Becoming Real Persons: Education as Relationship

A talk by Laura E. Wolfe, given at the St. Basil Center for Orthodox Thought and Culture’s Orthodoxy and Education Conference on October 17, 2025.

I’ve been working on this talk for a few months now, so the ideas here have been on my mind for a while. But just this past week, a couple things popped up that made me more certain what an important idea it is: a Substack essay on “the unmothered mind” and a recent reread of Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age: A Young Girl’s Illustrated Primer. Both the article and the book underscore the reality that education without relationship is form without function.

Just as in Orthodoxy, we don’t fast for the sake of ascesis itself, but instead fast because it prepares us for a certain relationship, education for its own sake is a self-eating snake. It has to serve relationship in order to fulfill its telos, its purpose.

There are so many ways to look at education. It almost becomes impossible to define the longer you look at it, so that it’s easy to get stuck thinking about the very practical aspects like curricula, book lists, and testing. We get so caught up in the trappings of education for our children, that we forget that education isn’t something that just arbitrarily stops when a diploma is issued.

But Charlotte Mason defined education this way, as “an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.”

What does it mean, that education is life?

Well, for one, it means that it is something far larger than what happens during our youth. It’s not something confined to curricula, book lists, or tests.

I’d like to propose this: that education, in its largest sense, is the becoming of a Real Person through authentic relationship. What is a Real Person, then? What does it mean to have authentic relationship?

Let’s start with the via negativa.

Oscar Wilde, writing from prison in De Profundis, said this: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.”

Yes, I know that Oscar Wilde is not the first person that comes to mind when we think about Orthodox Christian education. But when he wrote this, he was a man who had just lost everything—his reputation, his freedom, his family—for living what he thought was an authentic life. That’s relatable, isn’t it? That level of sacrifice, of commitment– Isn’t that one of the goals of the Christian life, to be the kind of person willing to give up everything for Christ? Isn’t laying the foundation for martyrdom one of the goals of Christian education?

How about if we reframe Wilde’s statement of autonomous self-creation, of hyper-individualism, as instead, a soul cry for the kind of hypostatic personhood that Christ offers us through membership in His Body?

If we frame it that way, then even in the depths of his suffering, Wilde was grappling with our fundamental question: What does it mean to be a Real Person?

The answer I’d like to suggest today is that we become Real Persons through learning to relate authentically– foremost to God, the Holy Trinity, but also to the icons of Christ in the faces of others around us, within the depths of our own hearts, and with the glorious Creation that surrounds us. Personhood, here, is not something we synthesize in isolation, but something that we synergize through communion.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, especially as I watch our culture promise us endless ways to “find ourselves” while simultaneously programming us to be exactly like everyone else. We live in an age of unprecedented conformity, yet the modern predicament is even worse than this, because this very conformity is repackaged and disguised as individuality. Algorithms feed us ready-made identities. Consumer culture tells us who to be through what we buy. Our educational systems themselves often seem to only produce compliant citizens who work, buy, and think how the experts tell them to, and even our spiritual lives are in constant danger of falling into the heresy of a very comfortable therapeutic moralistic deism, where performance and visible success become more important than transformation.

These systems don’t just program us to think alike—they cripple our capacity for genuine encounter. When our identities are algorithmic, our relationships become transactional.

Picture a young person– maybe you know her, maybe you’ve taught her. She’s doing alright at school, maybe not super passionate about any one thing in particular yet, but she likes some of the books she’s read and projects she’s worked on. She goes to church, says her prayers, gets good enough grades. She’s very interested in spending time with her peers, maybe looking forward to a summer job or camp experience, and to Life After School, when she finally gets to be her own person, (what that means might be vague, but the desire is there). On the surface, she looks fine, so no one is worried. But what looks “normal” on the surface masks her true hunger for Real Connection and Relationship. When she tries to talk to her parents about a friendship that’s falling apart, they’ve got advice, but it doesn’t help. When she tells her teacher she’s confused about something she read, she gets a correct answer instead of an invitation to wonder together. When she mentions to her priest that prayer feels empty lately, she receives a technique instead of companionship. She doesn’t have language for what she’s missing—she just knows that the adults in her life are somehow…absent, even when they’re standing right there. And yes, of course she’s scrolling.

