Ends and Education

Every person is by nature capable of determining his or her aims. Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right. Obviously, we must demand from a person, as a thinking individual, that his or her ends should be genuinely good, since the pursuit of evil ends is contrary to the rational nature of the person. This is also the purpose of education, both the education of children, and the mutual education of adults; it is just that -- a matter of seeking true ends, i.e. real goods as the ends of our actions, and of finding and showing to others the ways to realize them.


Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 1981