The Graybrook Vision: The Scope of Education

"It is properly the whole man or person that is educated; but the main subject of the work is the spirit. Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process. Even man's earthly end is predominantly moral. Now, if dexterity in any art, as in the handling of printer's type, a musket, a burin, a power-loom, were education, its secularization might be both possible and proper. Is not a confusion here the source of most of the argument in defense of that theory?... Dexterity in an art is not education. The latter nurtures a soul, the other only drills a sense-organ or muscle; the one has a mechanical end, the other a moral. "

Robert L. Dabney, "Discussions, Vol. IV, Secular"