Finding the proper tools
I learned about this op-ed piece in the Washington Times through the weekly HSLDA email. It’s about President Obama’s plan for “zero-to-five” education — using federal money to create more preschool opportunities, and work toward universal preschool. “The presumption by Mr. Obama is that the earlier children start formal education, the better chance they have of being successful in life and being competitive in the global market,” writes HSLDA President J. Michael Smith. “Sounds good, but is this policy backed by evidence that government involvement in child rearing from birth actually works?”
It’s worth reading… or at least, I think so. It touches on something that’s been nagging at me every time I hear the president talk about college education. From now on, he’s said several times, if you don’t go to college, you’re not just letting yourself down. You’re letting your country down. We must be more competitive internationally.
Doesn’t this notion of global competitiveness — put forth unquestioningly as a good thing in the president’s plans for both ends of the educational spectrum — put free nations at the mercy of not-free nations? If market competitiveness on a global industrial scale is the supreme goal, coercion and specialization are more dependable tools for achieving it than freedom and true learning. Where does the uniqueness of a free nation’s concept of education fit into this picture? In the liberal arts tradition of the west, education is seen as a humanizing process, not merely an economic one. To put forth global market competitiveness as the only, or even the primary, goal of education is to reduce education mightily. It reduces, too, the whole gamut of ways in which we might “compete” that aren’t measurable by economics — the level of courage or ingenuity or determination possible in a context of freedom.
Besides that, I have to ask when my personal educational goals became any of the government’s business. Letting my country down by not going to college? That’s not just intrusive; it’s elitist. My country needs tradespeople and artisans too, people who keep the inherited knowledge, the agricultural wisdom, the community traditions and the local comprehension of places alive. What happened to the dignity of all walks of life?
Worse, what happened to freedom? As a former college educator, I get cold chills at the tenor of the president’s remarks. To make the university an entitlement, or, worse, a citizenship duty for everyone not only robs the educational process of freedom, it destroys what legitimacy it has left. I believe everyone who has the ability and is willing to work should be able to pursue higher education. Let’s leave it at that. The problem in the housing industry began, some economists have said, during the Clinton administration with its goal of home-ownership for everyone. I can’t help but wonder if making college a requirement for everyone, and throwing the weight of government behind it, invites similar abuses, and similar devaluation of the goal.
I think re-anchoring education in tradition, and rediscovering the humanities, should play a larger role in the solution to our academic woes. It would enable us to better evaluate the times in which we live. Of course these things won’t happen, but I can dream, can’t I? And I can quote those far more articulate than I. Here’s Dorothy Sayers’ conclusion of “The Lost Tools of Learning,” first presented 62 years ago. Her essay still speaks, and it’s interesting to consider alongside the current dialogue about public education in America:
We have lost the tools of learning–the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane– that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
