Heart of education. . .

There seems to be two minds in education today.  One path seeks to educate people for pragmatic purpose, to raise up technicians with skills that sell.  This has been going on for a very long time and is nothing new by any means.  In this view, education must be judged most of all by its ability to prepare its students for real life, that is, for work.  Business and industry certainly love the idea that the job of the school and teacher is to impart life skills that are marketable and employable.  The other path seems to believe that the job of education is to unfold the flourishing of the self, to help the student get in touch with himself or herself, complete with feelings, desires, wants, and thoughts.  In this view, education helps the student get in touch with the real self and is rather personal and individual.  We hear about this kind of educational thought among those who would believe a school should not threaten the student with thoughts or opinions that would contradict the student's own held truth.  Such schools are safe places where nary a challenging or opposing view is encountered.

Small, though growing, is the resurgence of the older idea of education.  Whether you call this a classical or liberal arts education, it is not at all a repristination of old ideas once fostered in Greco-Roman history.  Rather, this view has as its starting point the belief that the present is inextricably tied to the past.  If you wanted a phrase to summarize it, the heart of this view of education is that it is the education of the heart.  The point and purpose here is not to impart simple facts or skills but a worldview with morality among its chief values.  To find out more about this, you might read Edith Hamilton's 1942 book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes which is still a key book in the renaissance of classical education in America.  There was a time it mattered little the trajectory of the child's future -- all children read the great classics in literature, were given a grounding in the history of Western Civilization, taught language and rhetoric, even Latin along with math.  So farmer or teacher or banker or preacher, the school provided more than mere technical skills and certainly something different than a place for self-realization.

Wisdom is acquired by extracting the lesson of history within the framework of the Greco-Roman foundations of Western Civilization according to the Judeo-Christian witness of faith and morality.  In our cancel culture world, this is not quite what most schools or most educators believe.  Whether it is the consequence of abandoning the classical and liberal arts ideas of education or not, we have never found ourselves today with the problem of raising over-educated children.  Schools are failing just as their time is being co-opted by social concerns and experiments trying to fix what they found missing in the home or to counter the work of the parents instilling instead progressive ideals.  It is not merely for the sake of religion or particular creed but also for the maintenance of the republic that education matters.  As so many others have said, unless we can regain control of education, the last best hope for America may well be lost as we forget what it means to be classically trained within a liberal arts curriculum to produce informed, responsible, and self-controlled citizenry.