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Filling the Education Vacuum

by Christopher Chantrill
August 28, 2005 at 4:17 pm

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HERE WE are at back-to-school time, and all across the nation colleges are prodding our children into freshman orientation. Today, of course, that means catechizing the young into the religion of “anti-racism.” And instead of inducting our kids into the cult of Americanism, they humiliate them into the “cult of multiculturalism,” according to college senior Kevin Carter.

Humiliation? Isn’t that what they do at army boot camp and white-boy fraternity rushes? But humiliation is now at the center of modern freshman orientation. Kevin Carter’s began with a video on the Matthew Shephard killing and then a “lecture from a supposed expert on ‘hate.’” After a ritual humiliation of the white guys in the audience, it was back to the dorm “to break up into focus groups so that we could have a ‘dialogue’ on how to fight “‘hate.’” The freshman orientation turned out to be a bonding experience, but not in the way that the powers-that-be had intended. After it was over the white guys got together and angrily exchanged “offensive” jokes using “insensitive” language all night.

So the liberals are doing a good job at turning off white guys. Maybe that explains why boys don’t do well in high school, and are heading down towards 40 percent of the college student body.

But when our young boys are not moldering away in the bums-on-seats prison of liberal-run schooling they are putting enormous energy into their first-person shooter video games and into racing up the multiple learning curves of today’s networked world. Of course they are also wasting enormous amounts of time in internet chat rooms in the eternal search for “hot” babes. (Reckless prediction: they are building a subculture that will rival the baby boomers’ Sixties culture).

Why exactly do we condemn our children to all those years of bums-on-seats government education? Can’t we think of something better for our children to do? We used to. Back in the nineteenth century most children went to school for four or five years. Then they went to work. They had to, because their families needed the money. Anthony Drexel went to work as a clerk in his father’s ramshackle bank at age twelve. As an adult he taught rich-kid J. P. Morgan the banking business as senior partner in the firm of Drexel and Morgan.

Today, we don’t need the money. And because we can’t think of anything better for our children to do, we let them goof off in government warehouses for most of their childhood.

What exactly is education for? Back in the nineteenth century the elite wanted a top-down universal education to teach morals to the lower orders and lower the crime rate. Meanwhile the people built a bottom-up education in the three Rs to get their children out of the mill and the mine. Today the elite wants to grab our children and teach them to hate the Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse: Racism, Sexism, Classism, and Homophobia. We, the people of the twenty-first century, dislike the elite’s program, but not enough to put a stop to it.

Why are we pumping more and more money into a K-12 education system that delivers less and less? Why are we ratcheting up the subsidies for universities every year when most kids major in drink and sex—or “extracurriculars” according to recent Harvard grad Ross Douthat in The Atlantic? We do it because we don’t have a better idea.

It’s time for conservatives to fill up the educational vacuum. But let us rise above a shameful program of “reducing crime” or “anti-racism” that is really a mask for imposing our values on the rest of the nation. We are better than that. Let our program just be this. We don’t know how other parents ought to educate their children; that’s their business. But we demand, as an ancient and immemorial liberty, the right to educate our own children according to our lights.

What should our lights, our educational philosophy, be? We could start with the sensible ideas of mystery novelist (and Oxford educated) Dorothy L. Sayers in Education in a Free Society, ed. Anne Husted Burleigh. Brilliantly anglicizing advanced continental developmental child psychology into three Ages, “the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic,” she proposes a return to the medieval Trivium. The first stage, Grammar, matches the child’s Poll-Parrot Age when memorization is easy and pleasurable. The second stage is Dialectics and matches the child’s Pert Age, “characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to ‘catch people out.’” The final stage is Rhetoric and matches the Poetic Age, striving for independence, creativity, and finding a métier.

It would certainly be an improvement over today’s program of “anti-racism” and multiculturalism that seems to be arrested, like the left-wing blogosphere, in the adolescent Pert Age.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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