Man's final end is to know God face to face. Every part of his life ought to be ordered to this end.
The purpose of education, then, is Heaven. It cannot be, first of all, knowledge, power, status, profit, employment, or any other subordinate good. From a perspective of education as preparation for work, or economic advantage, an education ordered towards man's final end will appear to be useless.
Man is created to love God with his will, according to the image of God in his intellect. This requires forming a proper image of Him, which in this life must come through the senses. Theology, the study of God as such, is part of this. So is the study of His creation, through which we learn of its creator. Although some of this knowledge of created things, unlike theology, might be applied for useful profit, the study of creation subordinated to man's final end rather than his own use will render this knowledge less useful, since it will preclude him from tyrannical domination of creation, and direct him instead to serve an end beside his own.
Forming a proper image of God in the intellect also requires forming the imagination so it is capable of receiving the image of God. This will entail the useless study of the imaginative arts, and particularly poetry, to develop minds that readily apprehend the truth when they see it.
Knowledge of the Creator through intellectual abstractions is incomplete, even dangerous, however. Man is an embodied intellect, made to know through his senses "naked" to the world. This entails digging into creation, disassembling and reassembling it, not with the object of tyrannical mastery over it for man's own sake, but with the end of knowing it intimately so as to reorder it more perfectly towards its Creator.
These manual activities may seem more useful than theological contemplation or poetic imagining, involving as they do certain practical arts of construction and production and so forth. But they will only be useful in the truest sense insofar as they are subordinated to the useless activities of imagination and contemplation.
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