This Was Their Finest Hour . . .

Education: the Vanity of Vanities of the Modern World

Name any social problem you like. Ask any person or group what needs to be done to correct the problem, and within five minutes education will be offered as the solution. We call this the fallacy of reductio ad educatum.

Reductio ad educatum reduces all social issues, problems, immoral or criminal behaviour—virtually every human need or failing—to the lack of education as the fundamental cause of the problem. But, a necessary corollary provided by reductio ad educatum is that, if education were to be provided, then the problem would be lessened, if not fixed. At that point all discussion comes to an end, the argument is over, agreement and consensus is reached, and the protagonists can move on to other matters.

In fact, society in general could be saved an awful lot of time and effort if it developed a quick short-cut. We should all be taught from pre-school onwards that whenever a human problem is introduced, everyone should stand, face Wellington, and intone “education”. Everyone could then nod and move on to better things at hand.

We see reductio ad educatum in use everywhere. It is so pervasive that no-one even gives it a second thought any more. Are people foolish in their investment choices? The government and the finance industry proposes a financial literacy educational programme. Is the nation becoming too obese? Education units on diet within schools will fix the problem. Are too many people drinking and driving? We will educate them into better behaviour by a nationwide advertising campaign. Are too many people graduating from our schools unable to read and write? Yes, wait for it—we will solve that problem, too, with more education. What ten years of formal schooling have been unable to inculcate we will solve by raising the leaving age and providing yet more schooling.

Reductio ad educatum is an amazingly useful and helpful fallacy. Firstly, it is almost universal in its application. Regardless of the problem, more education seems to be a relevant and powerful solution.

Secondly, it allows people to convey the depth of their social concern, while neatly removing any responsibility from their own shoulders. To call for more education is always some else's problem.

Thirdly, it has the advantage of appearing profound. Criticizing a dearth of knowledge has the patina of seeing into the depths and roots of the thing, rather than treating with superficialities.

Fourthly, in a world where it is virtually universally believed that human beings are at root and origin morally upright, reductio ad educatum fits right in with the dominant and prevailing religion. Are people acting wrongly, foolishly, stupidly? It is not because there is some moral lack or inadequacy within them. It must be simply because they do not have sufficient information. We can be certain that if they did have the correct information they would act properly, since all men are, at root, responsible and morally upright. Given even half a chance, everyone will respond and do the right thing.

Fifthly, it is very useful in that it provides a veneer of pity and compassion on the part of the protagonist. It removes all (inappropriate) moral guilt, blame or responsibility from the person or class or group that is the problem under discussion; it substitutes a paternalistic concern for the well being of these fellow citizens. “Poor fellows, if only they had better education, they would be so much better,” and so forth.

Sixthly, it introduces the appropriate guilt sentiments into the discussion. Society is to blame. Society has failed “them”. Society have not provided sufficient information or education.

Seventhly, the argument appears powerful and conclusive, even self-evident. However, we do acknowledge that, strangely enough, the self-evidence of reductio ad educatum tends to be held only amongst the educated. Those who have been educated and have benefited from it seem to be the only one's for whom reductio ad educatum is self-evidently true.

Finally, reductio ad educatum offers hope. Whatever the problem it most surely and infallibly can be fixed. The remedy lies at hand.

In all the field of human endeavour, never has so much been done by so many at such great cost for such poor results and outcomes as in the field of education. Surely, future generations will look back and say, “This was their finest hour.”

Why is reductio ad educatum a fallacy? It is fallacious because in the vast majority of issues and cases education, or the lack of it, is of little relevance to the problem at hand. All too often lack of education is a symptom, not a cause, of far deeper problems. But the deeper problems have to do with the inflexion points of culture, society, and personality. They cannot be resolved or changed easily. There is no ready solution to hand.

My father used to tell me that although I could lead a horse to water, I could not make him drink. Mmmm. Just as well we no longer depend upon horses. But the point being made was that the provision of an external circumstance (in this case, education) is in itself insufficient. The proposed recipient has to partake—willingly—if there was to be any benefit.

Let us consider formal schooling as an example. Actually, this is not a bad example because if ever, one would imagine, there was an institution where the proof of the education pudding could be demonstrated it would be in schools. Education, after all, is the stock-in-trade of schools. If all human problems could be solved by more education, one would expect that the evidence and proof would be seen on every hand in the schools.

But what do we see? Au contraire, we find that long before children turn up at school the vast majority have already been conditioned to a certain outcome. That conditioning will determine whether they drink the waters of education and knowledge, or whether they will stand at the trough and be made to go through the motions, without ever drinking in a drop. This preconditioning makes a large slice of the population impervious to education.

