Cheers to
Representatives Amedee, Crews, et al., for their
essay advocating a more responsible approach to public education than the
social engineering model being pushed by those who are woke, Marxist, and so
on. A focus on fundamentals in the
classroom is good and needful, but the Representatives have narrowed the list
of essentials a little too much. From
their essay:
In our estimation, the mission of education
in the public sector is to provide a foundational system that teaches,
evaluates, teaches AGAIN if necessary, then graduates into the work force the
school-age children of our citizens. The state is obliged to provide to
the taxpayers who live within our borders a safe and healthy environment for
students from elementary grades up through the completion of high school.
Anything else is extraneous and potentially distracting and harmful.
. .
.
The mission of our schools should be to
teach children first the basics, then intermediate, then, where appropriate,
advanced levels of instruction. Children need to be able to read.
They need to be able to write and speak in the English language (yes, it’s ok
to teach foreign languages, but English is the language of our country).
They need to be able to understand and demonstrate basic skills in
mathematics. Children need to be able to understand and apply varying
types of science, including biology, chemistry and physics. Students need
to understand and use the Scientific Method. Finally, students need to
understand the framework of history and how our governments are structured and
how they are supposed to work.
This sort of
instruction, focused on the natural/physical sciences, has a valuable place in
society, but to say that it is the essence of good education for all children is
to reduce human beings to something subhuman, to a mere faceless worker-drone
in a corporate business hive, whose only unique characteristic of his identity
is his Social Security number.
No, mankind
is infinitely more complex than this; and boys and girls and young men and
young women require an education broad and deep enough to match that multifaceted
spiritual and material nature.
What are the
fundamentals of an education that is really fit for a human child? The excellent conservative writer and thinker
of the 20th century, Dr
Russell Kirk, gives us a good outline:
The conservative is concerned, first of
all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial
problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical
understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is
founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
He goes on
elsewhere to criticize the
shallowness of modern education:
Humanism is a discipline that traces its
origins back to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, and has existed
ever since to humanize men. Cicero and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius
were at once the Roman exemplars and the Roman preceptors of this humanizing
process, for which our term is “a liberal education.” The humanists believed
that through the study of great lives and great thoughts the minds of earnest
men could be molded nobly. The process was both intellectual and ethical. This
humane discipline, passed along in the literature of Christian theology,
classic philosophy, poetry, history, biography, dominated the thinking of the
whole of the Western world—until very late in the nineteenth century. Humanism
persists today, but with influence greatly weakened.
. . .
But with the successive industrial
revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with what Friedrich
Juenger calls “the triumph of technology,” this veneration of humane learning
began to disappear—especially among businessmen in America. Applied science,
“positivism,” seemed to be the keys to complete power. Powerful voices
were raised then in disparagement of the humanities and in praise of
“efficiency,” “pragmatism,” “progress.” The School of Business
Administration pushed the Schools of Theology and Classical Studies into a dim
corner. People asked impatiently: Why waste years in school over Cicero?
A people can live upon their moral and
intellectual capital for a long time. Yet eventually, unless the capital is
replenished, they arrive at cultural bankruptcy. The intellectual and political
and industrial leaders of the older generation die, and their places are not
filled. The humanitarian cannot substitute for the humane man. The
result of such bankruptcy is a society of meaninglessness, or a social
revolution that brings up radical and unscrupulous talents to turn society
inside out.
But this
sort of narrow, industrial-style education is exactly what the Representatives
are telling us we need. C. S. Lewis saw
exactly where this utilitarian form of education leads in The Abolition of
Man (quoted in another
relevant Kirk essay):
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2022/07/garlington-an-education-worthy-of-the-name/.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
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