"Academics of the right sort are requisite. 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." In these words on page 195 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy significantly evaluates human education.
The need and desire for skill and learning in many departments of human activity are common to all people. The fields of learning extend from training for trades to cultivating one's taste for the fine arts and in the final analysis include preparing for useful activity in human society. This being so, may we not profitably ask: Where does true knowledge originate? Is its origin human or divine, material or spiritual? Is it the gift of God or a product of the brain? Is real knowledge based on unerring Principle or is it a mass of disorderly, ephemeral evidence obtained from the material senses? Christian Science declares emphatically that God is infinite Mind, and that the only true man manifests this Mind; that God is the all-knowing, and that man is His reflection; that infinite Mind must be unlimited, and that man, the perfect image of this Mind, cannot be limited in that which he knows; and furthermore, that Mind expresses itself in intelligence and an orderly unfoldment of ideas and does not give forth purposeless, wandering, unrelated, contradictory thoughts or beliefs.
According to Christian Science, therefore, the fact is that God's man, His compound idea, knows all that is good and real, because God, good, is his Mind. Sometimes, however, students of Christian Science struggle with a sense of having been deprived of much that is helpful and needful by having missed the opportunity of attending a higher school of learning. Many, having recognized the falsity of the suggestion that a lack of higher education can be an obstacle to their proper advancement and usefulness, have turned to the all-knowing Mind as the source of all true knowledge and have risen to greater heights of achievement by overcoming the very obstacle which might have limited their usefulness. They have demonstrated to a degree the scientific validity of the Scripture (Luke 15:31), "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." In other words, God's son, the real man, is ever at one with perfect Mind, and possesses intelligence, understanding, perception, and spiritual intuition. When this fact is understood and applied, the sense of limitation caused by a lack of human education is challenged, and the way for becoming truly educated, or being led out of the darkness of material beliefs into the light of spiritual understanding, is clear.
