We’ve Been Schooled!

The modern school system, as we know it, doesn’t work for educating free men and women. It does work well, however, toward the goal for which it was designed.

The goal of the modern educational system is to cultivate a society of people who are both consumers and cogs—people enslaved simultaneously in both roles, that of producer and consumer–all for the benefit of the modern State.

Bob Pepperman Taylor, who is the dean and professor of political science at the University of Vermont notes the following:

“For the civic educator, the task is to produce a particular kind of citizen; for the educator released from political goals, the end of education is less to shape students than to develop their reason and knowledge to such a degree that they are able to take personal responsibility for shaping themselves as free and independent individuals—thinking through their own views, cultivating their own tastes, developing their own life plans, and becoming unique people. Although it is comforting to think that in a democracy these two projects are complementary (we like to say that democracy is the form of government that values free and autonomous individuals), the open-endedness of the educational process is worrisome from the political perspective; the temptation is to try to produce an education with a known and satisfactory outcome. Free men and women are often a bit too unpredictable for the civic educator’s taste.”

We don’t have to scratch our heads all day long wondering why Americans (and most Europeans) have become so dependent on the State; we need look no further than our public school system. To use an idiom kids used when I was growing up, “We’ve been schooled!”

See, schools, as we have come to accept them, literally create a dependent society, not a free society. Further, this modern school system has no logical limits, and therefore, creates an abyss, a black hole of government jobs, budgets, advisors, bureaucracies, and bureaucracies to regulate bureaucracies—and the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, many Christian schools, even classical Christian schools, are simply modeled after public schools but adorned with Bible classes and weekly chapel.

While the motivation of the Christian and private schools are to be admired (Having started two schools myself, I understand the motivation) by copying the model of education introduced by Horace Mann, Christians are doing little more than repainting the grand ballroom of the sinking Titanic.

This concept of school—which I am defining as the age-graded process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum—is fairly new to the U.S. (less than 150 years old), introduced in the 19th century by secular humanists like Horace Mann (1796-1859), and later, John Dewey (1859-1952). As the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and later a U. S. Representative, Mann wanted to reform schools to cultivate citizens loyal to our democratic republic. In his own research, he became fascinated by the Prussian school models and modeled US schools after them.

As Taylor pointed on in the earlier quote–and every despot knows this—that by controlling the education of the youth you mitigate the consequences of free thought and control the direction of the culture, the very destiny of the country.

The way schools create this dependent society is to conflate  service and substance, or processes and value—and they literally “school” students to do the same.

In schools, students and their parents are conditioned to conflate:

• teaching with learning.
• grade advancement with education.
• diplomas (and in some cases, test scores) with competency.
• fluency with the ability to say something interesting, new, or intelligent.

In other words, students’ imaginations literally get “schooled” into the fallacy of equivocation regarding process and value. By shaping the students’ imagination this way, schools shape the entire culture’s social imagination into conflating processes with real value.

This is why institutional achievement is seen as legitimate while independent accomplishments are usually suspect. 

In any case, schools create and legitimize student values and shape student worldviews, which essentially gives the school system a monopoly on the professional, political, and financial aspects of a society.

Interestingly, the political philosopher, Ivan Illich, argued in the 1970s that the culture’s

“increasing reliance on institutional care adds a new dimension to culture’s—and especially the poor’s—helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to think or fend for themselves.”

He wrote this in 1971. And all of us in this generation have grown up in this system of institutionalization he describes which now appears to be the norm when the institutional nature of our society is really only about a century old.

This always makes me think of David Foster Wallace’s fish story.

In a speech title, This Is Water, he says,

There are two young fish swimming along who happen to meet an older fish. The older fish nods at them and says:

‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’

The two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks:

‘What the heck is water?’

Irrespective of Wallace’s personal philosophy, his fish story is meant to illustrate the fact that some of the most important realities—ones we would think should be the most obvious to us—are usually the hardest to see.

Another example comes from Atul Gawande’s fabulous book, On Being Mortal, in which he laments this same thing about the healthcare system.

As a medical doctor, he was fascinated by the fact and wondered why so many of his patients and colleagues conflate medicine and medical technology with health care. He further laments that death and the process of dying are literally resigned to the institutional management of doctors (and morticians).

So, we have finally come to the place in our society where, other than the poor and the privileged, everyone now enters the world and leaves the world via an institution.

It’s not only apparent in birth and death; we can actually see this perception of the world everywhere. Think about the way we make decisions today.

“What does your teacher say?”

“What did the doctor say?”

“What did the financial advisor say?”

And most recently,

“forget the science and what the statistics show, What does the CDC say?”

Institutional thinking has given the State a monopoly on the social imagination.

This allows the institutional bureaucracies to set the standards of what is valuable and what is feasible.

When this is the case, instead of becoming themselves the means of education, work, leisure, politics, life in the city, life on the farm, and even family life come to depend on schools for the habits and knowledge these realms of life presuppose.

Said another way, “We’ve all been schooled and most of us don’t even know it”

In closing, I would like to echo the philosopher quoted previously, Ivan Illich, and make a radical statement. If we want to preserve the culture of free men and women in this country, we will need to amend the first amendment of the US Constitution with just two words: or schools.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or schools, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If that seems too radical, perhaps we skip that step for now and just get to the work of taking up the mantle of our children’s education and make sure they get the kind of education that develops their reason and knowledge to such a degree that they are able to take personal responsibility for shaping themselves as free and independent individuals—individuals who can think through their own views, cultivate their own tastes, develop their own life plans, and become unique human beings who live for the glory of God in the kingdom of Christ.