Reclaiming Education
To be educated is to be led out of oneself.1“As the term ‘liberal education’ suggests, to be educated requires getting free from — led out from — taken-for-granted certainties.”
– Matthew D. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016 As such, I cannot think of anything more damning to the current state of education in the West than having Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, compare her time studying at an elite American university to her experience under the North Korean regime. There is something terribly wrong when the pinnacle of educational success involves getting into an elite university where one is then indoctrinated by some conniving little ‘Kim Jong’ in the humanities department. But even primary schools and Head Start programs seem to fall in line with this narrow vision of educational success defined as college readiness.
Education has to be about more than getting into a prestigious university or landing a decent job. It should help us cultivate conditions that allow us realize our potential. Education should spur us to achieve feats of bravery as opposed to being sedated into submission. Industrial schooling does none of this.
Industrial schooling approaches education as if it were an assembly line where the teacher pours a little knowledge into each student before passing them along. This approach might be useful for preparing automatons suited for factory work. But this über reductionist ‘method’ of schooling falls pray to the same latent conceit that Matthew Crawford associates with science. That is the idea that one merely has to follow a set procedure to be successful. “No long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry is needed; no habituation to its peculiar aesthetic pleasures; no joining of affect to judgment. Just follow the rules.”2Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016
The underlying premise, this idea that a person is just some disembedded interior mind, is simply wrong. And merely tweaking the method cannot overcome this inherent flaw. As a result, we’re doing a dismal job of forming young people today. Credentialing trumps learning and teaching is really more about sorting. Qualitative agnosticism ironically poses as a value-neutral and assumption-free commitment to objectivity.3riffing off Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (The Penguin Press, 2009) and Paul Tyson, De-Fragmenting Modernity: Reintegrating Knowledge with Wisdom, Belief with Truth, and Reality with Being (Cascade Books, 2017) There is always a hidden curriculum behind the official curriculum. The official curriculum transmits explicit skills and knowledge, whereas the ‘hidden curriculum’ imparts a set of implicit norms and beliefs. A value-free education isn’t actually possible. It’s a contradiction in terms. We simply cannot afford to take the highest things out of the curriculum. It’s no use trying to compromise with the totalizing religion of secularism.
Schools are not the objective value-neutral institutions they purport to be. They are “high churches” proselytizing “the modern orthodoxy of individual liberation.”4Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press. 2019 It is no surprise that we find sickness across practically every domain. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are literally killing us. So is anxiety and depression. General scientific illiteracy and ignorance of history are leading us down dangerous paths. And most tragic of all is the lack of meaning and purpose that afflicts so many lives.
If we hope to reverse the fragmentation and isolation characteristic of our modern society we need to build thick communities. And to do that’ we’ll need men and women with chests5From C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise… We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” “capable of building those communities and, when the time comes, defending them against the barbarian hordes,” as Michael Warren Davis says.6Michael Warren Davis, The Francis Option, Crisis Magazine, 2 Oct. 2020 The Church cannot afford to let the surrounding culture catechize its youth. The conscience is both “binding and fallible” and so “we have a duty to educate and inform our conscience properly.”7Gerard M. Verschuuren, Aquinas and Modern Science: : A New Synthesis of Faith and Reason. Angelico Press. November, 2016. The Church must nurture individuals “whose hearts desire truth, goodness, and beauty and who use their minds to discover these things.”8Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: : A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Penguin Publishing Group. 2018. The Church has a great advantage over secular education since she has an understanding of who it is she is educating and a vision for whom these individuals should become. John Stonestreet observes that without this knowledge, “education devolves into a disconnected hodgepodge of classes, skill acquisition, test taking, activities, and degrees.”9John Stonestreet, A Practical Guide to the Culture. David C Cook. 2019 This is exactly what we find today.
