Many philosophers, educators, and cultural commentators have addressed the inefficiencies and deficiencies of modern education. In earlier generations education was the responsibility of each family and administered either at home by parents or tutors or else in educational societies organized by religious orders. But in modern western nations, universal education is largely viewed as a human and civil right, provided, funded, and administered by the government. The work of John Dewey, building upon the philosophy of Rousseau radically transformed the notion of education, what it is for and how it ought to be structured. Rejecting earlier models of liberal (humane) education which focused on development of the human person, critical thinking, and the formation of virtue, Dewey gave western education a more utilitarian form. Today many families assume it is the government’s job to educate their children and that the goal of that education is to make them employable.
There are many problems that may be identified in this modern approach. Russell Kirk has noted “the lowering of standards for admission and graduation, the notorious disgrace of ‘grade inflation’, and the loss of order and integration in curricula” as well as the deleterious effect of the proliferation of technology at home and in the classroom.[1] Education has “become an instrument for creating a common mind,”[2] designed to serve the best interests of the State.[3] This should be no surprise given the shift in responsibility for education from the family to the government. The State will always be interested in that which maintains peace, but over time governments also become motivated to increase revenue, cultivate complacency among citizens, and expand, consolidate, and maintain power. Even governments which do not descend into totalitarianism desire citizens who pay their taxes, comply with laws and regulations, and yield to the magistrate many of their personal freedoms.
While all of the aforementioned problems are concerning, they are merely symptoms of a larger, systemic disease. The real deficiencies in modern, western education are more fundamental. These involve issues of teleology and eschatology. What is education designed to do? Where is it seeking to take its students? What is its ultimate goal and end? When education is framed in secular and, ostensibly, neutral terms, it will no longer be able to serve the original, classical, and virtuous goals it originally pursued. Education divorced from metaphysics, teleology, and eschatology is worse than ineffective; it is ruinous to moral character, deleterious to human society, and dangerous to political institutions. If you teach generations of children that they are highly developed primates with verbal skills, that there is no objective moral standard or ultimate accountability, that authority equals oppression, that equality of outcome is more desirable than equality of opportunity, that personal happiness is the highest good, that personal identity is a fluid and self-determined reality, then soon you will have a society of morons that are more concerned to save whales than human babies, who think that drag queens are positive role models and acceptable entertainment for elementary school children, and who don't know how to define a woman. There is no neutrality, not in education, not anywhere.
What is the solution? In brief, to re-introduce humane education within an explicitly virtuous framework. The current system must be judged broken beyond repair and summarily abandoned. Government funding and oversight should be terminated, and school systems should be closed, being judged hopelessly compromised and demonstrably ineffective. In their place, families and local communities must take responsibility for the education of their children and embrace a model designed to cultivate prudence[4] and to “form a philosophical habit of mind.”[5]
Education must no longer be seen as primarily preparation for employment but rather as preparation for a virtuous, and consequently productive, life. As Kirk explains: “What humane learning used to impart was not miscellaneous information, a random accumulation of facts, but instead an integrated and ordered body of knowledge that would develop the philosophical habit of mind from which cast of mind one might find the way to wisdom of many sorts.”[6] True education seeks to form the character of a human person, equipping him to become virtuous by acquiring and applying wisdom. It seeks to do more than make him employable and controllable by statist overlords. It seeks to make him truly human: competent to discern the true, the good, and the beautiful; courageous to choose them over their alternatives; and strong and tough enough to endure opposition to them.
If a virtue-oriented model of education is to be implemented, then it must also be explicitly religious and, therefore, Christian. This is a point at which even many conservatives and classical scholars will balk, and the full argument would require more space than is possible here. But there is no neutrality. You cannot teach children that they are highly evolved beasts and expect them to act as other than beasts. You cannot assert that there is no god above, no objective truth below, and no ultimate accountability for one’s actions and expect them to live virtuous and moral lives. To say that education ought to be explicitly Christian is not to say every student must be compelled to become a Christian. Many of us were educated in a godless system and peacefully learned and then cheerfully rejected absurd notions of Darwinian evolution and moral relativism. Personal freedom is only possible in a moral and virtuous system. If Christ is Lord, then human beings have freedom to choose and moral agency. If he is not Lord, it is not a question of whether we will be dominated by fascists and totalitarians, but which and when. We will acknowledge Christ as Lord, or we will have chaos, in education as in society. –JME
[1] Russell Kirk, “Humane Learning in a Computer Age,” 1.
[2] Christopher Dawson, “Education and the State” in The Great Tradition, 629.
[3] Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Purpose of Liberal Education,” 1; cf. Dawson, 628.
[4] Kirk, “Conservative Purpose,” 2.
[5] Kirk, “Humane Learning,” 1.
[6] Ibid., 3.
