"School is the symbol of social civilization"eludicate
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Education is preparation for life. We are social, so its purpose is to prepare us for a good life in community. It affects the whole man, inculcates community ideals, and builds on what we already are, through instruction, exercise, discipline, and setting definite goals. So it’s neither wholly from within, as the Romantics wanted, nor wholly from without, like technical training. And it’s different in different societies.
American public education naturally stands for American ideals and the American way of life. In the past, when life among us was more decentralized, local school boards and the parents who elected them had an important part in determining how those things were understood. That has changed. The people who run a complex, centralized, and increasingly diverse society with worldwide involvements don’t like to leave such questions up to amateurs and local politicians. They want them determined nationally and professionally.
So that’s what’s done. We have an increasingly national system of education that’s designed by experts answerable to each other, to major institutions, and to those who dominate public discussion, but not in any real sense to the public at large. They design it for the kind of society that makes sense to them: one run by experts and functionaries, along with commercial interests. The goals it promotes are thus efficiency, stability, and ease of management, with maximum equal satisfaction of individual preferences the ultimate ideal that justifies the whole.
Its goals and ideals, then, are those of present-day secular liberalism, and the way of life intended is one of career, consumption, pursuit of individual satisfactions, and inoffensiveness. It tries to prepare young people for such a life by emphasizing career preparation, moderate self-expression, “critical thinking,” which implies deferring to recognized experts and their methods, and “tolerance,” which implies treating questions of value—those not immediately related to efficiency and equality—as a matter of private taste.
Taken as ultimate standards for life, these goals are profoundly dreary, and people—especially young people—need to be inspired by something higher. That is why every system of education, like every way of life, needs an ultimate religious sanction.
The solution to the problem has been to turn maximum equal preference satisfaction, the utterly mundane goal of secular liberalism, into a religion. As such it becomes equivalent to the deification of individual man. Each of us, by his will, calls a system of values into being and thereby creates a moral universe. Choice, and Justice Kennedy’s “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life,” become sacred principles.
That is why our schools emphasize cultural and lifestyle diversity so insistently. By doing so they facilitate the unbounded freedom of human nature, and so become agents of a divine kingdom in which all are gods.
American public education naturally stands for American ideals and the American way of life. In the past, when life among us was more decentralized, local school boards and the parents who elected them had an important part in determining how those things were understood. That has changed. The people who run a complex, centralized, and increasingly diverse society with worldwide involvements don’t like to leave such questions up to amateurs and local politicians. They want them determined nationally and professionally.
So that’s what’s done. We have an increasingly national system of education that’s designed by experts answerable to each other, to major institutions, and to those who dominate public discussion, but not in any real sense to the public at large. They design it for the kind of society that makes sense to them: one run by experts and functionaries, along with commercial interests. The goals it promotes are thus efficiency, stability, and ease of management, with maximum equal satisfaction of individual preferences the ultimate ideal that justifies the whole.
Its goals and ideals, then, are those of present-day secular liberalism, and the way of life intended is one of career, consumption, pursuit of individual satisfactions, and inoffensiveness. It tries to prepare young people for such a life by emphasizing career preparation, moderate self-expression, “critical thinking,” which implies deferring to recognized experts and their methods, and “tolerance,” which implies treating questions of value—those not immediately related to efficiency and equality—as a matter of private taste.
Taken as ultimate standards for life, these goals are profoundly dreary, and people—especially young people—need to be inspired by something higher. That is why every system of education, like every way of life, needs an ultimate religious sanction.
The solution to the problem has been to turn maximum equal preference satisfaction, the utterly mundane goal of secular liberalism, into a religion. As such it becomes equivalent to the deification of individual man. Each of us, by his will, calls a system of values into being and thereby creates a moral universe. Choice, and Justice Kennedy’s “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life,” become sacred principles.
That is why our schools emphasize cultural and lifestyle diversity so insistently. By doing so they facilitate the unbounded freedom of human nature, and so become agents of a divine kingdom in which all are gods.
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