Much Ado About Education

It is interesting to note how much fevered talk there is about the matter of education in our day. If Oprah's talking about it, then it must raise our attention; or rather, because Oprah's talking about it, we can now pay attention to it. Let me sum up what I've heard from the cultural intelligentsia: We have bad teachers and not enough money. If we had better teachers and more money, or more money to give to good teachers, then our schools would improve. Much was made of various efforts to change the teacher tenure program and to reward good teachers while creating greater accountability, etc.

Is there something to this? Of course there is! Surely there are many bad teachers in the system, and surely one of the reasons is that we don't pay teachers what we ought to pay them. But I want to talk about four factors contributing to the failure of our educational system that are suspiciously absent from the present conflagration of cultural opinions.

First, there is the matter of the failure of parents and the disintegration of the home. As an educator, I recognize the need for foundational discipline and a basic respect for authority as necessary pre-requisites to effective student/teacher interactions. If a child has not been shaped by parents to afford the most basic tokens of respect to men and women in positions of leadership, then how can education proceed with any degree of success?

How many children of divorce are there in our nation? How many absentee parents? How many intact couples that simply fail to help their children manage their lives well? The effect of all of this is sometimes rather subtle. It produces a general coarsening of the attitutes of young people towards authority. And why would there be any other result? Young people have learned well that one cannot trust adults. If they cannot trust those adults whose natural affections and proximity should provide intimate motivation, then why should they trust total strangers? Why would they not view all adults with derision, or at least skepticism?

Of course if one believes that education is the responsibility of the state, then one can blame the state when a child passes through the halls of the schools of the state and remains ignorant.

If education is ultimately the responsibility of parents and their children, then individual families will need to look long and hard into the mirror if there is a failure to learn what must be learned.

The funny thing here is that many of the same voices that shift responsibility from the media to parents whenever a concern is raised about the influence of the media are the same voices blaming teachers and not parents for a failure in education. Someone must be blamed, and no politician, or aspiring mover of the masses, is going to blame the populace at large. It is one thing for an artist or cultural gadfly like John Stewart, whose demographic appeal is among 10-25 year olds (or those who are mentally that age), to rebuke parents. It is quite another thing for politicians and educators to do so. And so the easiest target here is clearly the state. After all, teachers aren't really human beings--they represent the machine of the state. And it is always en vogue to hate the state. Consider the many politicians whose rhetoric excoriates "Washington," as if the term denotes some abstract idea somehow separated from them.

Second, and related to the first, is the matter of the shift from an idea and word oriented culture to an image oriented entertainment culture. Neil Postman has said all that needs to be said on this point, and his work is perhaps the most devastating cultural critique you are likely to read. To put it simply, he provides clear evidence that we have departed from reasoned, linear, logical dialogue, and in its place we put the drug of various amusements. Words become accessories to images, and we lose our ability to think deeply at all. If Postman is right, the problem may be more complicated than hiring a more efficient teacher. In point of fact, even if we could hire Shakespeare to teach English in our schools, chances are most students would yawn at the man. (see related article: http://monomaniacy.blogspot.com/2010/06/lecture-series-lecture-3challenges-to.html)

Third is the philosophical shift that has accompanied all of this. Two philosophies have successfully supplanted better philosophies, and we are now reaping the rewards. The first is naturalism and the second is postmodernism, and both are philosophically incompatible with education on deep analysis. Bright students know this, and so when their UC trained teachers sell it to them, they know that the implications include what philosophers call an "undercutting defeater" of education itself. Of course students don't use terms like this, but they know that if their teachers are right philosophically, then there can be no objective and abiding motivation in education, nor can there be any objective knowledge. There is only appeasement of the ruling class, which includes educators occasionally. So what does the postmodernist/naturalist tell students is the reason to be educated? To avoid punishment or secure reward, and there can be little other motivation in education. This of course may work when a nation is desperate for a greater share of material comforts, but what if a nation is already fat and happy and still indifferent to knowledge or to sustaining for the next generation what the fruits of education provided for their own generation?

One is going to need a worldview that supplies education with sufficient objective meaning, wholly apart from simple personal payoff. Suffusing education with enough meaning to make it a "good in itself" is not going to come from postmodernism or naturalism. In both worldviews, education is ultimately rendered meaningless, even though on the surface it provides a self-aggrandizing motivation. Beneath the surface, and on careful analysis of the claims of naturalists and postmodernists, one is left with a philosophy that strips our experiences of any significance at all, including the experience of self-aggrandizement (see my various articles on education).

Fourth, modern education makes a fatally flawed assumption. I call it the assumption of will neutrality. The premise of the general argument in our day is that if we will provide better education, then students will eagerly learn. This addresses the sender problem (at least partially), but does not address the receiver problem. Plato put it this way, "The little human animal will not at first have the right responses; it does not naturally love and hate those things which really are lovely and contemptible." (this is something of a paraphrase from memory)

While Plato believed man's natural proclivities included the vice of laziness, an internal impediment to growth in education, the Christian religion has always referred to this internal impediment as sin. Of course there are many in our day who base their entire philosophy of education on the opposite assumption--that we do not possess any relevant lack of virtue making education at the very least more difficult for us. For many in our day the only barrier is simple ignorance, and of course if the only barrier is ignorance, the only solution is information. Irradiate the universe with information and all in the garden will be lovely. Hide or obscure information and we will live in the Dark Ages again, or so goes the argument.

But if in fact we are not simply ignorant, but also somehow corrupt, then providing more information, or information artfully conveyed, or various forms of information, or even by providing an information age in which information is available to all of us 24 hours a day, will not bring about a renaissance in education. We know this is true because of what is happening in our day. The state of education is steadily declining in the one nation in the world where information is most available. Curious isn't it. Perhaps Plato and the Christians were on to something. The solution to the current education crisis is not simply, "add education," but also, "raise virtuous people who can receive and appropriate education." Of course one wonders whether or not the public school system can raise virtuous men and women, especially when it turns virtue itself into a matter of opinion.

Lady Blah Blah

I know... really clever title to this blog, right? What I'm interested in discussing today is the argument in Lady Gaga's new song, "You Were Born This Way."

The key line is, "... you're on the right track, baby, you were born this way..." And it goes on to talk about gays, bisexuals, transvestites, etc. Real shocker that she has this kind of message and agenda.

But here is the latent argument within the song:

Premise 1: If you are born to do ... X , then it is acceptable for you to do X.
Premise 2: You were born to do ... X.
Conclusion: It is acceptable (morally) for you to do X.

My response here is a simple question regarding premise 1: Why should we believe it is obvious that if we are born a certain way that it must be morally acceptable for us to be that way? Does it really follow?

Let's play with a few examples:

Premise 1: If you are born to be a pedophile, then it is acceptable to be a pedophile.
Premise 2: Some people are born to be pedophiles.
Conclusion: Therefore, it is acceptable to be a pedophile.

Or...

Premise 1: If you are born to be a sociopath, then it is acceptable to be a sociopath.
Premise 2: Some people are born to be sociopaths.
Conclusion: Therefore, it is acceptable to be a sociopath.

Or...

Premise 1: If you are born to be homophobic, then it is acceptable to be homophobic.
Premise 2: Some are born to be homophobic.
Conclusion: Therefore, it is acceptable to be homophobic.

Now, of course Lady Gaga is no professional philosopher, but that doesn't mean we should accept muddle headed nonsense simply because it is accompanied by a driving beat.