It’s not enough to supplement a secular education with an hour per week of Sunday school. Some realize this and send their kids to a private Christian school. Unfortunately, too many of these schools adopt the same industrial model of schooling with just a little bit of God sprinkled in. Their teachers are trained in the same universities as all the others. The curriculum is largely the same. Most of the time they are trying to get their students admitted to the same elite universities that are openly hostile to their own stated values. There are, of course, subtle differences which are not trivial, like scripture reading and prayer. But most of what these Christian schools offer can be found elsewhere. Proponents will tell you it’s better than nothing. That may be true. Some public schools actually do harm. Children often learn next to nothing while being exposed to drugs violence, and bullying. The fact that some schools are actively harming students does not validate schools that are only marginally better.10One might even defend the worst schools since, despite the many deleterious impacts, students are still typically better off at school than on the streets. This is simply a race to the bottom.
Liberty through Discipline
I know a few things about school. To my credit, I logged roughly a quarter century as a student. I’ve taught at the college level. None of the formal schooling compares to the education I received as a Marine. Becoming a Marine is arduous by design. Recruits receive some classroom instruction. But most of their training happens through praxis. In other words, it’s enacted, embodied, and eventually realized though a form of initiation. Recruits receive the title ‘Marine’ only after enduring a 54 hour ordeal designed to validate the physical, mental and moral training they received. Marines adopt a telos11Every Marine is a rifleman first and foremost. And the mission of the Marine rifle squad is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy. and they subscribe to a set of core values.12namely honor, courage, and commitment Of course, some fall short of these ideals. But all things considered Marines have a pretty good track record. They do an impressive job of forming Marines from whatever raw material shows up on their doorstep.
Matthew Crawford stresses the importance of praxis as it relates to education.13Matthew D. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016 When you think about it, sitting at desks and looking at books is actually quite strange. It divorces the content of knowledge from the context which makes its value apparent. Students learning algebra and geometry often wonder why they need to study subjects that seem so irrelevant. The teacher assures them they’ll need these to be successful in college. In other words, it’s all contrived. The message is that if you ever want to get out of this town (which you should according to them) then you better memorize this fact or learn to solve that equation. But encountering things directly is so much more fundamental than doing so through abstract representations from a book. Crawford notes that trigonometry becomes incredibly interesting to students building a tube frame chassis for a race car. He makes the case for hands-on learning by quoting Doug Stowe, a woodshop teacher, who observes, “In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention. Without the opportunity to learn through their hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”14ibid. Grades and classrooms are contrived. We must not forget that we are real people situated in the world and oriented towards human concerns.
It is time to reclaim the real in education. Physical education is the perfect place to start. Disciplining the body is our first lesson in freedom. A gymnast who disciplines the body through training is free to vault through the air, whereas a middle-aged chain smoker is justly denied this freedom. Let us form our bodies for fuller family and social lives, aesthetic pleasures, and for the psychological benefits that physical fitness affords. The film below illustrates something close to what I have in mind.15I encountered the video below from the President’s Council On Physical Fitness in Aaron Renn’s article ‘When Phys Ed Class Meant Something’ at The Masulinist
This dated film begins by showing students at the now defunct La Sierra High School in Carmichael, California doing a set of intense exercises. The narrator tells us, “This workout would exhaust most high school boys. Several years ago the coach of a top ranked college football team had his players try it. A lot of them didn’t last the full 12 minutes. For these La Sierra students this is a warm up. It’s something they do every physical education period, five days a week.”16“The School Where Fitness Counts” (La Sierra High PE), President’s Council On Physical Fitness and Sports in Washington, DC The students learn to accept hard work, fatigue, and even to endure physical pain. They also get “to experience the pleasures of being in great shape.”
Notice that the educational goal is not self-esteem. It does not help students to tell them they are fine the way there are. If students are all perfectly fine then what is the point of improving them through education? Isn’t it better to tell them the truth? Why not tell them they could be so much more? Not only that, but the world needs them to be more and do more. They owe it to the world to do their part. And besides, what is worse for one’s self-esteem; demonstrating marked improvement in a clearly defined skill or having to convince one’s superiors, as many of us do, that our efforts deserve promotion because we demonstrate some set of easily-gamed soft skills that includes things like teamwork and commitment? With physical training the gains are predictable and clearly observable. According to the film, “Advancement depends exclusively on performance, not on subjective judgment by a teacher.” Testing identifies weakness in order to recommend remedial activities. This is not a program that habituates young people for work lacking objective standards. Instead, it’s designed to give them the physical and mental toughness to persevere. Everyone, regardless of their ability or fitness level, is capable of making real measurable gains. And a few students have the opportunity to truly excel. For reasons that are not obvious, schools abandoned this type of physical education. But we know it works. High stakes collegiate athletics and professional sports teams all have strength and conditioning programs modeled after this.17Strength and conditioning coaches are often among the highest paid on many coaching staffs.
