Americans tend to think that our schools shape our society, and that if we could just get education right, all else would follow. Actually, it may work the other way around. Societies tend to shape their schools, and right now the American public school is in many ways a receiver-in-bankruptcy for the rest of society, with all its crime, materialism, family breakdown and fadthink.
When it comes to fads in education, I`ve seen `em come and I`ve seen `em go: Social promotion. The PEP program. Self-esteem. Values Clarification. We Americans have always been big on labor-saving devices, and in education, we seem determined to save not only labor but thought.
All these fads seem to have a couple of things in common: They don`t last, and they emphasize form to the exclusion of content-a criticism that also has been made of the education of American teachers. The mills of Educanto, like those of God, grind slowly. But not, alas, exceeding fine.
The newest fad is Relevance. We`re told we need to make education more practical. But is it really the whole purpose of education to prepare the next generation for entry-level jobs? That seems to be the thrust of this year`s idea of educational reform. It reduces education to: You businessmen tell us the kind of worker you want, and we`ll mass-produce `em.
I`d like to make a case for irrelevant education-for what used to be called liberal education. I take my text from Jose Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher not known nearly well enough. He once delivered a series of lectures in which he devastated the historical theories of Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who is known entirely too well. In the course of his introduction Ortega tossed off this casual observation that, like so many of his, needs to be taken more than casually:
”. . . most educators, especially when inspired by an eagerness for the practical, think that what they must do with (students) is prepare them in the most concrete possible fashion for life as it is, leaving aside all disciplines and methods which seem merely ornamental, lavish or superfluous. But it is a fact that the condition of historic life is one of constant change. History is unending restlessness and mutation. So that if one educates a boy (or girl, I would add) by preparing him concretely for life as it is today, that boy will find, when grown to manhood, that life then wears another face, and that the more practically he was prepared for an earlier way of life, the less well adjusted will he be for the new present in which he must live and act. . . . (We are aiming) the new generation at a target which, when they reach it, will have been taken away and put somewhere else.”
We`re not only aiming at a moving target, but we have no way of knowing with any certainty which way it will move, so that the better we prepare students for our age, the more unprepared they may be for theirs.
The Spanish philosopher admired the way in which the English traditionally sent their students to study the classics, to live in the Age of Pericles, to dwell in a completely different time, so that they might be educated in the essentials, in pure abilities without specific application, in ancient languages and an archaic civilization. Given a completely impractical education, they made remarkably practical statesmen, explorers and scientists. Unprepared for anything in particular, they seem to have been prepared for everything in general. They had learned something about how to reason, how to behave, how to lead, how to live.
Lacking confidence in our values, we seek to substitute an empty pseudo-professionalism, complete with that wonderful pseudo-professional language that educationists can exchange without fear of saying anything.
By now we`ve been making education more relevant for decades. Earlier in our never-ending quest to be relevant, we drifted away from theoretical math, foreign languages, literature, history, art, music, and science. We switched to shorthand, typing, business English, business arithmetic, social studies . . . then, when it came time to compete with the Russians in space, we rushed to restore science, math and foreign languages to the curriculum. Having dropped geography some time ago, we`re now deep into adding Global Studies.
We might have saved ourselves many of these expensive changes and counter-changes if we had stuck to the classical, ”unreal,” ”impractical” disciplines that have always been at the core of a liberal education.
The more technological the world becomes, the more-not less-necessary it will be for all to have a liberal education. The very name means an education for the free. It`s not just the elite who vote (thank goodness) but everyone. If you`re dissatisfied with the quality of the political dialogue this presidential year-and who wouldn`t be?-it may be a reflection of what we now will accept in terms of thought and character. And without character, which is the last fruit of education, all other attainments may prove not only useless but positively destructive.
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