The Purpose of Education

I’ve been putting together a presentation for this coming Saturday. At our Tea Party, we’re spending two consecutive meetings on education issues. My part will be on homeschooling. The beginning segment is about the purpose of education, and some history of education. Since that’s where my thoughts are today, I might as well give a preview here.

The purpose of education, according to Aristotle, is to produce a great soul.

Joe Harless, in his book The Eden Conspiracy, says education should be about producing an accomplished citizen. It should teach the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society.

What should an accomplished member of society be accomplished at doing—regardless of how the person makes a living?

·         Obedience to the law.

·         Informed voting decisions.

·         Contributions to stability.

·         Resolution of interpersonal conflict.

·         Contributions to community improvement.

The Northwest Ordinance, one of our lesser known founding documents, written in 1787, the same year as our Constitution, says “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged.”

So the purpose of education, then, is to teach religion, morality, and knowledge so that we can have good government and happiness.

Note that encouraging schools and the means of education did not mean government provided it, only that it would offer a gift of land—after surveying, one 16^th of the land would be sold to private owners, and the proceeds would be used “within that township” to help with the building of schools. No state or national oversight. No ongoing support. Simply a one-time grant to encourage building schools.

So far we’re using different words, but we’re pretty much in agreement about what we want schools to do.

According to Oliver Van DeMille, in A Thomas Jefferson Education, there are three types of

education, each with its particular purpose:

·         Public education

·         Professional education

·         Leadership education

We’ll take these in turn.

First, public education. It’s intended to prepare a person for a job, or for servant labor. It teaches what to think. It is implemented in cultures to give opportunities to the poor, to lift them from being a burden on society. The downside—everywhere it had previously been tried—is the deterioration of other education, which can’t complete with “free.”

Second, profession education. It’s intended to prepare for trade, often through apprenticeship, for skilled artisan work, and for law, medical, MBA, or other professional training. It teaches when to think, or under what circumstances to use their specialized training. So, the purpose is to create expertise. It meets this goal, but it is not a substitute for leadership training.

Third, leadership education. It’s intended to produce leaders in home and communities, entrepreneurs in business, statesmen in government. It teaches how to think. So it trains thinkers. It develops character, competence, and capacity to do the right thing—and to do it well—in business, government, church, school, family, and other organizations. It perpetuates freedom.

Historically, for thousands of years, those with resources provided home tutoring, often followed by trade apprenticeship and professional training. Meanwhile the poor got whatever minimum was necessary to make them useful—usually emphasizing physical labor over brain labor.

Public education—that first type, for preparing the poor for service labor—was first tried in America during a time when many immigrants were working in factories, and their children were left to wander the streets. This coincided with the industrial revolution.

In comes Horace Mann, an atheist “progressive.” He said,

What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…. The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men (quoted in Christopher Klicka, The Right Choice—Home Schooling, p. 32).

Within two generations, Mann's ideas flooded the nation. There was the problem of large numbers of poor students from uneducated families. He offered the factory model. Subjects were separated, rather than integrated. Timing was determined by ringing bells, just like in the factories. Schools were top-down authoritarian. Uniformity was paramount.

Then along came John Dewey—of Dewey Decimal System fame. In 1916 he published Democracy in Education. He’s more or less the father of “progressive” education. He had plans to “revolutionize” child training. “Self-realization” became the goal instead of “learning.” He gave no more than a casual nod to teaching English grammar, ancient history, US history, geography, classics of Western civilization, or science.

He looked upon the schools as a wonderful opportunity to indoctrinate America’s youth in the “virtues” of a glorious age where private property, the free market, open competition, and profits would all be eliminated.

What was his background? He got his PhD from Johns Hopkins, studying under G. Stanley Hall—a disciple of German socialist Wilhelm Wundt. Dewey visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He failed to recognize the revolutionary desolation and widespread destruction of human values, and instead described it as “a popular culture impregnated with esthetic quality.”

According to W. Cleon Skousen, in The Freeman’s Digest, May 1984, “Today we are reaping the tragic results of the pedagogical misery that America inherited from Dewey’s misadventure in experimental education.” As he explained Dewey’s history before that Soviet visit,

Long before, in 1904, he had joined the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. He had then teamed up with James Earl Russell, the dean of the Teachers College, who was also a student of Wilhelm Wundt, and together they had worked for a quarter of a century diligently building this branch of Columbia University into the largest institution in the world for the training of teachers. By 1953, about one-third of all the presidents and deans of teacher training schools in America were graduates of Columbia’s Teachers College.

One of his contemporaries, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, saw through the scheme to its logical consequences:

The disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view, education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone (Great Western Books, vol. 1, preface; pp. xii-xiii).

I may have told this story elsewhere, but there’s a segment of To Kill a Mockingbird, where the young protagonist, Scout, describes her disappointment with school. Her description of the first day of first grade (no kindergarten back then) is worth retelling.

Scout’s teacher discovers that she not only knew the alphabet, but she could read all the readers and The Mobile Register (newspaper), which she had learned naturally just by sitting with her father and reading together in the evenings. The teacher says,

“You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers (p. 22 of my copy).

Apparently John Dewey was to blame. She goes on:

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem [her brother] called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus [her father] and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teacher thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me (p. 37).

Maybe it’s time we re-think what is normal.

In six thousand years of human history, children have been brought up and taught by their parents. Turning that responsibility over to the state is a social experiment—an undeniably failing experiment—begun only about a century ago.

While we homeschoolers may look radical to the people around us who don’t know anything different from government institutional factory-like schools they grew up with, we are the ones following the traditional pattern.

