The myth of education. . .

I cannot speak for all time since my own experience is limited and my expertise is easily challenged so I shall only address the present as I have observed it.  There is education and then there is the myth of education.  My presumption is that the myth is a modern day phenomenon, especially given that access to educational institutions by the general populace is relatively recent in the grand survey of human history..  That does not mean to suggest that those who did not matriculate from institutions were not educated but that the myth that passes for education today is largely perpetuated by those same institutions.

There is today a bias toward the individual.  Whereas learning was once a process of diminishing the individual and his or her taste or preference or ideas in favor of that which is more established as fact, the reality is that those attending and those teaching tend to respect the individual "truth" of the student far more than institutions or other paths to education did in the past.  Education in both the formal and more casual sense of the term has come not to revolve around established fact or truth but around the individual person and their perception, preference, and identity.  Education has become a path more of self-discovery than of acquaintance with events, facts, and interpretations.  In fact, the job of educational institutions is to respect the quirks of the individual and provide a safe space for that individualism to exist without the challenge of inconvenient truths or facts.  The campuses of institutions once dedicated to challenging the opinions of the individual have now created spaces immune from such challenge when the student finds it all too threatening.

Along with the tilt toward the individual, there is also a corresponding loss of confidence in the facts that were once incontrovertible.  History, for example, is no longer a set of events and explanations but has been turned on end.  The modern values attached to diversity, inclusion, and equity have been read into the past and changed what we once knew with confidence to rewrite that history and to introduce question marks where periods once stood.  We are less interested in what happened than postulating why, less concerned with facts than interpretation, and much more willing to judge and interpret the past through the lens of modern values.  Columbus the heroic figure gave way to Columbus the interloper who began a history of atrocity and abuse of the now heroic indigenous tribes of the Americas.  As some tore down his statues, others remade him into the first of a long history of slavery that has now marked American history.  It is not that Columbus has been re-evaluated but that he has come under judgment by the court of modernity to be a heel rather than hero.  Again, the point here is not to defend him as hero but to see how the man and his accomplishments have been laid against another standard and how those values can diminish what he did or who he was in his own time.

What passes for education today readily substitutes the untried things of the present for those which generations before have lauded as worthy and noble.  Think here of literature.  Thirty years ago I noticed that the summer reading lists for my own kids included modern books published within the past few years but none of the "classics" that I had read in school and my parents before me.  In other words, the rejection of the past against the judgment of the present had rendered these works not only less significant but tainted and spoiled.  The summer reading that was once dominated by what were universally considered "great authors" and their "great works" were replaced by books churned out to fit the then modern themes of feminism, sexual liberation, depression, and drugs.  I read those books with my kids and found them painful to read, not only because the themes were so filled with despair and desperate people but because the writing was so poor.  There was little appeal to morality, right or wrong, or virtue against evil but plenty of justification for feelings, desires, and views that called into question what other times had concluded.  Most notably was a complete lack of religion.  One book on how a family dealt with death was absent of any mention of religion as a way of understanding of it or healing from its pain.  The penchant for the present has led to the unqualified rejection of what in the past had been the hallmarks of achievement.  While this is certainly truth for literature, it is no less true for other subjects as well. 

This all is true in the way science is treated as that which is most true of all -- except, of course, when it conflicts with other values.  Science as a discipline has always questioned the conclusions and insisted that they must be repeatable in order to be established and provable even against changing standards of evaluation.  Now science is spoken of as a conclusion and not a process of discovery that is adaptable to changing conclusions.  Evolution is judged incontrovertible yet the science that conflicts with multiple genders or the idea that a person chooses that gender is dismissed.  One science fits with the idea that life is random and spontaneous and the other science does not fit with the idea that gender is fluid.  Science is left to be the bastard child of the acceptable values of the day and the phrase follow the science has become a joke.

So education has become a myth.  It is not learning but indoctrination in a way far more perverse and dark than religion could ever have been accused of imparting.  The campuses of higher education have nearly all succumbed to this delusion and many schools with a religious history are not far behind.  Worse is that the high school has become infected and the federal purse strings have ensured that it remains so.  Now we are seeing just how far and how fast the elementary schools can be swept up into the myth of what passes for education.  The Church and her people would be wise to remember that it is better to be fools for Christ's sake than just fools.