Recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about a nearby high school. This is the kind of school that parents fight very hard to get their children into – a purportedly “prestigious school” that routinely sends its graduates to the highest ranked colleges, and to well-remunerated employment thereafter. Families are more than willing to pay the extravagant tuition for admission, in the hopes of placing their children on the track to financial security and social prominence which it is the raison d’etre of the institution to provide. In short, it is a training ground for America’s future “elite.”
The specific topic of our conversation was the summer reading list for incoming freshmen to this institution. The assignment required students to read from a selection of short stories, only two of which – Joyce’s Araby and London’s To Build a Fire – would be considered classics of any sort. The remainder of the selections were written by contemporary authors, and reflect the kind of progressive obsessions that have replaced real thought in classrooms across the country. One follows the story of a “young African-American boy from the Bronx” who finds himself “questioning (his) identity in a white paternalistic society.” Another story is about a “Native American writer’s struggles.” Another is by Alice Walker. I take it for granted that the reader understands the thinness of such reading material.
Little is to be learned from reading material of this sort, other than the habit of repeating the sort of liberal bromides which ease one’s path to social advancement. And that is before we consider the fact that many, if not most, of the students will probably not do the reading at all, since the assessment instruments typically used to gauge students on this kind of assignment are never very robust (the last thing any school wants to do is fail half of their incoming students on their first high school assignment). Nor does the work increase in substance as the students progress through their academic careers; the sophomore assignment allows students to select from a list which includes classic authors like Tolstoy and Austen alongside contemporary authors like Amy Tan and Colson Whitehead, thus insinuating an artistic relativism that will easily elide into moral and political relativism in time. So among the lessons students will learn in their time at this “prestigious” school is that there are no true distinctions to be made among works of art, that acculturation inheres in an ability to mouth the platitudes of the ruling class, and that this ability can be acquired by a minimum of mental exertion. Such is the intellectual formation provided to our future rulers.
The real evil of this situation lies not merely in fact that these students are being educated according to pathetically low expectations. The real evil lies in the fact that they are convinced they have proven themselves against the highest. Graduates of an “elite” school, destined for an “elite” college, prepped to make their way into the “elite” world of media, law, or entertainment, these young people receive signal after signal of their deserved preeminence, until they inevitably internalize the sense of merit that results from attaining the highest honors of one’s society. But it is an entirely spurious sense of merit, that rests on no real accomplishments, but only on the simulacra of academic standards that prevails in the schools that have certified them. The hideous upshot of this state of affairs is readily observable in all those protests roiling the campuses of Ivy League colleges, where self-assured teenagers bully and intimidate their peers into mouthing identical platitudes about conflicts unfolding in foreign locales that they can barely spell. Our schools have produced a generation of arrogant know-nothings, and these are the characters slated to control the institutional life of our nation.
One could point to a thousand examples of our unseriousness as a people, from the size of the national debt to reality television. But to my mind, the greatest evidence of our unseriousness is our willingness to tolerate a state of affairs which ensures that the people destined to determine the direction of our society are educated in ways that render them completely unfit for such a station. No serious people would tolerate it. Over and over again in the history of the West, from Plato in his Republic to Erasmus in his Education of a Christian Prince, wise men have emphasized the indispensable importance of carefully and rigorously forming the character of those who will guide the state. Our complete insouciance about the gravity of this task reveals something unflattering about our national character.
As classical education expands its presence across our society, we need to make it a chief goal to remedy this state of affairs. Classical educators need to explicitly acknowledge their responsibility for providing the next generation of political and cultural leadership with the formation in virtue which alone qualifies a young person for eventual preeminence. We need to earnestly take up the work that progressive educators have flouted in their negligence, of teaching and assessing to the highest of standards, so that our graduates leave our school buildings endowed not with a semblance of academic achievement, but with the real thing.
It is not easy for us to countenance and articulate such aims within the framework of principles we commonly employ in discussions about education. Our habitual modes of thinking about schooling almost entirely center on the goods which education provides to individual students – on the growth and flourishing which any given child might take away from their experience in the classroom. Undoubtedly, these are real goods, which any serious educator must prioritize.
But the work of schooling aims at social and communal goods as well, which are not entirely exhausted in the development of individual students. Schools are built to be the houses of memory; they seek to preserve traditions, and the standards embedded within those traditions. They form young people according to those traditions because what is best and most edifying in a culture is saved there, and that is what ought to shape the character of the young. They nourish the spiritual instincts that make for justice, for prudence, for wisdom, thus providing a society the best hope that its laws and policies will take their stamp from such virtues. The classical tradition of Western education has always recognized these social goods as one of the prevailing ends of schooling, as evidenced by the public and private patronage routinely dispensed upon schools and universities throughout that history. We who wish to be the inheritors of this tradition must learn to speak of its communal benefits again.
At this point, I don't think any school -- public, private, religious, or secular -- can be saved. Somewhere along the way we forgot that learning is an individual quest. All schools fail because they treat students like interchangeable parts who must conform to the exact same specifications. In my opinion, the only way forward is to return to the old medieval model of the independent scholar / tutor.
Anyone else feel like they don’t want another elite. I just want to be left alone and only interact with people for work