or Why Educating Everyone is a Bad Idea
I remember a time that my mother asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I think I was around 7th or 8thgrade. I was a kid. I had no idea. I told her that I didn’t know, but I did know that I would not like an office job. I told her that sitting behind a desk would kill me. Little did I know that a few years later, I would be killed and now sitting behind a desk thrills me.
Growing up, all I wanted to do was to play sports and work hard. I didn’t care what the sport or job was, I wanted to win at it. I wanted to prove that I could be the best, the fastest, and the strongest. I didn’t really care how others perceived me as long as they listed those three things first. My life got turned upside down, and I was sent on a very different path than I ever thought.
To the terror of my junior high self, I have spent the vast majority of my cognizant life in school either as a student or a teacher. I like it. The work suits me. I enjoy the schedule. I also work with some pretty great people. It is how I provide for my family. I see the work that I do as vital, and I know that I have having an impact on every student’s life. I am literally directing the lives of every student that I teach. What I am doing has generational momentum. I think it would be hard to find someone more bought into the value of school. I really do enjoy it.
From my own life, one could draw the conclusion that everyone should spend a decent amount of time in school. If I had been able to leave school early and gone into a physical profession like I had wanted to do, then when I died later on, I would have been out of my livelihood. I would have had no fallback plan.
Just because I like school now and it saved my usefulness does not mean that it is for everyone. As one who is trying to start a college and who is primarily an upper high school teacher, one would think that I would want my students to spend more time in my classroom, not less. Yet, I have to ask, what is the point? To what end do I want them to spend more time learning.
Universal education is, on its face, a good idea. There are things that all people should know. My question is, who gets to decide what those things are? Is it the government? The church? The family? Who gets to make that decision? How should everyone be educated?
To answer these questions, one must first consider what is man. Around the time of Aristotle, I can’t remember where I read this, there was a story about some philosophers sitting around talking about what qualities make up man. They are looking at the creatures around them and figuring out what man is not. Eventually, they settle on the description that man is a hairless biped. One of the philosophers was not happy about this description, so to prove them all wrong, he plucked a chicken and threw it in the middle of the circle and said, “Behold, your man.”
I bring this story up because man is not purely physical. If man were merely the attributes on the outside, he would be little different than a monkey. Plato would push man the opposite way and say that the perfect man is the one that is united into The One of the universe that is the pure spirit. The flesh that binds man is what is slowing him down from becoming what he is supposed to be. It is the job of man to become more like the things above and then to be released from this physical body into the spiritual realm to exist. One should be able to gather that both the hyper physical and hyper spiritual view of man is wrong.
There has to be a happy medium here. I would say that man is an equally physical and spiritual being. There is a physicality to man that must be considered while also a spiritually to him that cannot be ignored. These things must be united in order to correctly think about mankind. Plenty of people have disagreed with this statement over the millenniums, but I just said it. Write your own blog about why I am wrong.
So, if man is spiritual and physical, shouldn’t his education be one that works to perfect both sides? And if it is meant to work both sides at once, how would it do this? I would ask the question: what is every man going to be? No matter who it is, what are they going to do with their lives? Everyone should learn the things that have to do with these types of things. That would be a very practically education. There are two things that I can think of that every man will be: a political creature and a religious creature.
There is no such thing as a man born in isolation. If it does happen, it is an anomaly. I can say this with confidence because at the minimum, a person is born to a mother. From that point on, the child is in a political relationship with his mother. I am taking a broader definition of politics meaning that there is a hierarchy of power and relation between people. I would hope that there would also be a father and other children around, but at the minimum, there has to be a mother. There is the anomaly that the mother dies in childbirth and there is no father, but if there is no one else around, that child will die. Man is born into politics. As such, man is political. He should learn how to be political.
Now, what does a political education look like? To be well rounded, I would argue that a political education is a historical education. Learn how men have interacted with each other throughout history in order to learn lessons from them. Read Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx to name a few philosophers. Read Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Dickens, Austen, and Dostoyevsky to name a few fiction writers. From there, specialize within your country. For example, if you are American, like me, you should read plenty from the founding fathers. Read Lincoln Speeches. Read Mark Twain. Study the histories of each major war. Read the letters from those who were in those wars. Figure out why the people were fighting. Know where you came from.
Once you know, debate. Take all these past ideas and thoughts and play them out. What would actually work in real life. How have people tried them in the past? Have they worked? Where did things go wrong when they did? How did things go right? For how long? Learn what has been tried and then consider what could work into the future.
Debating is a lost art to our society on multiple fronts. First, people hold their ideas too personally. An idea is not a person. An idea can be right or wrong. Is gravity true? As far as we know and until we are proven different. But when we are proven different, it is man’s job to change the way they think. So it is with all ideas. Ideas are fine to hold until it has been proven wrong. Then they should be written down as a warning to others and abandoned as a system. Ideas are systematic. Debate is good because it helps people to see that ideas are impersonal.
