycle or the opportunistic outrage of politicians. He has read enough to know that such language has always been with us, that it is a feature of those who wish to bypass reason and commandeer the passions. 

The person with a long view reads the media headlines without being consumed by them. He takes the present seriously, but he doesn’t mistake it for the whole of reality. And because he does so, he is capable of responding responsibly; he doesn’t merely react to the next scary thing on the news. He doesn’t fall for all the propaganda and conspiracy theories that are rattling the demos.

None of these marks—ordered loves, intellectual humility, capacity for genuine conversation, and the long view—appears on a transcript. None of them is measured by a standardized test. All of them are the product of years of deliberate formation: reading great literature, engaging the great conversation, lot’s of practice, and the slow cultivation of habits of mind and heart.

The question worth asking is not whether your child is on track for the college or career of choice. It is whether or not your child is on track for a good life.

Those are not the same question. And the education that answers the second one well is the education worth pursuing.

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