Education of freedom and responsibility: Preparing athletes for Christ
Education of freedom and responsibility: Preparing athletes for Christ

Author(s): Maria-Christina Matsouka
Subject(s): Theology and Religion, Sociology of Religion
Published by: Editura Doxologia
Keywords: Education; freedom; responsibility; teacher;
Summary/Abstract: Our education risks producing one-dimensional people who worship what is useful, glorify what is practical, but remain unaware of the fundamental questions of existence. The freedom that education must cultivate is freedom from ourselves and from our personal happiness. Only freedom, as constant discipline and renunciation, self-denial and transcendence, communion and responsibility, constitutes our being and shapes our character. Only freedom can help children and young people, through education and formation, to resist the temptation of individual self-sufficiency, moral arrogance, self-justification, and above all the animalistic pursuit of happiness, where man enjoys, as much as he can, his own gratification without caring for others. Freedom is preserved and honored when it is lived as responsibility and as a cross to bear, as duty rather than as a right, as sacrifice rather than demand. The subjugation of education to individualism is neither an expression of humanism nor of progress. The pedagogy of the future must be a resistance against the terror of the useful, based on freedom and responsibility, in order to prepare, in St. John Chrysostom’s words, “athletes for Christ”.

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