It is also good because it teaches one how to win others to your ideas. How do you prove something? Just because you state it does not mean that it is truth. Truth needs evidence. Otherwise, it is opinion or faith. If man is political, man also has to work together with others. Everyone doing their own thing is not unity. It is anarchy. Men must learn how to communicate in order to unity into a single direction. The politic will fall without unity.
A political education must also be moral. This is a bridge between the political and spiritual education. Throughout history, the location of morality has changed. Are morals born into a man or is it something that man builds into the system himself? The answer to this question is very telling of a person/society and has impact upon the political and religious training of a person. The fact that throughout history, cultures from around the world have agree upon the same basic morality (do not murder or steal for example) is telling that morality is innate within man. It is also interesting from history that every time that a society allows for morality to be individualize, it is corrupted and the civilization falls within a few generations.
For a society, who sets the rules is vitally important. Do laws come from man or from a deity? Does tradition rule? What rule does the collective play? The answers to all these questions are religious. It goes to the belief system of a person. Everyone is religious. It just depends on what they worship. If man is the decider of all things, then man is god. If it is tradition, then ancestors are the gods. If it is the collective, then the society itself is god. Man and society are necessarily religious. If there is no religion, then there is either anarchy or there is self-worship, which is a religion.
The education of an individual should be to teach each individual how to worship within the religion of the culture. This will take a very different look depending upon the religion of the society. If it is man-centered, then each individual child will be raised and taught that they are the deciders of their fate. There is no one above them telling them what is right and wrong. They are allowed to make up the standards for themselves. The system changes to the individual, not the other way around. This is the religion of the public school system today. They may call it neutral or atheistic, but it is really just the worship of man.
If there is a deity involved, like Christianity, then the individual should be raised to obey the rules of the deity. God is the one that sets the rules that man is to follow. Man will then be trained and bent to follow the deity. There will be something outside of each man that all men must follow.
A good education is one that will seek to align the student to the standards. Depending upon what the standard is, will depend on how the child is raised. If man or the child is the standard, there will be a very different outcome compared to if a deity is the standard.
No matter where a person lives, they have to learn how to live in the political and religious culture that they are born into in order for that culture to continue. Children should be raised based upon their history. In America, this is within the Western tradition. This comes downstream from the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews. It is influence by Christ’s coming and death on the cross. The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution happened. The Western expansion into the Americas. The American’s War for Independence. The American Civil War. WWI and WWII. All these things directly impact the way my life is today politically. Moses, King David and Solomon, Christ, the Apostles, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, Knox, Edwards, Spurgeon, MacArthur, Piper, and Wilson are all men who have directly impacted me throughout time. I would not be the man that I am today without these men and their writings.
How much of this training should a person get? This training is one that the basics are easy to get, but it is also a lifelong pursuit. How much should be mandated for every individual? This is a very personal answer, depending on what each person wants to do with their lives. This initial training, along with the standard reading, writing, and arithmetic, should be able to be done by the time a person is 12-14 years old. That should be the end of mandated education.
The vast majority of what we call education today is merely bloated knowledge that someone thinks is important within a bubble of people (board of education) that is not actually needed by everyone. This leads to many students being frustrated with their education. The telos or point of education has been lost over the years which has led to the majority of this frustration. We need to regain the direction of education in order to better serve our students. The goal of education should not be to create smart people. It should not be to create the best technological workers. It should not be to get a better job. It should not be to make a person ready for any particular job. The point of education is to make good people and citizen who know their place in society both physically and spiritually. Occupation/vocation consideration should come after education. Universal education should be education that all people need. occupation/vocational education is individual and should be specialized to the individual. It should not be universal. This causes mass frustration.
Now, a child being frustrated by education is nothing new. Often if it in response to something that is good for them and hard to do. Children should be trained to enjoy hard work. It is up to adults, people who know better, to do this training and to decide what is actually needed and not needed for everyone. The student should not be the one to decide what they should learn.
I am not blind to our current age. We are a technological people. The amount of data that is added every day is astronomical. The question should be asked: does everyone need technological training? My answer would be absolutely not. We may be in a technologically age, but we do not live in a technological world. The world is still physical and spiritual. Should everyone be kept in school to learn more things that won’t make them into better person or citizens? No. After a person has learned how to be a good citizen and worshipper, they should be allowed to go and learn how they want to live their lives, how they are going to add to society and to be profitable. This could mean more schooling or an apprenticeship. Each person would get to decide what they want to do. The standardize schooling of today is not helpful for those who have no desire of being academic. The standardized schooling of today is not helpful for the majority of mankind. Humans should be raised within a community and trained by the community at the direction of their parents and their religious community for their occupation/vocation. The level of training of each person should fit with their desires, and what the family, religious, and social community suggest for them. This would lead to a more fulfilling life for each person and a better community as a whole.
Good words, well written. This helped me draw some connecting lines on my thoughts on these ideas. Thanks.