The meaning of life

This essay raises a valid question (why our educational system systematically censors the great questions about life?) but offers inadequate answers (the great books? the university as an alternative to religion?). The problem is NOT one of religious indoctrination, but one of method. How can one face these questions reasonably? The absence of "meaning" from education is just a reflection of the reduction of reason that the Pope denounced in his Regensburg address. Reason coincides with the methods of empirical science, and empirical science knows no meaning, so what's there to teach? In particular, the humanities must by logical necessity become the domain of pure relativism and unbridled instinctivity.