Asking the Questions that Matter of Our Schools
A few thoughts on recent debates about education
Most people are aware of the recent controversies surrounding the teaching of CRT in the classroom. These controversies have given rise to acrimonious debates over whether in fact it really is this ideology that is being taught in schools or something else. These debates, in turn, have given rise to further debates about the origins of CRT, what elements of Marxism or post-modernism it incorporates, and to what extent these elements have been worked into the curriculum as well.
To be honest, I find these debates completely besides the point, not least because it is the most obvious thing in the world that some form of progressive ideological capture – call it what you will - has taken hold of our schools in recent years. Its not a secret; to the contrary, the people leading our schools trumpet this fact to the heavens, when they go on about equity and inclusion and anti-racism.
But put all that to the side for the moment. The ills of our schools run so much deeper than this ideological capture, which is actually just a symptom of a far more fundamental disorder in our educational institutions. If we are going to have a national conversation about our schools, and whether or not they are adequately preparing our children to maintain the form of society bequeathed to them, then arguments about whether critical theory is really being taught in the classroom hardly seem the place to begin.
We might, instead, begin with questions like this: are America’s schools improving the character of young people? Are they cultivating in them the sorts of virtues they will be called upon to exercise in their maturity? Are they cultivating in them honesty, loyalty, a propensity towards self-sacrifice? Are they preparing them to be dutiful husbands and wives, neighbors, citizens?
Or how about questions like these: are America’s schools developing the skills of literacy in young people? Are they making their students better readers? Betters writers and better speakers? Are graduates of our schools familiar with the great texts – the sorts of texts where wisdom and guidance are to be found – and can they apply their understanding of those texts to affairs in their own lives? Can they debate fruitfully? Converse courteously? Have they learned to think in ways that avoid the hackneyed verbiage of the sort that Orwell deplores in his famous essay?
Or we might ask questions like these: do America’s students have any idea where their world came from? Do they understand how many achievements and how many sacrifices went into the construction of their tolerably peaceful, orderly, undespotic, prosperous, and air-conditioned world? Do they know the extremes of brutality to which human life has been subjected throughout history, and appreciate the fragility of those institutions that have managed to keep that brutality at bay during their own lifetimes? And have they come away from their study of history with anything like a sense of gratitude? Or a sense of responsibility to the civilization they stand to inherit?
To ask such questions is to answer them. No one even pretends that our schools are fulfilling such duties anymore. But then what more needs to be said about their failure? If a school does not perform the minimal functions for which we establish schools in the first place, then it is superfluous to our judgement of their value whether or not they also impose a regressively doctrinaire course of study on their students. Chastising schools that have signally failed to prepare young people in any substantive respect because those schools also serve up a bunch of ridiculous ideologies is like complaining that the pilot who is flying your plane into a mountain forgot to turn on the “no smoking” sign. One fault is a bit more consequential than the other.
Classical education is many things, all of them full of promise. But one thing it certainly is is a renewed effort to speak about education in terms of what matters, what is fundamentally important, what schools are for in the first place. The moment we start doing so we realize how far astray our present educational establishment has veered from its proper duties. This realization provides us with all the motive we need to start over.
In starting over, we are obviously keen to avoid a course of study shaped by the narrow dogmas of the day, in which students and their instructors alike are merely trained to repeat certain deceptive mantras. But more to the point, we classical educators are intent to provide our students with the robust humanistic instruction that prepares them to think in ways that excel the habits of cliché and propaganda. We have no intention of allowing contemporary bigotries (which are just ancient bigotries in new garments) to take hold of our students’ minds, because we are too busy planting there a bent towards piety and dignity and selflessness. We have no room in our curriculum for partisan ends of any sort, from any faction, because no true education is partisan in its substance. Only an ability to acknowledge and address what is fundamentally broken in our schools can turn the tide of culture at the present moment of history, and only the classical education movement holds out the hope of accomplishing this.