Can Education Be Saved, Part II

Intractable Problems

In the previous post, we argued that there is a cluster of serious issues facing schools in the current state education system which can be fixed. They are problems which are remedial.

But underlying the modern Athenian state education system is a religious ideology which reflects the very essence of Athens itself. These things Athens cannot change without denying its very existence. These things make the decline and ossification of the modern state compulsory secular education appear inevitable in the longer run.

There are at least four malignant cancer tumours within the system.

1. Egalitarianism. The Athenian ideology of rights based equality is so deeply held and believed that it is inconceivable that it will ever be changed without the dismantling of Athens itself. In education, rights based equality insists that everyone not only has a right to the process of education, but also that graduates have a right to achievement. Everyone must be a winner; everyone must achieve; everyone must be affirmed.

The idea that failure is absolutely necessary to sustainable education is a concept so foreign to the ethos of Athens that it is now almost blasphemous even to contemplate. Nevertheless, it remains true. If you do not have failure within the school system, you do not have educational standards, which is to say you do not have a recognised body of knowledge into which pupils are to be educated. Failure to learn and grasp the required corpus must result in failure. Without such failure you cannot sustain an education system, because in the end there is no defined corpus of knowledge, information, or truth in which to be educated.

When it comes to educating a child there are two basic limitations. One is the child's intellectual or academic ability. The second is the child's attitudes and character. On the assumption that some children are more intellectually able than others, and that some (for whatever reason) are less committed to education than others, failure to achieve a set standard by some is inevitable. It is also necessary if standards are to be maintained.

Modern Athens, however, sees such failure as a violation of egalitarian non-discrimination rights. The only way it can respond is to lower or adapt or inflate, or broaden achievement standards so that everyone can be affirmed an achiever.

2. Anti-family ideology and practice; the crumbling of the family unit. There are attitudes and disciplines, outlooks and mentalities which are learned by pupils long before they ever go to school. These attitudes and mores arise out of the family circumstances of each child. These conditioning factors will determine not only how the child will respond to schooling, but also will eventually dictate to Athenian schools how and what pupils are to be taught. Absolutely central is the view of the future.

The essence of the process of education is a willingness and commitment to sacrifice in the present in order to achieve an advantage in the future. Without that, education quickly deteriorates into gratuitous entertainment in a vain attempt to keep a child engaged. The attitudes to the future, time frame horizons, sacrifice in the present for longer term advantage—or their opposites, are not in the first place taught by parents to infants—they are caught. These values and attitudes are communicated inarticulately to pre-school children in a thousand different ways, so that by the time the child attends school, it is too late. The attitudes are largely set.

As families in Athens crumble; as families become more mixed, or solo, or confused; as attitudes and actions arising from broken families get repeated and exacerbated down through generations, the situation worsens. Increasingly, children of such families are found to be unable to be educated--and their numbers are rising rapidly. But Athens cannot avoid policies and laws, actions and dictates which assail the family and break it down. Rights based egalitarianism makes the nuclear family no worse or better than a family consisting of two lesbians and a budgie.

The temporary and transient nature of family and living "arrangements" that is a direct consequence of Athenian rights-based equality increasingly consigns children to a life of brutish, uneducable ignorance.

3. Crumbling of epistemology and resulting curriculum detritus. Athens is caught in the vortex of a deep uncertainty over the truth itself. It is increasingly suffering a crisis over what should be taught. Is literature to be found in Shakespeare or Facebook? Fundamentally, Athens cannot answer that question in any authoritative way.

Athens is a religious society built upon the “principle” of radical universal metaphysical chaos. The only reason man exists is because of brute chance. Moreover, all that exists must, by definition, exclude the Living God who created all things out of nothing. Therefore, everything is radically contingent, uncertain, and without any absolute significance or meaning.

In a world which cannot have absolutes (and any world turning upon man cannot) nothing is certain. All that we have, at the end of the day, as Wittgenstein so profoundly and acutely realised, is conundrums and linguistic puzzles. There can be no sustainable impartation of truth and knowledge from teacher to pupil, master to apprentice. The teacher can never rise above being a mere facilitator to “self-based-discovery”—and a rather mediocre facitator at that

As to whether literature is represented in Hamlet or the phenomenon of Facebook, Athenian education will always favour Facebook in the end—for the simple reason that that is where its erstwhile students are currently engaged. If the pre-engagement of one's students determines the curriculum and its content, education is not sustainable.

But Athens cannot change this fundamentally flawed approach, without throwing out its world view of man and his mind being the measure of all things. But it cannot, without denying itself and ceasing to exist. So it will not. The disease is terminal indeed.

4. Education as false redeemer. Education in Athens has been loaded with weight that it cannot bear. It will inevitably break under the strain. But this is something which Athens cannot avoid doing.

Athens does not believe in sin. It will not accept for one moment that the world is Fallen. Therefore sin of any sort, from moral imperfection to crime to malfunctioning of a roading system is intolerable insofar as it is imperfect and incomplete. For Athenians this reflects badly upon man as man. Failure is not an option within Athens at the end of the day. Something which man controls must be lacking. Man, the Great Redeemer, can and must perfect the imperfect.

But how? The only answer is education. Athens believes it can only permanently remove imperfections if it changes man himself. Within modern secular humanistic Athens only education can change the nature and limitations of man. There can be no other gods to which appeal can be made. Athens has no other redeemer. Humanism will not allow any other redeemer.

The false redemptive expectations of education, the imperative that it be the universal long term solution to all imperfections and problems, means that the education system will inevitably crumble into incompetence. It is simply an idol which will be crushed under the weight of false expectation. But modern Athens will not be able to lessen its demands or lower its expectations. It has no other god, no other redeemer.

When a patient is dying, there are always some palliative, shorter term things which can be done to make things easier for a while. This is certainly true of the modern secular state education system.

But the appearance of recovery is only that—an appearance. Treating symptoms works only so long. In the end, the terminal disease wins. Death is inevitable. The bottom line is that modern Athens cannot sustain an education system. In the end, it will devolve and disintegrate into inter-generational, institutionalized ignorance.