An Elementary Mistake about Education

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

 

“What is school for?” asks the New York Times.

 

We might answer that by asking a different question: Whom is school for?

 

The consensus answer for the authors in the Times symposium is the state, though they almost never say so plainly.

 

For education reporter Anya Kamenetz, the schools are there to serve as Horace Mann’s “crucible of democracy.” Mann’s view (also Kamenetz’s view) is that schools are there to serve as homogenizing institutions — though, again, as with the statism, the conformism is rarely acknowledged. Kamenetz worries that if students are educated outside of the state’s effective monopoly, then they may come into contact with religious or political views of which she disapproves. She complains about being “singled out” as a Jew in Louisiana and then praises Mann’s intellectual roots in Massachusetts, where public schools were created in order to systematically impose Puritan orthodoxy on the population and to prevent the nefarious influence of popery among a people who had made it a hanging offense for a Jesuit to enter the commonwealth. (The first public Mass was not said in Boston until 1788.) For those who are unfamiliar with the religious character of compulsory-education laws in New England, consider that the first Massachusetts public-school law — the first of its kind in the New World — bore the wonderfully evocative title of the “Old Deluder Satan” Act of 1647. Its Puritan intentions live on in the Blaine Amendments, the assortment of state laws that prohibit state funding of “sectarian” — meaning Catholic — schools. That Mann’s purportedly nonsectarian “common” school was distinctly Protestant in its conception is generally understood.

 

Kamenetz writes:

 

This [school-choice] movement rejects Mann’s vision that schools should be the common ground where a diverse society discovers how to live together. Instead, it believes families should educate their children however they wish, or however they can. It sees no problem with Republican schools for Republican students, Black schools for Black students, Christian schools for Christian students and so on, as long as those schools are freely chosen. Recent Supreme Court decisions open the door to both prayer in schools and public funding of religious education, breaking with Mann’s nonsectarian ideal.

 

There is a lot to consider in that. To write of the “common ground where a diverse society discovers how to live together” is euphemistic — it is marketing copy for the project of indoctrinating students in whatever official orthodoxies the people who run the education establishment prefer. There is, in fact, very little racial, cultural, or economic diversity in our highly segregated public schools — four out of five white students go to schools that are predominantly white, most of them in schools that are more than 75 percent white — and, hence, little opportunity for “discovering” how to live together in diversity. There have been Christian schools for Christian students in the Western world for a thousand years or so (instruction has been offered at Oxford since at least 1096), and most of our best universities were founded as Christian schools. The work of historically black colleges and universities has been extraordinarily valuable to African Americans and very likely will continue to be. (This is particularly true of the black elite, whose institutions make up those blessed corners of American life for which money alone is insufficient to secure entry.) And while I cannot immediately think of any Republican high schools for Republican students, the political affiliations of Democratic schools in Democratic areas could not be more obvious.

 

Maybe black schools and Christian schools are not good for the progressive vision of a populace educated into uniformity by the state, but they are awfully good for — let’s not forget them! — students. Students at Spelman or Howard — or Hillsdale or Grove City — may not get the approved version of the “gorgeous mosaic” of American multiculturalism, but they get something that is very valuable — in my view, more valuable: a real education in a community with a character of its own. It is true that the Hillsdale graduate is more likely to have read Cornelius Van Til while the Morehouse man probably will have read some books that the Hillsdale graduate hasn’t, but each of them is going to be much, much better educated than most of his peers. T. S. Eliot once observed that he was surprised and impressed by the range of reading his Harvard students had done but thought that it might have been better if they had read fewer books but the same books. There is something to that, of course, but the kind of common culture T. S. Eliot had in mind is, to put it gently, not the same as what our progressive school monopolists are cultivating in the institutions under their control.

 

Setting aside the serious question-begging — that our society and our liberal-democratic institutions would benefit at all from sameness in education — there is the question of why some abstract egalitarian ideal should be given predominance over the real-world interests of actual children and young adults whose lives would be improved — not in every case, but in many cases — by access to different kinds of education better suited to their own needs and interests. I cannot think of any reason why that should be — if you believe that the goal of education is to educate, to e ducere, to “lead forth.” If you believe that the goal of education should be to reshape society along certain egalitarian lines and to impose a shared vision of the good life on a genuinely diverse population of some 330 million souls, then the old-fashioned Bismarckian factory model of education put forward by figures such as Mann and Kamenetz makes more sense; the schools are manufactories, producing the goods — citizen-workers — required by the state.

 

The other answers given to the question, “What is school for?” in the symposium are: economic mobility, according to John N. Friedman; making citizens, according to Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray, with a focus on racial issues; care, says Jessica Grose, who is more frank than most in treating schools as government-funded daycares and supplementary welfare agencies; learning to read, says Emily Hanford, an unobjectionable if excessively modest goal; connecting to nature, according to Nicolette Sowder, who produces this kind of horsesh**: “So I developed a method called Wildschooling, a form of home-schooling that celebrates an interconnected, relational view of nature”; merit, says Asra Q. Nomani, perhaps conflating what students bring to school with what they should take from school; hope, says Gabrielle Oliveira, because we must endure that kind of sanctimony; parent activism, offers a panel of people I want to keep as far from schools as possible; and the students, with those of Fremont High School reminding us that they are, as Jonah Goldberg once put it, at the bottom of the learning curve. The economist Bryan Caplan, in his usual bracing style, offers the sole note of real dissent: What schools are good for, he says, is “wasting time,” writing: “I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling.” I do, too — more than I did before reading the Times symposium.

 

Most students do not want and would not benefit from much in the way of advanced education. We should make it available to those who want it and who have the capacity for it, but what most students need is basic education and job training, or basic education and preparation for job training. As I have argued for some time, much of our discussion about education — from elementary school through graduate school — is distorted by the fact that we lump together liberal education (meaning education in the arts and sciences) and job training. These are not the same thing, they probably do not belong in the same institutions, and they serve different students in different ways. Of course, these things can go together in some situations: The best kind of legal education is also a literary and historical education, and many students whose talents lead them into science and mathematics also have artistic interests and talents, particularly touching music.

 

But the question should not be: What kind of education is good for society? Or, What kind of education is good for the economy, or democracy, or liberty? It should be: What kind of education is good for John? For Jane? For Seth? For Sita? For Tai? For Ajani?

 

There isn’t an answer. There are answers.

 

The Puritans who wrote the Old Deluder Satan Act knew why they wanted universal compulsory education. And the puritans of our time know why they want it, too, i.e., because you hicks and proles can’t be trusted to pass on the vision of the anointed. But they too often are embarrassed to say so.