We don't need no education

What's the point of education anyway?

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Over the last few months I’ve been feeling more and more sympathy with Pink Floyd’s famous song:

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
… Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!

Over the past few years, as I’ve been thinking about all that’s wrong with the country and the world, every avenue seems to lead back to education in some way. The way we teach children reflects our priorities and goals as a society. Our hopes and aspirations, as well as our problems and weaknesses - all of these things play into what’s happening in education. This is why education is such a key battleground for the ‘woke’.

While all this has been going on, my eldest daughter has reached the age where we now have to seriously consider which secondary school she goes to. This is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak - I’m not thinking about what is right in general, but about what is right for my own family.

What I’ve been finding is that my problems with the education system run so deep at the moment that it’s difficult to know where to begin. When you start asking the question ‘why?’ about a topic like education — why do we do it this way rather than that? Could we do it better? — you can just run and run. I appreciate that no system is perfect, and there are always going to be flaws in any system. At the same time, I feel that things are so bad at the moment they are ripe for rebuilding from first principles.

What I want to do over the coming weeks and months is to think through the topic of education more deeply. In this introductory post I want to think about why we educate children - what is it we’re trying to achieve. Once we’ve thought about that, we’ll be in a better place to evaluate the problems with the education system as it stands at the moment.

Why educate?

One of the things I’ve become aware of over the last few years is that so many things in our society seem to run as they used to some years ago without any real thought as to why they are run that way. It’s as if all the thought has drained away and we are left with the shell of a system which once was trying to accomplish something. All the structures are still there, but no-one really has a coherent vision for why they are there and what they’re supposed to be doing. I believe this is true for many areas in society at the moment - for example, I wrote earlier this year about how democracy itself has become a kind of box-ticking exercise, empty of its principles. Education is no different.

What are we trying to achieve by sending children and young adults to school for a huge proportion of their lives? What are we as a society trying to achieve?

Let’s start with this definition from the CiRCE institute:

EDUCATION is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty. It should be distinguished from training (for a career), which is of eternal value but is not the same thing as education.

I found the CiRCE Institute through John Anderson’s interview with Andrew Kern, which I can highly recommend.

Isn’t that an amazing definition? Let’s go through it bit by bit.

“The cultivation of wisdom and virtue”. Straight away we are talking about words with a moral foundation. “Wisdom” is a wonderful word: in the Bible, it means not simply the knowledge of facts or information, but how to live rightly (that is, morally or righteously) in this world. The Biblical book of Proverbs famously says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. We find wisdom in how we live in God’s world in God’s ways. Children, first and foremost, need more than factual information - they need guidance in how they should live. This is wisdom.

Its companion is virtue. Virtue is found in Colossians 3:14, “over all these virtues put on love…” Paul has just been talking about the qualities of Christians, e.g. compassion, kindness, and so on. In other words, being someone of good character as well as doing what is right. If you put wisdom and virtue together, what you have is the whole package of knowing about the world, being able to tell right from wrong, and being someone of integrity who is able to act rightly.

The definition goes on: “by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty.” In other words, the goal of education is not to transfer information per se, but by bringing people to things which are themselves true, good, and beautiful, they will come to recognise it. For example, we recognise what is good and beautiful in the arts by seeing examples of things which are good and beautiful. Education is about helping children young people to flourish in the way God made them, by helping them to understand what is already good, beautiful and true in the world.

I appreciate there’s much more to say here — I really like the definition that they give and I think it’s a solid foundation to build on. But let’s leave it there for the moment and turn to think about education as it stands today.

The state of education at the moment

If you’re reading this, I expect I don’t need to convince you of the problems in education. Not only are we nowhere near the definition of education that the CiRCE institute came up with above, but there are more and more problems in the educational system.

There are, of course, many problems we could mention — far too many to go into here. However, broadly speaking, I believe there are two fundamental problems which underpin the others.

