These are the aims of a BYU education. Taken together, they should lead students toward wholeness: "the balanced development of the total person" (Mission Statement). These aims aspire to promote an education that helps students integrate all parts of their university experience into a fundamentally sacred way of life--their faith and reasoning, their knowledge and conduct, their public lives and private convictions. Ultimately, complete wholeness comes only through the Atonement of him who said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). Yet a university education, guided by eternal principles, can greatly "assist individuals in their quest for" that abundant "eternal life" (Mission Statement).

A commitment to this kind of education has inspired the prophets of the past to found Church schools, like BYU, on the principle that "to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God" (2 Nephi 9:29). These prophets have known the risks of such an enterprise, for "that happiness which is prepared for the saints" shall be hid forever from those "who are puffed up because of their learning, and their wisdom" (see 2 Nephi 9:42-43). Yet they have also known that education plays a vital role in realizing the promises of the Restoration; that a broad vision of education for self-reliance and personal growth is at the very heart of the gospel when the gospel is at the heart of education. To the degree that BYU achieves its aims, the lives of its students will confirm Brigham Young's confidence that education is indeed "a good thing," blessing all those who humbly and faithfully use it to bless others.