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Education as Economics

In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for? The answers are discouraging, and one of them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a good job. And that’s it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one. Neither of these purposes is, to say the least, grand or inspiring. The story each suggests is that the United States is not a culture but merely an economy, which is the last refuge of an exhausted philosophy of education.

-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 174

I was not particularly fond of Postman’s solutions to the problem, but his analysis of the modern state of education is profound, especially considering that he wrote the book before the boom of the internet, laptops, tablets, iPads, and even cell phones. The more engrossed our culture becomes in the skills of technology, the more education seeks primarily to ‘equip’ students to perform technical skills. There used to be a particular type of school for that sort of thing – a technical school. We are now on the verge of all schools in some sense becoming technical schools. My own take on the new common core is that it is a leap in that direction, with everything being geared toward testing and ‘practical’ workplace applications.

Today, education is even more wrapped up with, and in, economics than it was when Postman wrote these words in the 90s. I hate the fact that I have to encourage teenagers to go to college simply for economic purposes, but that’s the sad reality. I would much rather tell them that a good liberal arts education will equip them to see the wonder of life and reality than tell them that it is simply a hoop that one must jump through to live a comfortable life.

I do not see any way of stopping this train in modern American culture. We have been headed in this direction for a long time, and the momentum is likely past the point of no return. But perhaps there is hope in the church. We can encourage our children to read simply for the sake of reading, and for the sake of good stories. We can encourage them to study creation (science), mathematics, history and the like simply for the fact that they are interesting and worthwhile, and a part of the story that God is telling, regardless of their so-called ‘practical value.’ We can continue to find roots in our tradition that will temper our need of flashy technological tools for learning. We can temper the bright light show of our culture with the deep roots and simple beauty of Christ.

Instead of flashier, we must go deeper. Instead of focusing purely on pragmatism and economics, we can encourage the goodness of education simply for the sake of knowing God and what he has created. And as we do so, perhaps, at least in the United States, we have a real opportunity to be different from the culture in a way that has not been evident for the past 100 years.

Let me put it this way: rather than seeking education as primarily a means of competing and gaining currency, we must seek it (1) as a means of reminding ourselves that we are small and (2) gaining currency for our souls.

Personal Knowledge: Submitting to Authority and Tradition

To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.

– Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 53

What follows are some random thoughts that may make zero sense to anyone other than myself.

The Apostle Paul put it this way: ‘Imitate me, as I imitate Christ’ (1 Cor. 11:1); and this way: ‘What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you’ (Phil 4:9). The author of the epistle to the Hebrews put it this way: ‘Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith’ (13:7).  Discipleship is still relevant, and it is relevant for every area in which you seek knowledge.

I actually think that Polanyi’s principle is implied in the 5th Commandment: ‘Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God is giving to you’ (Ex. 20:12). If we are to thrive, we must not buck off authority, culture, and tradition. Chaos does not lead to progress. Progress comes as we advance by building upon the foundation that has already been given to us. This is why the early Reformers were intent to build upon the Church Fathers rather than start from scratch.

The danger here is that authority might become dictatorial authority. But the pre-Catholic Chesterton, who was a Protestant when he wrote Orthodoxy, got it right initially: tradition is the democracy, not dictatorship, of the dead. We give a vote those who come before us, valuing their opinion as much as our own. They are a foundation, but not the Cornerstone. And the application of this principle goes far beyond brute theological matters. It applies to virtually any form of education or enculturation.

Leaving Children on Doorsteps (G.K. Chesterton)

Chesterton says that the modern Western world sees the existence of children as a problem. How does the world then handle said problem? In several ways, one being the following:

The third way, which is unimpeachably Modern, is to imitate Rousseau, who left his baby on the door-step of the Foundling Hospital. It is true that, among the Moderns, it is generally nothing so human or traditional as the Foundling Hospital. The baby is to be left on the door-step of the State Department for Education and Universal Social Adjustment. In short, these people mean, with various degrees of vagueness, that the place of the Family can now be taken by the State.

He wrote that in 1932. He continues,

And if all the babies born in the world were left on the door-step of the Foundling Hospital, the Hospital, and the door-step, would have to be considerably enlarged.

Follow the logic. If it is the job of government to educate all children, then government cannot help but grow. He continues,

Now something like this is what has really happened, in the vague and drifting centralization of our time. The Hospital has been enlarged into the School and then into the State; not the guardian of some abnormal children, but the guardian of all normal children. Modern mothers and fathers, of the emancipated sort, could not do their quick-change acts of bewildering divorce and scattered polygamy, if they did not believe in a big benevolent Grandmother, who could ultimately take over ten million children by very grandmotherly legislation.

Did I mention he wrote this in 1932? He concludes,

Government grows more elusive every day. But the traditions of humanity support humanity; and the central one is this tradition of Marriage. And the essential of it is that a free man and a free woman choose to found on earth the only voluntary state; the only state which creates and which loves its citizens. So long as these real responsible beings stand together, they can survive all the vast changes, deadlocks, and disappointments which make up mere political history. But if they fail each other, it is as certain as death that ‘the State’ will fail them.

Marriage and the Modern Mind, from In Defense of Sanity, pp. 223-224.

A Small Home is a Big Place

In his essay, Turning Inside Out, G.K. Chesterton makes a case for the central importance of education in the home, especially by mothers. The essay is quite timely. He sees a world in which education is seen as a grand task – so grand that it takes great experts and specialists to accomplish it. But he doesn’t think this is the way the world actually is:

Private education [i.e. education in the home] really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. It would really be an exaggeration to say that the schoolmaster who takes his pupils in freehand drawing is training them in all the uses of freedom. It really would be fantastic to say that the harmless foreigner who instructs a class in French or German is talking with all the tongues of men and angels. But the mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all forms of freedom, because she has to deal with all sides of a single human soul. She is obliged, if not to talk with the tongues of men and angels, at least to decide how much she shall talk about angels and how much about men.

In short, if education is really the larger matter, then certainly domestic life is the larger matter; and official or commercial life the lesser matter. It is a mere matter of arithmetic that anything taken from the larger matter will leave it less.

Hence his case for the massive, and massively important, role of mothers in the education of their children.

Modern Western societies would argue that in going out into the world, mothers are leaving the cramped, claustrophobic confines of a small house for the big wide world of freedom and advancement; or the small, tedious interaction with a child or two or three for ‘life out there’ to seek their fortunes on the market and with the masses. Chesterton says this line of thinking is wrong:

Every word that is said about the tremendous importance of trivial nursery habits goes to prove that being a nurse is not trivial. All tends to return of the simple truth that private work is the great one and the public work the small. The human house is a paradox, for it is larger inside than out.

His argument goes like this: society says that the State should be highly, maybe most highly, concerned with education. Mothers have the greatest opportunity to educate their children. And if these premises are true, then why on earth would the state want them separated from their children? That’s the argument (look up the essay to see it fleshed out), but that last quote is the takeaway for me.

When your children are at home, do not let them get the notion, and don’t get the notion yourself, that they are trapped in a small world. The home is, or at least should be, a place filled with God, the heavens, the stars and planets, human history, art, poetry, drama, story, love, joy, and much more. A small home should be a big place. And it ought to produce big people – who will, in turn, create their own small-big homes.

Quotes from the essay Turning Inside Out by G.K. Chesterton, from In Defense of Sanity.