Good Teachers

"There is one simple key to exciting and successful education on any level … good teachers. Good teachers, in turn, means two things, both of them love-things. The teacher by whom students are inspired, the teacher who changes their lives, is always a double lover. He is a lover of the subject and a lover of the student. Students detect that love almost infallibly, and it is simply irresistible… But this love of student and subject that is the key to great teaching is a love of God, at least implicitly, even if the teacher is an agnostic or an atheist. The spark is not just natural affection, friendship, or desire but some sort of disinterested, self-forgetful, wondering, and worshipful agape for the student and for the subject. For the student is an image of God, who is love, and the subject is a bit of truth, which God is also. Loving these two supreme values of personhood and truth is implicitly loving God because that is where they are. They are divine attributes. Therefore good teaching is loving God."

Peter Kreeft, The God Who Loves You