Suppose we apply the same rigor to academics. Imagine we trained the mind the way professional athletes train their bodies. What if we sought to build the strength needed to plunge the depths of truth? What if we explained to young people that by learning to think, speak, and write they will be powerful beyond belief? They’ll be able to defend their actions. They’ll be able to convince others to take a risk on their ideas. They’ll be able to convince an employer to hire them. They’ll be able to convince a suitable mate to become their spouse. And they’ll be able to affect positive change wherever they go. But to do that they must be able to discern what is good. And they must learn to distinguish true ideas from those that are false. Otherwise, it’s all for nothing. Education without values, if it were even possible, would only make man a more clever devil.18C.S. Lewis is often attributed with saying, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” Indications are this is someone else’s paraphrasing.
The world needs wise, competent, and good men and women. If we avoid religious questions we avoid the most human questions. Only a tragically inert mind dismisses questions of existence and discernment of the good. I’m not proposing the addition of an extra religion class, but rather a curriculum oriented towards the Creator. All of Creation can be seen as iconography, as a sign, or collection of signs, pointing us to God. The beauty of the arts, the life of the mind, the exercise of the body, and the pursuit of the common good all speak of Him.19paraphrasing Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. Regnery Publishing. 2017 Just as physical education draws out chiseled bodies capable of incredible feats, let us draw out sharp minds abounding in ingenuity.
Rethinking School
Is the classroom the most appropriate setting for this? Is the teacher lecturing the most appropriate means for transmitting knowledge?20Lecturing dates back to the medieval university when books were in short supply so the instructor stood before the class and read from original sources. This evolved into reading glosses of the material that were eventually distilled into lecture notes. Books are no longer scarce and scholarly notes are easily disseminated. Industrial schooling continues to rely primarily on this passive one-way communication not because of efficacy, but rather efficiency. The lecture scales well and is relatively quick and cheap. Imagine school without the classrooms. It’s part library and part fabrication shop. Ideally there’s a gymnasium, an auditorium, and some laboratory space. And there’s also woods and pasture. The teacher moves into the periphery becoming editor, adviser, coach, mentor, guide, and exemplar. Learners take the stage, creating actual art and literature and mechanical devices. They build the furniture they sit in. They program the devices they compute with. They fix the equipment in the shop when it breaks. The learners advance not according to the calendar or even after demonstrating some modicum of proficiency, but only after demonstrated mastery. That means they’ve written a novel or produced a film. They’ve built something useful. They’ve replicated an experiment. They’ve taught novices. They’ve found their way through the woods on their own at night. Their thinking is challenged and their ideas are pressed. They’ve wrestled with the big questions related to origins, identity, meaning, and morality. And they’ve committed to a particular vision after thoroughly exploring the alternatives. The goal is not necessarily to get to college. It’s to instill curiosity and equip them for independent learning. College is just one option among many.
In this setting teachers take on new roles. They challenge assumptions.21Like the idea that freedom is doing whatever one wants; the idea that there are no limits to progress; and that nothing is really sacred. They guard against the “weak excess of sensibility” and “the slumber of cold vulgarity.”22“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.“
-C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man They remind the young learners that nobody’s worldview is complete and that no single marker of identity determines how someone sees the world. They caution learners against those offering simple solutions to complex problems. Instructors expose learners to the strongest arguments for even the most unlikely positions. They ask probing questions.23For example, the teacher might pose the question, “How does a bird fly?” Students hypothesize and then set off reading, researching, and observing in order to discover an answer. They might focus on the physics of flight or the physiology of the bird. They can can go in any number of directions. At some predetermined time they report back on what they discovered and share this with all the others. They probe the limits of their collective knowledge and pose new questions. Together they build a model not only of avian flight, but of its context within biological systems, ecological systems, and societal structures. They don’t only ask “What is it?” but also “Why is it?” and “What is it for?”