Our instinct is to place the blame squarely at the foot of technology, and to assume that the answer to our relationship challenges will lie in the way our educational systems manage screens and devices. And that is a discussion worth having, but I think that ultimately it’s looking in the wrong place, because even if we preserve our kids from the “wrong kind or wrong amount” of tech, they will still struggle here. Technology use is not so much the problem as it is the symptom of the problem.

Our girl is looking for connection anywhere she can find it. We keep offering her systems and programs and answers, when what she needs is our struggling, authentic, embodied presence. And when life throws her the inevitable curveballs—when someone she loves dies, when her faith gets tested, when she has to make a hard choice alone—she’s going to discover she’s on her own in a way none of us anticipated, because we taught her information instead of relationship. We have not introduced her to an encounter with the extravagant generosity of Real Communion. Not because we haven’t tried to give it to her, but because we have failed to find it ourselves.

This is why we’re here. We are here, at this conference, because we all hunger for the Right Kind of Education that will set our younger brothers and sisters on the right paths, the straight and narrow ways that will lead them to flourishing. We are here, as Orthodox Christians, because we look to the recently glorified Saint Olga of Alaska, and want also to know how we can all become Real People. This is what it means to be Yupik, like Saint Olga– the word Yupik itself means “Real Person.” And what did St. Olga reveal to us about what makes a person real? The capacity to relate authentically—to God, to her community, to the land and animals she lived among, to her own interior life. Saint Olga is relatable because she was related—woven into the fabric of reality through genuine encounter.

The trouble is that there is no patented process to become such a Real Person. And no matter how much we desire it, there is no single system that will produce such a product, because a Real Person by definition cannot be a product. This way of thinking about education is mirage in a desert landscape. There is no curriculum, booklist, test, system, or program that will substitute for the Living Water that is the Source of our Reality.

But that’s okay. Because the point isn’t to convince our children to get everything done right and squared away before they graduate, so that they can just rest on their laurels and coast along to financial, academic, and spiritual successes. As much as we believe in the educating for the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we don’t really even want our students to just be taking our words for it. We don’t want them stuck at simply thinking our opinions, quoting our passions and mimicking our lives. We want much, much more for them.

The goal is to initiate them into something so much bigger, something that all of us must first be practicing and modeling in order not to be hypocrites. Each of us, as adult Christians, bears the responsibility of becoming a mentor who leads through service, example, and authentic, embodied relationship.

This is all great Big Picture Thinking. If you’re like me, that only takes you so far. You want inspiration, a Plan, something to act on, something to incorporate right now and revisit and retrospect in 90 days. We’re planting the seeds for that. First we need a pattern.

Charlotte Mason, in saying, “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life,” left us such a pattern, and far from being old-fashioned or out-of-date, it is built on common-sense, perennial principles. And these principles open up education for us, so that the pursuit of education becomes synonymous with our ultimate goal of Becoming Real Persons. And this pattern, furthermore, works for human growth at every stage of life.

The foundational premise of this is: You Are NOT a Product.

Mason’s most basic and most radical insight flies in the face of everything our culture tries to sell us about human development. She said that “Children are born persons.” Not blank slates. Not animals to be trained. Not raw material waiting to be shaped. Not blanks of future adults that need to be manufactured according to specification. Persons, reaching out to connect, to know and be known.

Now here’s the thing: If children are born persons, then – guess what?!– adults remain persons throughout life. This sounds obvious until you acknowledge how much of our culture treats us as products to be optimized, problems to be solved, and resources to be managed. We are so inundated with messaging that benefits the systems of the Powers that Be that we can easily forget that our Personhood rests on inherent iconity– that being made in the image of Christ, we are blessed with dignity, unique gifts, and the rights to both growth and relationship with our Creator, regardless of age, stage, or productivity.

Think about it. Most personal development, and even educational systems, treat you like a machine that needs better programming. I say this as someone who’s been through my share share of institutional education and self-help phases. Life-hacks, optimization, systems for financial, academic, and spiritual success. It’s all designed to make us more efficient versions of what Someone Else thinks we should be.

Mason’s framework is different. She gave us principles, not systems. Patterns that adapt to who you actually are, not formulas the force you into predetermined shapes.

