Having said that, I’m drawn to this sentence: In other words, the key question for education is what has formed the students’ love, and what is that love is directed towards.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment that Christianity is not primarily about packing more information into brains encased in meat. Clearly we are more than that and most, not all, Christian educators realize that. The question though contains an assumption or an ambiguity that can lead us to tilting wind mills. The question assumes that education equals formation. This is contested within Christian education circles. Is there not a case to be made for a distinct field of Christian education that can focus on the shaping of what is pejoratively refered to as “world view” without needing to form the entire person? Even if we have a more wholistic anthropology can we not acknowledge that there are various parts to humanity that need specific kinds of formation?

For arguments sake, I would say that education is the formation of the mind and that other specific fields form other aspects of us. Knowing Smith a little, he would likely say that worship is that which forms all of us. That still doesn’t mean that education equals formation. To confuse the two may do a disservice to both because we can no longer coherently talk about particular aspects of humaness. The whole consumes the particular to the extent that it starts to lose its distinctive shape.

The Church births both its Thomases, for whom Truth leads to Love. and its Francises, for whom Love leads to Truth.

As Chesterton wrote, “The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr: he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age…. It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most(St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox,

Romantics need Thomas; Naturalists need Francis.
But Postmoderns need them both, because Postmoderns relativize truth to oblivion, and they mistake sex for love.

Perhaps it would enhance your reading to know that I have personally experienced Smith’s teaching and interaction with people in and out of class. He really means what he says in the book. He lives it.