What Today’s Academics Have Forgotten About Education

What once distinguished the gentleman and the lady from their common counterparts was not that the former possessed more worldly goods than the latter, for gentlemen and ladies often were anything but wealthy. What distinguished them was what the gentleman and the lady had, and the common man and woman lacked: a principled education informed by what Chateaubriand called the genius of Christianity, an education that had as its end the realization of a unifying vision of nature and man’s place in it. Granted, gentlemen, once considered the natural leaders of the people, did not always govern justly, but having studied civilization and the moral precepts that make it possible, they at least governed intelligently.

Today, Americans of every social class enjoy a constitutional right to govern themselves. To do so responsibly and with dignity, however, they must be humanely educated. There is “no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education.” Informing the discretion of the people entails, first and foremost, instructing them in the ways of virtue. Moreover, informing their discretion requires that those who do the instructing remember that the proper object of study by mankind is man, by which unpopular term is meant male and female.

This is, essentially, what many academics have forgotten, particularly at large, secularized universities, where professors are bent on subverting what was once accepted as the true and the good. Unfortunately, academe has largely cut itself loose from all philosophical moorings. Many university professors are committed nominalists who believe, and would have everybody else believe, that universals such as truth, goodness, justice, redemption, and salvation exist in name only, as nothing more than human desiderata; that reality exists in the subjective mind alone; that there are as many universes as there are minds thinking them into existence; that the transcendent and organizing center of language cannot hold because there never was a transcendent center in the first place; and that in the beginning there was nada, and nada was with nada, and nada was nada.

Contrary to the tenets of postmodern eclecticism, some points of view are simply superior to others. This is not to say, of course, that what is true should treat uncharitably what is not. Nor is this to say that one can always be certain of the truth. The teacher who holds that all moral points of view are equal has grown bored with the proper study of man and has forsaken reason, which dictates otherwise. Students under the tutelage of such a one are certain to confuse right with wrong, virtue with vice, good with evil, and authority with force, and to have no fixed axioms by which to orient themselves in the flux of contemporary life.

No, educators ought not to make an idol of the past; at the same time, they should not make a deity of progress. Only when he sees man as man has been can the student begin to know man as man is. Students can see most vividly what man has been by immersing themselves in the best that has been thought and written in ancient and recent times. To reduce the pursuit of genuine liberal learning to discussions narrowly focused on us-vs.-them situations instead of imparting the wisdom of the noble dead, which centers on timeless human questions and problems of an us-vs.-us kind, is to rob students of their intellectual inheritance, or to debauch their minds with a false, overly sentimental humanitarianism, while making them chronologically arrogant.

Good schools can be a great boon; bad ones can do irreparable harm. This statement holds true at all levels of education, religious and secular. Schools that teach for all times know the importance of humane learning and that we may excel in knowledge of, say, thermodynamics and still be morally ignorant. Information in itself will not help us conserve and reform civilization. We need information plus some basic metaphysical first principles to do that. Students learn the significance of such principles from a disciplined study of human behavior recorded by historians and represented in works of the moral imagination.

Students investigate historical human failures to learn humility, and they observe man’s perpetual striving toward the good to learn the price that must be paid to remain a faithful husband or wife, a devoted father or mother, a loving brother or sister, and a selfless friend or citizen. To study history is to realize the past in the present, and the present in the past. History is not, as some would make of it, a mere bolus upon which to impose an ideological methodology. To study the past is, from a philosophical perspective, to observe an integral relationship of parts to a whole through which, and in which, reason (man’s capacity to form moral judgments) is made manifest.

And yet the study of man’s capacity for good as well as evil must go beyond pure history. To be complete, it must engage the philosophers whose thoughts comprise the history of ideas, for ideas, as Richard M. Weaver reminds us, have consequences both virtuous and vicious. Furthermore, it should extend to the best of imaginative literature, particularly to vatic poetry, which verbally incarnates ideas of consequence. Poetry, at least that inspired by man’s better angels, is to science what a mother is to a child: as a mother guides and civilizes her child, poetry humanizes and directs the ends of science. Also, the study of man as man ought to entail an examination of art in all its forms. From these strivings the student gains indispensable insights into the human predicament. And, yes, the study of man must consider his religion, for if the study of the world’s wisdom teaches us anything, it is that man is, by nature, a spiritual being.

To be sure, opportunities for learning have increased immeasurably with the establishment of more colleges and the opening of their doors to those who might not have been admitted in times past. Furthermore, we would have to be terribly obstinate not to acknowledge, with some obvious qualifications, the benefit of ever greater access to information via the Internet and now through applications of artificial intelligence. Still, we might ask whether education is better presently than it was a century ago. If we believe that education must have a coherent framework and something timeless at its center, we are obliged to say it is not.

This is not the place to recollect all the problems that plague American education. But a few words about the decay of reading are in order. The educrat typically claims that more students can read today than in times past, and he bases this claim on the fact that more high school students go to college now than ever before. This claim has some validity — but very little. More students might know how to read, but, owing to a lack of classroom rigor and proper instruction, they are not reading well. Evidence shows, and any reasonable teacher knows, that for high school and college students, the level of reading comprehension is, on average, alarmingly low. Nor are students reading the right things. Rarely are they encouraged to engage truly great books. Instead, they are presented with demotic novels and plays that sink their thinking into a narrow contemporaneity.

What’s more, students are also presented with the idea that one kind of reading experience is as valuable as another. The experiential theorists who cultivate this idea insist that a student better “relates” to a poem or piece of fiction when he brings to it his own personal experience (no matter how provincial). These theorists might be right, but they fail to see that there is more to reading books than relating to them on a personal level. What students ought to bring to literature are experiences of a literary kind. Students cannot fully appreciate a classic like Heart of Darkness, for example, unless they have some prior experience with Dante, whom Joseph Conrad invokes. Students become sophisticated readers — and thoughtful, informed people to boot — by ever expanding their context for reading through encounters with texts that are ethically and culturally edifying.

In the foregoing observations consists an adumbration of an educational philosophy. The philosophy envisions a teacher who desires to travel not only backward and forward in time but also toward the timeless center of being that is, was, and ever shall be. When they seek the center, the sempiternal intellection of Logos, in communion with the brightest of minds ancient and current, teacher and student alike transcend the mutable world and begin to distinguish, in the words of Paul Elmer More, “what is essential therein from what is ephemeral.” In pursuing the center, the numinous still point of the turning world, they apprehend an enduring moral order defined by the true and the good. In discovering the center, which can be understood only in numinous terms, and affirming its existence, they enter a realm of learning uncircumscribed by prejudices of presentism or place. Inasmuch as they do so they achieve progress in the classical sense of this much-misunderstood word.

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