Edward Banfield has written compellingly on the subject:

[The] idea of what the schools should do contrasts strangely with the account sociologists give of what they do in fact. According to this account, the school does not liberate the child from his class culture but instead confines him in it even more securely—it thickens the walls that separate him from the rest of society. The child has absorbed the elements of his class culture long before reaching school; what the school does is to “socialize” him into it more fully and to make him more aware of the differences that separate him and his kind from others. The child has “picked up” from parents and playmates an outline map of his universe, and the main features of it—the continents, so to speak—cannot be changed by anything that is said or done in school. At best, teachers can only help the child to fill in certain empty spaces on the map he brings with him to school. If the map is extremely crude or wildly inaccurate, teachers and textbooks can be of little help. . . .

How, it may be asked, can this claim that the school furthers the socialization of a child into his class culture be reconciled with the familiar fact that in America the schools are and always have been a principal vehicles of upward mobility? The answer is that the children who are stimulated into mobility in schools are the ones whose initial class culture permits or encourages—perhaps even demands—mobility. The more nearly upper class the child's initial culture, the more susceptible he is to being “set in motion” by the school. At the other end of the continuum, the lower-class child's culture does not even recognize—much less value—the possibility of rising or, rather, of doing those things, all of which require some sacrifice of present for future gratification, without which rising is impossible. The lower-class child's conceptual universe lacks the dimension of time; in such a universe, people rarely try to change things.
Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little Brown and Co, 1974), p. 158,9

Banfield characterises the lower-class mentality as one of instant gratification and the inability to sacrifice present benefits for a longer term, greater good. The essence of education requires just such a sacrifice—to work hard, now, in the present, with little or no tangible reward or pay out, for the sake of a perceived longer term benefit. If the child does not have that life-duty and life-attitude inculcated into them by the time they arrive at school, it is unlikely they will ever succeed.

Educationalists, of course, have come to realise this. They have adopted two key strategies, supported now by a credulous state. Firstly, they have sought to “get hold of the child” at a younger age. Pre-schools have been promoted as a key strategy to counteract the preconditioning the child would otherwise pick up from their whanau and immediate social group. The intent is to give younger children the “right” preconditioning that would inoculate them against the attitude that make them subsequently impervious to education.

Secondly, educationalists have responded by trying to make education an experience which provides instant gratification as much as possible. “Learning is play.” “Learning is fun.” They tell us that if you don't make it both play and fun, children will “turn off” education quickly. You mean, more quickly. For to learn anything that will generate lasting and future benefits you have to deny yourself immediate gratification and work hard—and in the very nature of the case the more focused upon immediate feedback you are, the more impervious you become to learning anything.

Sesame Street was a grand experiment and a naive idea which proved this to be the case. The idea was to get children in the ghetto via television before their culture got to them. So, four times a week, children were exposed to fun-learning. Guess what. The under class children had fun and enjoyed Sesame Street. Then they went to school and subsequently dropped out. Nothing changed. They had, at the very youngest ages, merely fitted Sesame Street into their preconditioned world-view of instant gratification—in this case, entertainment and fun. When education required hard work, they gave it away. Their inherited culture would not permit them to take it up.

Banfield concludes:

If the view taken here is correct, there would seem to be a fundamental incompatibility between the outlook of the lower-class pupil, who is present-oriented, and that of the school, which is . . “an institution where every item in the present is finely linked to a distant future, and in consequence there is no serious clash of expectations between the school and the middle-class child.

The lower-class child, by contrast, is concerned mainly with the present; his social structure, unlike that of the middle-class child, provides little incentive or purposeful support to make the methods and ends of the school personally meaningful. The problems of discipline and classroom control result not from isolated points of resistance or conflict but from the attempt to reorient a whole pattern of perception with its emotional counterpart.”
Ibid, p. 165,6

Hence reductio ad educatum is fallacious insofar as education per se is utterly incapable of producing any lasting change whatsoever—unless the recipients already have the psychological, spiritual, and cultural preconditions to make it successful. Education is the baking soda; it is not the cake.

There are other institutions in our modern societies which virtually ensure that the lower class mentality of instant gratification is ineradicable in the foreseeable future, consequently dooming public education to widespread failure. For example, social welfare and the fortnightly benefit payments have the effect of locking in and constantly reinforcing the instant gratification culture. Lotteries—state supported, sanctioned, and promoted—encourage people to look to instant transformation from indigence to maximal consumption. The gambling industry is a massive cargo cult, reinforcing the lower class mentality.

This leads us to a counter intuitive concept: we tend to assume that the lower classes will reduce over time. In fact this is not the case. The lower class mentality is moving up town as the culture of instant gratification takes hold and spreads. This is understandable as so many social institutions now reflect and play the tunes of instant gratification.

Is there any hope for the lower classes? No. At least certainly not within the realms of education and all its attendant social programmes. Our belief is that only a widespread return to the Christian faith amongst the lower classes will be sufficient to effect the necessary change. Only God, through Christ's great works on our behalf, can give the lower class a future and a hope, that will take them out of themselves to live for Another and His glory, not their own pleasures.

And when that happens—as it most surely will in time—education can and will be an enormously effective ally. Without it, education remains a vanity of vanities.