This connects beautifully with the Orthodox Christian understanding of theosis, the journey from being created in the image of God to growing into His very likeness. This is Real Life: it’s not self-improvement or mere actualization, and it’s far more than material success. It is participation in the life of the Holy Trinity, which IS Perfect Relationship in Love and Communion.

I’d like to introduce you to someone whose work has helped me understand this process more clearly, whose framework might give you language for what you’re seeing in your charges and experience yourselves. Kazimierz Dabrowski was a twentieth century Polish psychologist who developed what he called the theory of positive disintegration, a framework that is often referenced in gifted education circles, but has a far larger use and applicability. Dabrowski can help us understand how the process of education continues to work on us by scaffolding the development of inner complexity. Going back to the Wilde quote, you cannot genuinely encounter another person if you yourself are merely a collection a borrowed scripts and programmed responses. Encounter requires something more Real than that.

Dabrowski identified five levels of personality development. Most people, he said, end up living at Level One– primary integration. This is comfortable conformity to biological drives and societal norms, with relationship– if you want to call it that– mediated through roles and scripts. You do what’s expected, follow the rules, measure success by external standards. There’s minimal inner conflict because you’ve never really questioned the program you’ve been handed.

Even our most good-intentioned education– religious education in particular– often reverts to this level: Just get the kids to conform to the right behavioral standards, and their souls will take care of themselves.

This is complete fallacy, and a very dangerous temptation. Our Lord Himself tells us this over and over in His Gospels:

In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew chapter 5, where Jesus repeatedly says “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” He moves from external compliance (don’t murder, don’t commit adultery) to internal reality (don’t harbor anger; don’t lust in your heart).

In Matthew 15, he says – “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

Jesus is constantly pulling people from scripted religion into genuine encounter. In fact, Christ explicitly condemns outward compliance without internal transformation:

In Matthew 23, – He accuses the Pharisees of tithing mint and cumin while neglecting “the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”– all matters of the heart. He goes on to call the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” – outwardly clean but inwardly corrupt.

And this is why authentic development, real growth, and relationship that is based on encounter all require what Dabrowski called positive disintegration. In order to become Made New, we must disintegrate, or breakdown, all of these false scripts, borrowed identities, programmed responses and pseudo-relationships.

This is uncomfortable, if not outright painful. The first time this typically happens, when we start to question and examine the premises, scripts, and roles we took for granted in childhood– is what Dabrowski calls Level Two. This occurs most often in adolescence or young adulthood, and all of us in this room are aware of how this is a prime time of life for people to fall away from the faith. When this level is improperly scaffolded, it can lead to rejecting everything– throwing out the reality of relationship with God because the false version was so unsatisfying.

This is because being able to parrot the right answers and conform to the “right” behaviors doesn’t guarantee that the heart itself is being transformed. In fact, without preparing our charges for the process of self-questioning and disintegration, without providing a model of how to move from performed relationship to authentic encounter, we’re very likely to fail. It is essential for us to engage in a lifelong process of education that grows and stretches us into the kind of interior complexity that reflects Reality.

Dabrowski’s Level Three, which begins what he calls multilevelness, involves continual and often intense inner conflict between a person’s lower impulses and drives to conform with his or her higher values. You really start to feel ashamed of the gap between who you are and who you sense you could become. Holding this tension between competing desires and values creates space for inner complexity, which in turn enables authentic relationship, because it is the same space that makes room for loving our neighbors.

A lot of people– even most adults– simply learn coping mechanisms to try and escape the discomfort of this tension. They either retreat back to scripted relationships and conformity (level one), or get stuck in reactive rebellion (level two). But when we stay with the tension, when we lean into the process of education which grows and stretches us, we gradually develop what Dabrowski called an authentic hierarchy of values. We start making choices based on an inner compass– the conscience, the soul, the nous— rather than external pressure, even if that external pressure is from an objectively good source or for an objectively good outcome. As we become more consistent within ourselves, we increase in multilevelness. At level four, we begin a conscious and deliberate campaign of self-education and development that will continue to align our whole selves with our internal values and ideals. And at level five, we hope to achieve a secondary integration, a deep, authentic, harmonious and autonomous personality.

When we attain this kind of agency, we also become truly relatable.

Join us next time for the conclusion of the talk, as well as a gift!