What’s education for? Let’s have a national debate on this issue

An interesting theoretical issue in education from the beginning has been, who needs this stuff and how much of it do they need?

Let's imagine a farmer sitting behind a mule plowing his field. Does he need an education? Is it wasted on him? Would life be better or worse if he knew some history, could sing some opera, or do puzzles in his head. What if he knows some Shakespeare and, as he’s going around the fields, regales the mule with speeches from Hamlet? Would this make life a little more interesting? Or would having such knowledge be a horrible burden?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are essential questions and might be asked about every child, and each bit of knowledge.

Let’s go to another question. Whatever the value of education, shouldn’t each person be able to make the decision? Let’s say a school teaches you some uninteresting stuff you don’t need. You slough it off and forget it. Are you worse off for having had exposure to the knowledge?

Would you be better if you were protected from knowledge you later found useless? Do we need Knowledge Police to make sure that doesn’t happen? Too late. We have those people. That’s our Education Establishment. People born to limit and diminish.

My thought is that in a democracy, people should be able to decide for themselves.

The great tragedy in this country is that our Education Establishment wants to answer for the kids. And the answer is always no. Our Education Establishment—that would be professors up at Harvard -– are basically saying, hey, kid, you don’t need to know that, you don’t need to know this, you don’t need to know anything. So stop trying.

The Education Establishment decided that you don’t need to know the names of famous people. You don’t need to know dates. You don't need to know places. You don’t need to know the presidents or the states in the United States.

The oceans?! Why in the world would a child need to know that? The continents? Surely it’s a waste of time to know the continents? What about 30 days hath September and so on? What about 16 ounces in a pound? We have to get these professors under oath and find out if there is ANYTHING in the whole universe a student needs to know.

Professors of education have made the decision that children don’t need to memorize poetry, even though doing so makes it easier for children to learn to read and to appreciate stories. It’s a no-lose situation. But our Education Establishment doesn’t like memorization.

They don’t want children to memorize the multiplication tables. If you don't know what six-times-seven is, you’ll be slow doing basic arithmetic, whether multiplying or division. Our top educators don’t seem to care.

North, East, South and West? Who needs to know that? The sun rises in the east? Surely superfluous. Noon is when the sun is at its highest point. Seriously, why would anybody need to know that? The pattern seems to be simple and all-encompassing. These people don't like knowledge. If you ask why, they’ll say because it creates inequality in the classroom. if your kid knows what Kansas is, and another kid doesn’t, that kid will feel bad and we can’t have that, according to the doctrine of self-esteem. So their solution is to eliminate, as if with a neutron bomb, all factual information.

The spirit of education today is the spirit of nothingness, of emptiness, of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Our Education Establishment has created a desert and called it Sunny Acres and told you that it is a wonderful place to live

There were times when knowledge was taught in big doses. Perhaps sometimes it was oppressive. But isn’t that better than learning nothing? How much fun is an empty head??

Let’s imagine a non-oppressive situation where a teacher over months and years introduces the children to an array of information and talks about it constantly. As time goes by, the children retain most of this. When somebody says Illinois, they know it’s a state near the center of the country, with Chicago in the top corner by Lake Michigan. That’s the way it should be.

Our Education Establishment, however, has decided you don’t need to know anything about America. It’s just another country like all the others. And if you decide you need to know where Alaska is, well, you can use Google to find out. Why should you bother learning anything ahead of time?

This is the big new dumb dogma of the month. All information in the universe is on the Internet. Why should children know anything they can easily find? But 100 years ago all information in the universe was in books, encyclopedias or at the library. Did anybody make the completely idiotic deduction that you no longer need to learn anything because all the information was in the encyclopedias? No, nobody did that. Our Education Establishment makes these illogical deductions because they hate knowledge.

Their idea is to have lots of kids equally ignorant. Everybody knows nothing. The education commissars think that’s fair and square. They are the grinches that stole education.

Education is about human fulfillment. Being all that you can be, as the Army used to say. Developing yourself as far as you can. The more stuff you know, the better chance you have of doing anything well. Being a citizen, voter, parent, business owner, or a hiker in the woods—probably the person who knows the most will survive the best.

The public schools are not giving students the option of learning as much as they can. So what is going on all day? There seems to be a great squandering of time, and a perpetual waste of human capital.

Michael Gove, an education official in England, said this in 2009: “I believe that education is a good in itself – one of the central hallmarks of a civilized society – indeed the means by which societies ensure that everything which is best in our society is passed on to succeeding generations.”

So what are we passing on? Anything at all? Every measurement, every test and stat, shows that children know less and less, and adults know less and less. The Education Establishment is selfish and shortsighted. By depriving people of the knowledge that everyone could have, they cripple each person’s ability to work, and they cripple the society’s ability to compete internationally. Our Education Establishment basically functions as ignorance engineers.

Remember the Seabees in World War II? They went to remote islands and built entire air ports out of nothing. Our Education Establishment does the opposite. It goes to busy cities and towns, purges all the knowledge, cripples learning, until finally they have created a society of the walking dead, cognitively speaking, lost souls wandering in the void.

This question is posed in Education 101. Education is to:

(1) Prepare a person for informed living.
(2) Prepare a person for a livelihood.
(3) Prepare a person for self-realization

Unfortunately, American higher education doesn’t do such a great job in terms of (1) and (2) and has very little to do with (3) if a person knows what rings their bell.

Very well said.

I was fortunate enough to have a classical education, in the best sense, back in the 50s when some of the prep schools still offered that.

John Dewey had already tossed a monkey wrench into the public schools, but some of the old ways still survived.

No longer.

“The primary job of every Christian educator, regardless of grade level or subject matter, is to shape the heart. We should begin by warning students about the subtleties of pride in both its forms, arrogance and despair. We must teach them to think less of their own abilities and more of God’s. It will be difficult, but it is even more central to the goals of classical Christian teaching than the Trivium or the Great Books. The only way we can accomplish our task as educators is to demonstrate with our own lives that a truly successful life is one in which God is glorified for His faithfulness and love regardless of our personal performance.” - Brian Douglas

This was on posted on freerepublic a few days back in case you missed it.
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2012/11/five-temptations-for-classical-christian-education

The Nation's Founding Fathers instituted free public education because they knew that a democratic republic could only survive if it had an informed, moral, and educated electorate.

This implied the classical Liberal Arts model of education as opposed to mere training-- its goal being to produce citizens who "could discern for themselves what is Good, True, and Beautiful."

The Founders knew full well that low information voters would not be able to "keep the Republic," as Franklin put it outside Constitution Hall. We are in imminent danger of proving him right.

I am quite fond of the purpose of education as described by John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1914: “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”

By that standard, American education is a dismal failure.

Watch the movie RIDE WITH THE DEVIL. One of the Southern supporters in the movie talks about how the North will win because the first thing they put in every village is a public school.

The purpose of an education is to make better citizens. You train people for jobs. You educate people to have better citizens.
Our public education system would make the Soviets proud. They use cookie cutters.
“You will learn this now.”
Doesn’t matter if the child has developed enough to absorb the instruction. And they reward the best parrots.

“It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that, too, of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan.” —Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1786.

“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” —Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779.”

As a history teacher, I’ve let this be the guide for what I am supposed to be doing.

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