For the reflecting conservative, the purpose of education is clear. That purpose is to develop the mental and moral faculties of the individual person, for the person’s own sake. Now this process of cultivating the mind and conscience of young people (here I speak of education in the sense of “schooling,” though it is quite true that self-education ought to continue most of any man’s or woman’s life) has certain lesser purposes and incidental benefits. One of these lesser aims is to instruct young people in the beliefs and customs which make possible a decent civil social order. Another of these lesser aims is the inculcation of certain skills and aptitudes which will help young people as they come to man’s estate. Yet another is the development of habits of sociability—teaching boys and girls how to take a normal part in society. And there are more purposes and benefits.
Yet the conservative does not forget that the essential aim, and the chief benefit, of formal education is to make people intelligent and good. Schools cannot, wholly by themselves, make people intelligent and good; natural inclinations or disinclinations, the family, and the community have a great deal to do with whether young people are wise or foolish, good or bad. But schools can help in the process. And if schools neglect this primary function in favor of vague schemes for “group play” or “personality unfolding” or “learning by doing” or “adjustment to the group” or “acquiring approved social attitudes,” then they have become bad schools.
The conservative always thinks first of the individual human person. What is bad for individuals cannot be good for society. And if most individual men and women are reasonably good and reasonably intelligent, the society in which they live cannot become a very bad one. Therefore—especially in this time which Ortega y Gasset calls “the mass-age,” this time in which standardization and various forms of collectivism threaten the whole concept of true individual personality—the conservative never ceases to emphasize that the school exists primarily to help improve the understanding and the moral worth of private persons. The school is not merely a custodial institution, to keep young people in a tolerable captivity while their parents are busy elsewhere. It is not merely a place where young people are taught how to make money in years to come. It is not merely a means for indoctrinating young people in certain approved social attitudes. No, it is something much more important: it is an institution for imparting a sound intellectual and moral discipline to the rising generation. The conservative is not afraid of the abused word “discipline.” Without discipline, men and women must spend their lives either in mischief or in idleness. The best form of discipline is self-discipline; and self-discipline, mental and ethical, is what the schools try to impart to students.
But to the modern radical who is faithful to his own first principles, formal education is something quite different from what the conservative thinks education should be. To the radical—communist, or fascist, or socialist, or any sort of radical ideologue—the school is an instrument of power. It is a means for indoctrinating the young with what the radical believes to be the concept of the good society. The school, in the radical’s opinion, exists to serve “society,” not primarily to serve the individual human person. And the scholar, in the radical’s opinion, ought not to waste his time searching fo Truth: instead, he ought to be preaching approved social doctrines to the young, or in advancing the class struggle, or in planning for a better world. The radical thinks of the school as a means for improving, or at least changing, society in the mass. To the modern radical, the very idea of encouraging the development of private talents merely for the sake of private character is annoying. He thinks of the school as a means of advancing toward some form of collectivism. He cannot see the trees for the forest. The private person, and the private person’s reason, are very little to him; the amorphous masses are everything.
Now of course there are persons of radical political views among us today who do not embrace the radical theory of education that I have suggested above. But these are inconsistent radicals, just as there are inconsistent conservatives. If the only real object of life is the material betterment of the masses, presumably to be accomplished through the establishment of equality of condition, then there is no point in encouraging development of strong private opinions and strong individual minds. What collectivism requires is not strong personalities and a high degree of private culture, but rather unquestioning conformity to the secular dogmas of collectivism. The more consistent and forthright radical educators, like Professor Theodore Brameld, confess this truth and urge us to convert the schools into propaganda devices for teaching the doctrines that “everybody belongs to everybody else” and that one person is as good as another, or maybe a little better. Quite candidly, they call themselves Social Reconstructionists—educators who would employ the schools to build a new collectivistic society. They intend to break down all the old beliefs and loyalties, through the process of educating the young, and to supplant these old beliefs and loyalties with artificially cultivated attachment to collectivistic doctrines. Some of them would teach “the religion of democracy,” to replace the religious convictions in which nearly all schools had their origins. They do not want reverent or inquiring minds; they desire only submissive and uniform minds.
When such theories as these are baldly presented to the American public, that public promptly rejects them. But what the American public has not yet rejected is something more subtle, less candid, and—in the long run—perhaps as dangerous: the educational notions of the late John Dewey. Sound sense and fallacy are blended in Dewey’s theories, but the fallacies have become almost official educational dogma in our country, while the sound sense either has been forgotten or has lost its significance because of altered social circumstances. Dewey desired the state schools to become a means for making the American population homogeneous. Hostile toward traditional religion (though sometimes giving it lip-service of sorts), he hoped that a thoroughgoing and aggressive secularism in the schools would take the place of the religious concepts which have been the foundation of American morals and politics. Hostile toward the works of the higher imagination, he proposed to substitute “group endeavor” and “learning by doing” for the literary studies and intellectual disciplines which had given American education its established character.