Firstly, education is not at all focussed on cultivating wisdom and virtue - education today is almost entirely about skills and the transfer of information. Character is an afterthought. Of course, character cannot be ignored completely in teaching: the other day I was chatting to a teacher at a local secondary school who said he had to focus on ‘crowd control’ first and teaching second! Teaching, without adequate behaviour (i.e. character) is simply impossible. All teachers have to deal with character to some extent - and that’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem. But it seems to me that the majority of state schools see character as a kind of side hustle - it’s only necessary insofar as children are causing a problem. If they’re not being disruptive, they have nothing to teach them. They don’t have anything positive to teach children about character.

One of the things that the CiRCE website mentions is the way that education without a core of virtue and wisdom devolves into pragmatism - that is, teaching things purely because they are thought to work, rather than out of any principle. For example, teaching children to read without going to to teach them what’s worth reading and about some of the great works of literature. (It goes without saying that there is a vast amount of classical and modern literature which could be ‘beautiful, good, and true’).

There is a kind of moral vacuum at the heart of modern education - it’s focussed on skills and facts, but lacks any coherent moral vision.

The second major problem with education is the one which I think is more insidious. I’ve only become aware of it more recently. I believe that education today doesn’t simply suffer the problem of a moral vacuum, but is actively being used to further the agenda of powerful people / organisations. They are not simply mistaken, but they are actively being used to try and shape society in a particular direction. There are several strands to this, and I don’t have time to go through them all now. However, it seems to me that education as it is now serves the interests of many groups - except those of the parents and children.

Let me give a few examples of what I mean:

• Why should children go to school from age four, and continue til age sixteen (or eighteen)? Who does it benefit? If children go to school for a substantial proportion of their childhood, it means that they don’t need to be looked after at home - so mums can go to work. Perhaps this is part of the intention - it serves corporate interests to have mums back to work rather than at home, teaching and looking after children.

• Many people involved in education now do have a kind of moral centre - only, it’s a moral centre I fundamentally disagree with. It’s worse than a moral vacuum - it’s a different kind of morality, one which is at odds with Christianity. There are teachers who see it as their moral duty to impose these new values on children. One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read was from a woman who quit teacher training, describing what she had witnessed one of her lecturers say:

“We cannot change the laws,” the lecturer told his disciples, “but we can control what happens in our classrooms.”

• One of the people who I think has had some fascinating insights into education over the last few years is David Goodhart. His book “The Road to Somewhere” was hugely helpful to me in thinking through why we seemed so divided as a society. One of the things he raised in the book was why the graduate class seem so disconnected from non-graduates. What I’ve come to realise over the years is that universities have come to be a kind of social engineering tool - I believe that universities are now essentially compliance factories for the prevailing orthodoxy. They train young people to accept what the ‘experts’ are told, rather than to think for themselves. Sadly, I think schools are now like this as well.

Let me reiterate: the way education is setup at the moment benefits certain interest groups - such as the government and big corporations - but in general does not benefit children or families. This is a total inversion of the way things should be!

There’s one final problem I wanted to mention.

Secular education

Of all the things I don’t like about the education system at the moment, the worst thing is the way that it has become so secular. A couple of weeks ago, we went to the open evening of a local high school. It’s a good school and we enjoyed the visit. One of the things which really struck home with me, however, was the RE class. I went into the humanities department, and they had a classroom set up to talk about RE. On a table there were artefacts from different religions. The teacher there said that they taught “mostly Christianity but six different religions”. And there it was: for this school, ‘religion’ was relegated to a fairly small and insignificant subject. And Christianity itself was simply one option amongst several.

One of the things I’ve been realising over the last few weeks, as we’ve been going through Os Guinness’ book The Gravedigger Files on the podcast, is the way that Christians have been slowly but surely excluded from public life. Secularism, privatisation and pluralisation have eaten away at public life until there’s nothing of Christianity left. You can see this very much in schools. Things were pretty bad when I was at school back in the 90s, but I believe it’s even worse today.

I believe that things are not going to change unless we as Christians take a stand and say “Christ must be at the centre of everything - not just our own lives, but in publci life - the state, the government, education, etc.” Of course, we can’t change the state, we can’t change the way that education is - but we can seek to ensure that our own children are educated in the way that God wants us to.

This is why I am thinking seriously about education, and why I am going to be returning to this topic over the coming weeks and months.

Please do chip in and let me know your thoughts - do comment below, and please share this post with anyone you think might appreciate it!