The Role of Education and Government

Education, in general, teaches to the lowest common denominator in any given or particular class. I know. I was once a teacher. And according to my children, a very poor teacher at best. But what I do know is that year by year, generation by generation, there is a definite dumbing down of students, surprisingly enough, by the parents, which are and should be the first line of defense in regards to education, and then secondly by the government schools themselves. I saw it when I left teaching almost thirty years ago and it has done nothing but get worse over the years. The answer, as far as the state or the teacher unions are concerned, is to throw more money at the problem. I find it interesting that like any top heavy corporation, about a third statistically of the teaching force in this country has opted out of teaching and moved into administration. That coupled with teachers being paid a greater amount to move into administration, unions getting their hands on the “pie”, and waste, the per capita cost of “educating” a student has gone through the roof. And still the education field wants more with less and less glowing results.

I’m not sure if this is being done on purpose or out of necessity because there have been for some time now families out of necessity having to have two wage earners in the family. Therefore send your kids to school. Families don’t sit down to dinner much anymore either. And that is where the first line of “teaching” and “educating” really begins. At meals. All meals. Then there are chores and homework that have fallen by the wayside as well. All in the name of what? More video, television, computers, what?

According to Chesterton and some of his works, the entire point of education is that it should give a person a set of standards, one, I believe, which should be incorporated, is critical thought. He makes the remarks that education should give a set of eternal standards that can be used to judge fugitive standards, i.e., critical thought in part. Modern education has no eternal philosophy, no eternal reference point. But the irony is that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. This is the same thing as saying that “the more doubtful we are about whether we have the truth, the more certain we are that we can teach it to children. The smaller our faith in doctrine, the larger our faith in doctors.”

And here is a man writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. “It is the great paradox of the modern world that at the very time when the world decided that people should not be coerced about their form of religion, it also decided that they should be coerced about their form of education.”

And again, “I think our coercive popular education has been uncommonly near a complete failure. Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not an education at all. The truth is that the modern world has committed itself to two totally different and inconsistent conceptions about education. It is always trying to expand the scope of education; and always trying to exclude from it all religion and philosophy. But this is sheer nonsense.”

It is obvious, and critical thought would tell us this if we were taught how to think critically, that a complete education could not possibly leave out, theology, religion and philosophy.

By giving up our children to public education, over to the experts, we have undermined the natural authority of the family. Chesterton in essence states that the man in the street is wholly at the mercy of the “academic priesthood”.

And from there is just gets worse. Why? Because the poor, who need a complete and in depth education suffer far more because they can’t afford classes where the ratio of a math teacher is one to five; or English, or….dare I say it….a class on critical thought. Chesterton says, “In the case of comparative poverty, which is the common lot of mankind, we come back to a general parental responsibility, which is the common sense of mankind. We also come back to the parent as the person in charge of education….If you exalt education, you must exalt the parental power with it. If you deprecate the parental power, you must deprecate education with it….Private education really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. The mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all sides of a single human soul.”

On an additional note by a writer, whom I have met personally and is a famous commentator on Chesterton, Dale Ahlquist, paraphrases Chesterton by adding, “’The human house is a paradox for it is larger inside than out.” When we step out of the home, when we pass from private life to public life, we are passing from a greater work to a smaller one, and from a harder work to an easier one. And that is why most modern people wish to pass from the great domestic task to the smaller and easier commercial one. They would rather be in the business world serving the minor needs of a hundred different people than meeting all the major needs of just one person, which includes serving meals, conversation, and moral support. They would rather teach a course in trigonometry to a hundred children than struggle with the whole human character of one child. Chesterton says that anyone ‘who makes himself responsible for one small baby, as a whole, will soon find that he is wrestling with gigantic angels and demons.’ While public education suffers from the conflicting problem of not enough teachers and yet too many specialists, the result is a lack of results. Children actually keep learning less and less. ‘To say that the moderns are half-educated may be too complimentary by half.’”

Ultimately, education is about truth. Not politically correct nonsense. It’s also about the three “R’s”. And how to think critically.