The teacher should be beyond reproach.24Recognizing this, the Marine Corps hand picks its Drill Instructors to ensure recruits are exposed to only the best exemplars. It’s not enough to go into teaching because one enjoys working with children. We need to hand pick those with impeccable character and demonstrated knowledge. Character development is not incidental to learning. Skilled instructors find ways to humble the proud. They motivate the strong to encourage the weak. They ensure that all students get to experience failure.25“The experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students.”
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Page 204 Because only those who’ve faced adversity can be depended on when the chips are down.26Paradoxically, “the strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”
-G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Education should never be about rejecting or transcending the culture, but rather the transmission of the culture. If we hope to have good government in our churches and our towns then we need to establish order in our homes and schools, and wanting order in our home we must discipline ourselves. If we truly desire self-discipline then we must rectify our own hearts. That requires us to give precise definitions to our inarticulate thoughts. Wishing to attain precise definitions for these ‘tones given off by the heart’, we should extend our knowledge to the utmost.27paraphrasing Ezra Pound’s translation of Confucius’ The Great Digest
Industrialized schooling is poorly suited for engendering this passion for virtue. C.S. Lewis discussed this extensively in The Abolition of Man. Brett and Kate McKay expound on those ideas, explaining how this sterile value-neutral fiction creates a void that leaves us susceptible to manipulation in the service of corporate and technocratic values that often go against our own interests:
“People have a propensity towards apathy or cynicism or sterile complacency anyway, and if you only magnify this cynicism by telling them that all value and emotion is subjective and that absolute truths do not exist, then you create a thirsty vacuum that is actually more vulnerable to being filled by advertising and propaganda. Being subjected to the endless debunking of ideals imparts to young people a smug ‘pleasure in their own knowingness’ that can disguise an ignorance that leaves them susceptible to the enticements of disinformation. Really protecting one’s mind from indoctrination requires filling it with positive truths that are both well-reasoned and animated by sentiment. A man with a well-honed sentiment for an ideal, a real love for something, rises above the cheap plays of propaganda: A man who loves democracy deflects rhetoric that merely encapsulates a false simulacrum of it; a man with sentimental love for the philosophical value of simplicity tunes out the enticements of advertising; a man with a noble sentiment for intimacy and romance sees through the siren song of porn.”28Brett and Kate McKay, Men Without Chests, The Art of Manliness, May 20, 2018
We see propaganda and disinformation wreaking havoc everywhere. This results in us making decisions that go against our own interests. For example, we might want to question why the local public school is so hellbent on sending the child off to “earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community.”29Wendell Berry, The Work of Local Culture (1988), The World-Ending Fire, Page 125 If we want strong communities, wouldn’t it be better if the child were educated to take their place in the community?
We have to do better than what industrial schooling offers. The future of civilization depends on it. Our technological advances make the stakes unbelievably high. As Wendell Berry puts it, “A modern science (chemistry or nuclear physics or molecular biology) ‘applied’ by ignorant arrogance resembles much too closely an automobile being driven by a six-year-old or a loaded pistol in the hands of a monkey.”30Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance (2004), The World-Ending Fire, Page 336 Education must lead us out of ourselves. The Church must stop abdicating her educational responsibilities.
Let us not be afraid to plumb the depths of the mysteries of the world. Let us build institutions of education, or research, of exploration, in the full confidence that what we’ll learn will not contradict our faith, but will speak of God’s abundant majesty and grace. Let us explore that we may be more, that we may serve more, that we may know and love God more, that we may wonder at His magnificence.31Gabriel Berghuis, For the Life of the World, Letter to the Exiles Series, Acton Institute
An educated person must not remain unaffected by the knowledge acquired. Education should involve practices that sediment knowledge, commitment, and belief into our being so we can possess and exercise those goods that are internal to these practices. I mentioned how Marine Corps recruit training does this. Bear in mind, Marines do what they do so they can destroy their enemy. They take this quite seriously, as they should. But we all know it is far easier to tear down than to build. Our goal is far more ambitious. Our aim is to love our enemy.
Note: This post was originally published on December 18, 2021.