We homeschoolers are the ones doing leadership education. We’re the ones teaching how to think.

And insofar as we do well in teaching the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society, we’re producing great souls.

My kids were worth it.

Leadership Education--Do You Have the Right Stuff?

I’m thinking about one of the details toward the end of Agenda, the documentary I talked about in Tuesday’s blog, in the “What can we do?” section. It was to homeschool.

If you’ve read my First Blog and/or the introduction to the website Spherical Model, you know I homeschooled. Our family did it for the last ten years we had school-age kids (graduated Social Sphere in spring 2010). There were times it did indeed feel heroic. For us it also seemed necessary, so it was just life as we knew it.

I hesitate to recruit others into homeschooling. It is something of a calling. The 2-5% of families that do it are set apart, in a way, from other parents and children out there. But the suggestion in the movie made me think it would be worth asking a few questions, to let you evaluate whether you have the right stuff to homeschool.

First, do you believe that you as a parent have an inalienable right to the bringing up of your children as you see fit (assuming that you do not infringe on their God-given rights with behavior that is clearly abusive)? If you believe you have that right, do you also recognize the responsibility to bring them up in ways that will give them knowledge, wisdom, and an ability to support a home and family in a civilized society?

If you believe these things, then educating your children is something you are committed to do. There are several possible ways to accomplish it:

• Nod approval as your children seek their own resources and learning.
• Educate them yourself.
• Hire private tutors to educate them under your supervision.
• Hire a school that you have chosen to offer a full range of subjects.
• Turn over the choices of subjects and schools to a public institution.
• Some combination of the above.

According to A Thomas Jefferson Education, a subversive book you ought to read when considering your child’s education, there are three types, or levels, of education:

1. Public education, which tries to prepare everyone for a job, any job, by teaching them what to think. This includes rudimentary skills designed to fit them to function in society.
2. Professional education—from apprenticeship and trade schools to law, medical and MBA programs—which creates specialists by teaching them when to think.
3. Leadership education, which I call “Jefferson Education,” which teaches students how to think and prepares them to be leaders in their homes and communities, entrepreneurs in business, and statesmen in government.—TJE p. 31

The point is that leaders have traditionally (and almost exclusively) been taught by private tutors. Learning tends to start in the home, with basic reading and math through a range of elementary subjects. Then private tutors are hired for more depth in chosen areas, and as the student grows and learning depth increases, a mentor often directs the individual study. That’s how Thomas Jefferson was educated, as well as a great many of the founding fathers. It’s the method used for royalty pretty much throughout history.

We think of the term “public education” as meaning public schools, government funded institutions, which is accurate. But the purpose is to “educate” the vast public with a standardized level of rudimentary skills. The purpose isn’t to educate for leadership, since the vast public are seen as those to be led, not those who lead. If public education is used for a future leader, it must be supplemented beyond typical public school levels. Leadership education methods, on the other hand, do not preclude a child from going into any field; they open up the possibilities for more.

So, then the question is, if you want your child to learn how to think, how will you go about it? A certain level of wealth and resources are required for private tutoring—including homeschooling. I have known people who must work while homeschooling, but it’s difficult and not ideal. So, in a world where households economically almost require two incomes, homeschooling requires a dedicated parent whose job is educating the children (or combination of two parents to add up to full-time teacher). Most homeschoolers are not wealthy—certainly including us. But they make sacrifices that allow for living off a single income. That’s not possible for everyone, but it is more doable than many realize. Expenditures per year, aside from that lost income, are relatively small. You can of course spend much more, but $300 a year per child is easily adequate (and maybe well beyond what you need) if you have a local library and the internet.

The most common reason people give me for not homeschooling is that they could never teach their own kids. I think they picture standing up in front of their children and spewing out knowledge and assignments, with the children resisting the way they resist doing chores. That isn’t reality in a homeschool. A homeschool teacher is more a learning facilitator and collaborative learner, rather than a lecturer. But there are family dynamics and personality quirks that could make it difficult to teach at home.

Here’s one way I knew I could do it. I used to feel heartsick when summer was coming to an end, because it meant we didn’t have time to go do fun things together as a family. I was never counting the days until I could have alone time in the house. Lack of chaos, better cleanliness, etc., I craved like the next person. But those were secondary to enjoying being with my kids.

I never sent them to preschool. That was in part because we never had the money. But it turns out our going to the library, reading together, going to museums and other family field trips, and doing art projects and science experiments for the fun of it pretty much superseded any need for institutionally imposed structured learning during those early years. And our more or less accidental results were superior. (Or, possibly, I just happened to luck into having three gifted level children.)

Homeschooling was a lifestyle change, and pretty intense for that decade. But it was a life I loved. Maybe the best years of my life, at least before grandchildren. Our family benefitted not only educationally, but spiritually and socially as well. Socialization was far superior with homeschooling than it had been with public schooling. I wish I had considered starting sooner. We had good neighbors who homeschooled and set the example. But at the time we also had good public schools, including an excellent magnet school for gifted kids that we used from 3^rd grade on. So I didn’t see the need until two years after a move to an area where schools didn’t meet our needs. (I could detail the schools’ failures, but you don’t need that.)

Another day we can cover what public schools are doing to the education levels of our nation’s next generation. Today is just to consider that possibility that homeschooling, or some other method of private tutoring, could be in your future.

• Do you have the desire and drive to give your children the best possible education you can?
• Do you have the minimal level of money and resources needed to make homeschooling a possibility?
• Do you have the patience—or the willingness to gain it—that it takes to spend long hours raising and educating your own children?

If the answers for you are yes, we should talk.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”~ Thomas Jefferson