Just something I dashed off tonight for my own enrichment.

Abstract: An education, properly understood, should equip the student with the proper tools to seek worldly understanding, personal purpose, and lifelong happiness. A curriculum that can achieve this must be coherent, integrated, universal in scope, and meant to last for a lifetime. The pedagogy should engage the student to think for himself, rather than mindlessly compete with his peers for the approval of an instructor in the form of subjective grades. Education, properly understood, is not to form a person, but to give the student the tools he needs to form himself. It should be a life-enriching process; one that allows the student to enter the world with the ability to shape his own life in any way his potential allows him to.

“The main failing of schools today is that they have nothing to do with education…”

The main failing of schools today is that they have nothing to do with education. The student enters school, seated amongst his peers — usually of the same race and class, always of the same age — and is instantly taught, implicitly or explicitly, that his goal is to beat the other students in the grade race, or at least to keep up with them. Upon the completion of a test, teachers will grade on a curve, or note the grade distribution, or explain how it relates to the requirements for graduation. The immediate message that this gives is that a person should be satisfied with a ‘B’ if the other students have all received a ‘C.’ Or the ‘C’ student can rest comfortably, knowing that the others have also only managed to achieve such a grade. The idea that is instilled from this over the course of thirteen years is that one should only judge himself in relation to his peers. Is he keeping up? Is he doing as well as the person next to him? — These are not the questions that self-assured, self-reliant men seek. These are the questions of mindless competition that lead not to self-betterment, but to comfort in mediocrity. These students do not keep checks on each other, but sort each other into hierarchical positions that lead to complacency in status. Worst of all, this leads to a de-motivation on the part of the student and teacher both: the former is assured of his mediocrity, the latter is as well and thus will not bother to help him.

Coupled with this is the idea that the curriculum should be tailored to match the needs, interests, and intellect of the individual student is promptly thrown out the door, as all are taught the same random amalgam of facts without any overarching, coherent meaning. This is not to contend that there is not meaning behind it all; that astronomy and chemistry have nothing in common with philosophy or government, but rather that schools do not convey this. Rather, classes are arranged as a sort of checklist: you’re supposed to learn this about physics. Why? In order to graduate. Students are taught that knowledge is the means to the end of escaping the institution, rather than to equip them with some sort of insight into how life works. Could there possibly be any more perverse a distortion of the meaning of education?

Schools, in this manner, are like little jails, meant to keep children busy for eight hours daily while their parents head off to work. It normalizes their societal instincts and instills the standard nine-to-five ideal of checking in and checking out of what will inevitably come to be a chore, not a personal fulfillment. As an adult may go to work merely to pay the bills, a child goes to school so he can escape the school. The school will certainly not teach him how to avoid drudgery in work, it will not teach him meaning outside of it — that is, it will not teach him virtue. Classical education has been shredded; governmental institutions have no need for it. It does not create people ready to fall in line as cogs in the machine! But indeed, nature does abhor a vacuum. And a child that comes from a household without virtue — which is rapidly becoming the norm, as parents of today are products of the government schools of yesterday — will be filled in with values coming from somewhere: his peer group. Since parents have abandoned virtue and schools have abdicated their responsibility, the child constructs his own values. These values include those that are typical of a child: anxiety, intemperateness, a love of instant gratification, impatience, a disdain toward hard work and self-reliance. It is no accident that these are the overarching social ills of American society: it taught itself its own arbitrary values as youth! And no one was there to correct them. So the values were internalized and carried over into adulthood.

How, then, does anyone escape this vicious cycle of emptiness? This government-sponsored life that lends itself to meaninglessness, consumerism (the emptiness must be filled by ’stuff’ if it cannot be filled by virtue), and a lack of critical thought — how does one escape it? Sometimes by accident; an adolescent may accidentally wander into Aristotle’s Ethics. More often, it comes as the result of a stable household with parents who inspire their children to ask questions about the world and seek truth. That natural instinct, that eternal spark that drives men to seek truth is a power that no government can suppress.

Perhaps one may immediately object that only a small fraction of us are fit to seek truth; that there is a sort of ‘natural aristocracy’ in intellectual pursuits, as in all things. Half of us, after all, are below average: who can possibly expect someone with an IQ of 87 to comprehend the Nicomachean Ethics, let alone engage the ideas of sophists like Jacques Derrida with both eyes open?

The answer is as obvious as the question is shallow: one does not need to directly engage with the text to comprehend the argument. The themes of moderation, virtue, and rational enquiry are not restricted to the language that Aristotle used any more than the axioms of Isaac Newton cannot be taught to a class of elementary school students. All students should be required to engage ethical questions, be given an overview of history’s great ideas, and debate them with their peers.

But not only with their peers. One of the most bizarre and unnatural aspects of government schooling is how it restricts children from interaction with both the upcoming generation and the generations that have come before. Most children will interact with no more old people than their grandparents and perhaps great-aunts and great-uncles. To deprive a student of the community around him seems to be a willful blindfold to all of life’s offerings. The modern college — which is quickly becoming obsolete to the self-motivated man — is in no way superior and holds all of the same failings as the government school in this regard. Why do students not engage adults more often? Why are war veterans not spoken with? Doctors and nurses? Dentists? Professors? What do they do, what motivates them, what is it that they can learn from them? Students don’t know, and they don’t even know that they don’t know — they are never even introduced to the community at large. If they go to a doctor, it is merely to have one’s body examined. There is no interaction beyond this clinical exchange of interests.

This is wholly unnatural and counter-productive to finding meaning. But it is a social order constructed by the pedagogical process. We restrict our students to interaction with people of their own age, and then are shocked when their worldview is solipsistic, self-centered, and shallow. As C.S. Lewis trenchantly described such processes in his Abolition of Man, we remove the organ but demand the function. We create a generation of empty heads and empty souls — and the owners of such hollow selves don’t even know why they are so hollow or where to turn to find fulfillment.

The arguments surrounding contemporary education, then, completely miss the point: we argue about whether students are ‘achieving’ ‘results’ on standardized tests. But what is being tested, and why are they being tested? Platitudes assure us that positive results — and, if one believes President Barack Obama, longer school hours — will lead America into a solid competitive edge against nations such as China and India in the twenty-first century. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem is not that our scores are not high enough, that our hours are not long enough, but that our curriculum is not deep enough. Our scores may skyrocket, but what will the scores represent? The problem lies not in a lack of hours, but what those hours are being filled with. Numbers are no substitute for content. One can inflate the definition and wrap up nonsense in beautiful language, but the essential core remains the same. A war against reality is not winnable.

A further objection may be that education should, to some extent, teach individuals to be cogs in the machine; societal order cannot be sacrificed to a sort of extreme individualism in which one simply ‘follows his bliss’ and lives life solely to understand it, rather than to contribute to society. To some extent, this has already been addressed, but I may add more: such critics ought to look inward. Are schools meant to be foundations of society; instruments meant to integrate students into a coherent, meaningful social order? If so, they are failing, and alarmingly so: by grouping children by age, race, class, and neighborhood, they teach children to be insular. By instilling no virtue in them, they teach children to be solipsistic. By refusing to teach them meaning or allowing them to critically think, they produce assembly-line beings, barely registering as human beings who contribute to a society. These schools and their progressive proponents, in other words, are ruining society with the tools meant to help preserve it! Society preserves its own order through constant interaction between its members. Schools do nothing of the sort. Schools do all in their power to stop that from happening.

…To be continued.