The importance of education

The pervading and unrelenting tension in American pedagogy for the last one hundred-plus years essentially has come down to one question: what is the purpose of education? This set the stage for an intense face-off between America’s two competing premier educational philosophies: the classical view versus the progressive version.

The classical model was deemed the tried-and-true model; synonyms were academic, traditional, scholastic or general while its advocates were called classicists or essentialists. Conversely, the progressive model was deemed the up-to-date model; synonyms were modern, industrial, utilitarian or natural while the advocates were called progressives or experientalists. 

The classical approach, tracing back to the Greeks and Romans as well as the Jews and Christians, involved the systematic study of the historic arts and sciences.  The Latin word arts meant skill, craft or ability, while the Latin word scientia meant knowledge or body of knowledge. In this framework, the arts developed intellectual skills while the sciences delivered intellectual content (food for thought). The thinking arts included the language arts, fine arts and liberal (liberating) arts while the thinking sciences included the natural sciences as well as the formal and technical sciences.

Altogether, they convened a passionate pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty, casting an expansive vision of what it meant to be fully human through a concerted transmission of the wisdom of the ages. It was not opposed to the practical merits of job-training, only with being considered synonymous to or replaced by the same.

The progressive model launched “student-centered” learning and what was called “natural” education. Championed by three pivotal philosophers – 18th Century Frenchman Jean Jacques-Rousseau, 19th Century Englishman Herbert Spencer and 20th Century American John Dewey – progressive education disparaged “bookish” learning and denounced teacher-directed classrooms as elitist and authoritarian. It promoted what it deemed a freer, more joyful approach of letting student interest drive the educational endeavor. With Rousseau and Spencer as the forebears and Dewey as the facilitator, the child-centered movement was born. 

So the struggle began between the historic approach and the modern approach, the old school versus the new school. And the central conflict boiled down to one thing … the purpose of education itself.

The reason this matters is because (as logic teaches us) errant assumptions always lead to aberrant conclusions. When the purpose of education is misunderstood or redefined, the consequences will always be adverse, for both the student and society. 

When pragmatic impulses take over, academic integrity gets compromised and learning eventually gets dumbed down. Children get pushed through the system and a vacuum is created that gets filled by every educational fad imaginable. Eventually radical ideologies emerge, destroying any semblance of what a robust education looks like within a democratic republic. 

In short, when education loses its anchor, a spirit of anti-intellectualism begins to grip both our students and our country. As our children swim in the ocean of pop youth culture, without something deeper and more substantive to hold on to, they will drown. 

Moreover, when schools lose their intellectual and moral compass, the educational enterprise gets hijacked by nefarious, agenda-driven forces, and schools eventually become subversive, government-controlled vehicles that ultimately end up conflicting with more rooted institutions, like home and church. 

So what is the purpose of education? It can be summed up essentially in four words: to learn to think – learning a lot so they can think a little and learning from others so they can think for themselves. That has been the purpose of education for over a thousand years, which is why 19th Century American educator William Mowry rightly called the local community schoolhouse a “brain factory.” It has only been in the last one hundred years that the progressive model has shifted the paradigm and redefined the purpose, and they have been experimenting with our kids ever since. 

Louis Pasteur said, “chance favors the trained mind.” Classical education reminds us that the best way to train the mind will always be through the arts and the sciences. With this conviction, the classical model takes on a more expansive educational vision; apart from it, the progressive model promotes a much more restrictive and limited view. 

In addition, classical education contends that a student’s thoughts have to be grounded in good soil (truth and wisdom) before they can bear good fruit (virtue and character), which brings us to the heart of the conflict: underneath the tension between both models is an inescapable clash of worldviews. The one says there is a transcendent authority, the other says we are that transcendent authority. The one espouses freedom of religion, its adversary espouses freedom from religion. The one views human beings as fundamentally flawed, the other sees them as inherently good. The one worldview claims parents are the owners of our schools, its opposite sees the state as the owner. 

The one says truth is absolute, meaning there are some things in life that are absolutely and always true, for all people in all places at all times. The other says truth is relative, so we each decide for ourselves what is true and false, which means we each decide for ourselves what is good and bad, and therefore, what is right and wrong. 

From America’s conception up until the early 1900’s, there was a consistent and universal consensus regarding what schools were supposed to do and why they existed. Through the arts and sciences, classical education not only frees the mind, it opens it. Its antithesis does the exact opposite.  With a choice of this magnitude, we’re left with two questions: (1) Which model should Wyoming embrace? and (2) Who rightly should decide the answer?     

Brian Schroeder is the former Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, an ordained minister and founder/president of The ChrisCorps Association (bschroeder081858@gmail.com)