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 16th 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.
