Problems and Solutions in Modern Education

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.

Excerpts on Education from "What's Wrong With the World"

I read several excerpts in a Q&A video on December 15, 2020. I am posted the excerpts (and a link to the complete work) here for those wishing to review them. --JME

G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World (1910)

“Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

“This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”

Later in the same work:

“But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child’s mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself; for he hates something inseparable from human life.”

And again in the same work:

“There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the first schools, but among the last schools to be established; and London had been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error is a highly practical one. It is persistently assumed that unless a child is civilized by the established schools, he must remain a barbarian. I wish he did. Every child in London becomes a highly civilized person. But here are so many different civilizations, most of them born tired. Anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor is not so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that the young are already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy would be educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated. The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest complexity as solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerable idealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor; but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge. Real educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of culture. The truant is being taught all day….

“ … I will not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys. But there are no uninstructed boys.”