Dewey’s theories and influence cannot be examined in detail here; they have been intelligently criticized in recent years by Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, Professor Arthur Bestor, Mr. Mortimer Smith, Mr. Albert Lynd, Dr. Gordon Keith Chalmers, and others. What I am trying to do is to suggest the attitude toward formal education which the intelligent conservative ought to take. The intelligent conservative combines a disposition to preserve with an ability to reform. And our schools need reform most pressingly. Despite all the talk about “education for democracy,” they seem to be educating for mass-submission; dreary secular indoctrination is substituted for the inquiring mind. The Republic cannot long survive if its citizens are incapable of apprehending general ideas, or even of reading and writing; and the failure of our schools—and, to a considerable extent, of our universities and colleges—has brought us to just that pass. Many college graduates today cannot write a simple letter as well as a sixth-grade student would have written it fifty years ago.
So the conservative believes that we ought to say less about “group dynamics” and “social reconstruction” in our schools, and do more to restore the old and indispensable disciplines of reading, writing, mathematics, the sciences, imaginative literature, and history. He thinks that we need to bring back definite “subject-matter” courses and abolish vague catch-ails like “social studies” (taught as a single amorphous course) and “communications.” He thinks that our colleges and universities could profit greatly by a return to humane learning—to the real humanities, those disciplines designed to teach ethical understanding and develop the higher imagination; they ought to redeem themselves from an excessive vocationalism, from a mistaken eagerness to attract students which gives everyone a degree but no one an education, and from a false specialization. Alfred North Whitehead remarked once that the ancient philosopher aspired to teach wisdom, but that the modern professor aspires only to teach facts. Isolated facts, the conservative thinks, do not constitute an education; and vague sentiments and “approved social attitudes” have still less to do with the true educational process. For what the Republic requires is a citizenry endowed with a knowledge of the wisdom of our ancestors, and a respect for that wisdom; a citizenry endowed with the ability to form opinions and make judgments. And what the truly human person requires is a grasp of those genuine disciplines of the mind which make it possible for him to become, in the full sense, a reasoning being. An “educational” system which does less than this is not educational at all, but only a propaganda-apparatus in the service of the state.
With the medieval schoolmen, the conservative is of the opinion that we moderns are dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants—able to see further than our intellectual ancestors only because we are supported by the great bulk and strength of their achievement. If we spurn the wisdom of our ancestors, we tumble down into the ditch of ignorance. Lacking the old disciplines which inculcated ethical principles and encouraged the ordered imagination, any people sink into a cultural decline; and they are liable to become the victims of any clever clique of unprincipled manipulators.
Yet, despite all these faults in twentieth-century American education, the conservative knows that our system possesses still some considerable merits. Conspicuous among those virtues is the diversity and competition surviving among our educational institutions. We have not merely state schools, but a large number of private and church-supported schools; and the conservative approves this healthy variety. Disciples of Dewey like Dr. James Conant urge us to sweep away private and parochial establishments and force the whole population into a common mode of schooling, completely secularized and intended to “teach democracy.” The conservative sets his face against such arrogant proposals. On the contrary, he thinks we are fortunate in escaping the deadening influence of uniformity in the educational process. He is glad that we have not merely state universities, but old endowed private universities of high reputation, hundreds of private and church-sponsored colleges, opportunity for experiment, and freedom of choice among professors and students. If a nation desires intellectual vitality and originality, it will encourage this variety; if it is resigned to stagnation and secular conformity, however, a nation will embrace the uniformity-designs of Dewey and Conant.
Centralization of any sort is suspect to the conservative; and centralization of the educational establishment is one of the most dangerous forms of centralization. It is with marked hostility, then, that the conservative looks upon proposals for federal subsidies to the public schools. The man who pays the fiddler calls the tune, the conservative knows; and, besides, education is more vigorous when it is supported by local endeavor. The only very valuable piece of information to come out of the White House Conference on Education, in 1955, was the conclusion that no state in the Union is unable to bear its own educational responsibilities. Private citizens, local communities, and the several states, the conservative knows, are the best judges of their own educational needs and interests. When he is approached with proposals for consolidation and unification, he shrewdly suspects that somewhere in the dim background of these proposals is someone’s Grand Design for employing the schools as a tool for turning society inside out. And the conservative has no intention of turning society inside out. He thinks that to abuse the schools for such a purpose would be to corrupt education. The natural function of formal education is conservative, in the best sense of that word: that is, formal education conserves the best of what has been thought and written and discovered in the past, and by a regular discipline teaches us to guide ourselves by the light of the wisdom of our ancestors.
A Scottish friend of mine writes to me of the confused notions that curse our age: “People seem to accept premises that have been rejected by the wise through all the ages, and there is a horrible ominous throbbing in the air like the sound of countless trotters on the cliff-head at Gadara.” All the good places and people, he continues, are being sacrificed “not to a candid malevolence but to unbearably specious cant.” Unbearably specious cant characterizes much of what passes for education among us nowadays. One of the works of conservative reform most urgently needed is a return to right reason, a restoration of honorable disciplines in education. And the first step in this reform must be a recognition of the enduring principle that education is intended for the elevation of the mind and conscience of the individual human person. It is not intended to be a toy for radical doctrinaires to play with, nor yet to be a great sham affording profit and prestige to what Mr. David Riesman calls “the patronage network of Teachers’ College, Columbia University.” The conservative respects the works of the mind; the radical, in our age, seems to be smugly content with cant and slogan.