St. Paul supplies us with an answer to this ever recurrent question with a phrase which gives us at once a definition and a goal. To the thinking Catholic the process of growing up can never be a haphazard one for it is founded upon settled laws, directed by an established method, inspired by an ideal made concrete in the person of Christ Himself.

Now, it is of the very nature of the living being to wish to attain to maturity and the rational being strives towards that maturity not by a blind urge but with philosophic and selective apprehension. The social being, “Man-in-Society”, sees maturity not as his own isolated development, but as the widening, deepening and raising of the life, both natural and supernatural, of the society in which he lives.

Viewed in this light, the question of education cannot be narrowed into the confines of the School-system, the examination-syllabus, the University programme. It cannot be conceived, merely, as a branch of politics. On the contrary, the term must be made to embrace the whole of life and society, with every human being as its subject; while for its object we envisaged the rational, harmonious use of all created things. The field is vast, certainly, and by its demands for comprehensive thinking this vastness often frightens away the student. Nevertheless, it is only when viewed in its totality that the question of Education can be made to yield its full fruit of human interest and creative power.