Is quality education something we may get in school—in reading, writing, math, science? Is it found in career training, or is it represented by a diploma or a degree with honors? No.

Then is it something we may get outside of school—in job experience, learning how to make good decisions, becoming responsible for ourselves, interacting well with others? No.

Why not?

Because quality education includes more than even the best of human training and experience. Sooner or later these—despite their everyday usefulness—fall short of helping us to successfully meet personal to worldwide challenges and to deal with and eradicate human fear. Human education is limited because it's largely based on material reason and transitory appearances rather than on spiritual, changeless Truth.

"But," someone may ask, "isn't much of human education a reaching out for truth?" Yes, it is, but such education can be a reach in the wrong direction because of mankind's general unfamiliarity with and even disregard of the spiritual.

In a study made by the Stanford Research Institute on the relation between a society's structure and history and its dominant image of man the researchers concluded that we need "a drastically changed image of man-on-earth," an emphasis on the "spiritual side of man so long ignored or denied by that official truth-seeking institution of modern society, science." ^{See The Christian Science Monitor, September 17, 1974;}

The spiritual side is really the only side of man, as a thoughtful study of the Bible reveals and as Christian Science teaches.

Spiritual man was the ideal that Christ Jesus so effectively demonstrated in his life and in his healing works. And inseparable from his spiritual sense of man was his understanding of God as man's Father. His overflowing sense of God as Spirit, Father, and his reflection of God's pure nature enabled him to feed spiritually deprived people.

Multitudes flocked not only to witness Jesus' healing power but to listen to his teachings about life. A great deal of his teaching was concerned with ethics—with expressing the flawless nature of the Father in purity, integrity, and brotherly love. Some have argued that these ethics were not original with Jesus but were simply a restatement of the highest values of Judaism. But though Jesus' words may have sounded familiar to some listeners, their basis was new, vital, inspired, because they stressed man's actual sonship with God. Jesus based his teachings on God, infinite Spirit, and spiritual man. He discerned that "the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." ^{John 5:19;}

A quality education is based on the spiritual understanding of man and true being. Quality education exercises and strengthens our moral and spiritual senses. It aligns academic study with Principle and teaches sound character as well as skills.

What does that mean to us? As parents, teachers, pupils, or taxpayers we are able to make better decisions on educational issues. Knowing what quality education is includes an awareness of what it is not.

Mrs. Eddy stressed the importance of right academic education. But she expected more from education than the orthodox. In Science and Health she puts her finger squarely on the need: "School-examinations are one-sided; it is not so much academic education, as a moral and spiritual culture, which lifts one higher." ^{Science and Health, p. 235;} A spiritual education touches and transforms all of human life. It manifests the activity of the Christ, Truth, in human consciousness, which flushes out human misconceptions in every area and replaces them with a more spiritual sense of man and the universe. The correction appears as moral and physical healing.

It's important to recognize that healing doesn't change reality. Reality can't be changed. But the human view of reality can be, indeed needs to be, changed. What but quality education—instruction in spiritual reality—can fill the urgent need for an emphasis on the "spiritual side of man"?

Education in Christian Science is a constant drawing out, or unfoldment, of the spiritual man we really are. No material knowledge can impart such spiritual growth, though Mrs. Eddy does point out that "observation, invention, study, and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself, out of all that is mortal." ^{ibid., p. 195.}

Following Christ Jesus' example in the light of Mrs. Eddy's teachings, we gain a genuine education through self-surrender, humility, and love. May we not also, through Christly thought and example, be quality educators to all we meet in our daily round?

With a continuous, expanding education based on moral values and spiritual truth, we can help rid human consciousness of its false assumptions about man's origin and nature. And with such a basis we will help purify and strengthen what's best in human education.

Through right education as to what God is and what man really is, mankind can see its way to just and lasting solutions of such problems as overpopulation, lack, inefficient government, environmental decay, and threat of atomic extinction. The burden of suffering imposed by false education about life and man can be lifted and men set free to achieve their full potential.