Proper education integrates “thinking, virtue, and delight.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

12 December, 2025

HAMILTON, ON — Values-neutral education is impossible, according to a new Cardus paper, Schooling and Delight: What We Can Learn from Comenius About Why We Educate by Cardus Senior Fellow and education professor David I. Smith. In the paper, Smith draws on the work of John Amos Comenius, a Christian seventeenth-century reformer, educator, and scholar, to explore the ways that education is inseparable from a belief system or worldview.

“An educated person is someone who can wisely navigate and integrate these three fundamental human needs: to think well, to use power well, and to delight in the right things,” writes Smith. “These three needs imply that learning, virtue, and piety are core goals of education, with an accompanying insistence that they cannot be separated, that proper education requires an intimate integration of thinking, virtue, and delight.”

A clear implication from Smith’s paper is that all education, whether from a secular or religious vantage point, is rooted in particular beliefs about the world. Consequently, it will foster implicit and explicit choices about how to live.

“Therefore, seeking the common good through education does not…imply that schooling should avoid being based on specific beliefs and commitments, a specific faith and piety,” writes Smith. “Healthy piety seeks and sustains the common good. The familiar modern division between private faith-based education and secular public education does not do justice to Comenius’s questions.”

Smith also argues that “to delight in the right things,” as Comenius put it from a Christian perspective, is not inward focused, but involves active care for the world and other people. This reinforces the argument that religious education serves the common good by producing graduates who engage with and care about the world around them—something the Cardus Education Survey has consistently found in terms of religious school graduates’ strong civic and voluntary outcomes.

Schooling and Delight: What We Can Learn from Comenius About Why We Educate is freely available on the Cardus website.

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