The End of Education, Part #2

Truth As Endless Circles

State education systems are generally failing throughout the West. This is certainly true in New Zealand where we are told that one in three graduates from the system emerge functionally illiterate and innumerate. They cannot read the labels on goods in supermarkets; nor do they understand prices. One prosaic anecdote illustrates the problem: this from The Veteran who blogs at No Minister.

Had occasion today to drop by the supermarket to replenish the beer frig. I drink Carlsberg and they were offering 12 packs at $18.99. Stacked right beside them were 24 packs of the same brand at $58.

Asked one of the staff standing close by how this could be so. He confirmed the $58 price tag was correct. Said to him that I didn't think they would be selling too many of these. His response ... "I wouldn't want you to bet on that because you would lose".

Can Western state education systems be fixed? Are they redeemable? The prognosis is not good. It is impossible to reform or change in a vacuum. The pagan religious and philosophical foundations are now so overwhelmingly powerful and pervasive in the West that they are not only tearing down the old state education system, they are also making its reform impossible. It is hard to see that there can be any substantial reformation, without a societal rejection of the foundations upon which state education is built.

In the first of this series, we argued that state education is failing because the curriculum has become politicised. This we see as inevitable because in the West the prerogatives of the Living God have been replaced by the state. Overwhelmingly our society looks to the government to providential provider, lawgiver, teacher, redeemer, deliverer and saviour. To answer these calls and in a vain attempt to meet these expectations the state turns to its education system as one of its primary means of achieving its messianic aims. Schools will produce the New Model Man and act as the primary socialisation agent. Education in the truth is replaced by imperatives of socialisation.

As long as the state is regarded by the overwhelming majority of people as having the honour and functions of a secular deity the politicisation of state schools will not abate.

A second reason why the failing state education system appears irredeemable is that there is no longer any societal conviction as to what is truth. Now this has been a long time coming, but it is the inevitable outcome when two conditions emerge: firstly, a denial of the Living God; and, secondly, democratic political systems. Put those two things together and eventually scepticism wins.

The Enlightenment saw the first serious philosophical rejection of the Christian faith. Within a generation Hume was propounding scepticism--the notion that, in the end, we cannot know anything for sure. Kant, arguably the most significant of all European philosophers, professed himself deeply troubled by Hume's scepticism. To avoid the inevitable progeny of atheism--that one can not be certain of anything--Kant agreed with Hume that whilst we cannot know anything as it really is, man can impute or insert meaning into his existence.

Two streams flowed down from Kantianism. The first was authoritarian, centralised statism where the assertion of truth rested with the dictatorial state. Propositions were true because the state said they were. This option flowered under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. Under this post-Kantian option truth is true because the government says it is. State school systems thrived because the state defined the truth and could adopt an authoritative curriculum.

The second Kantian stream is one we are more familiar with in the West. Truth is democratised. If man does not receive the truth, but exports it and imparts it to reality, it follows that we can no longer speak of absolute truth in a democratic society, but only opinions and perspectives and framing and narratives and discourse. The upshot is that there is no authoritative tradition to pass on to the next generation any longer. There is no settled truth about anything; therefore, there can be no settled truth tradition to impart. Therefore, there is nothing authoritative to teach. There is only a cluster of perspectives to describe.

According to Professor Furedi,

. . . contemporary pedagogy has lost faith in the importance of knowledge and the search for the truth. Increasingly educators insist that there is no such things as the truth and children are instructed that there are no right or wrong answers. (Robert Whelan ed., The Corruption of the Curriculum, p.7)

Hume would have agreed. Hume has (temporarily) won the religious and philosophical war in the West. His seed is now fully sprouted up in the state education system. Turn away from the Living God and truth which holds man to account and upon which he can build his life dies culturally and institutionally.

When truth becomes nothing more than a discovery and description of multiple "discourses", the impact upon state education systems in time becomes pervasive. It affects everything in the school.

The relativistic turn in pedagogy . . . has profound implications for the way that the curriculum is perceived. If the meaning of the truth and the status of knowledge are negotiable, then so is the curriculum. . . . More importantly, the diminished status assigned to knowledge has encouraged a relativistic orientation towards standards. That is why officials have been so pragmatic about the way they wheel and deal about the content of school subjects.
Ibid., p. 7f.

Does this sound familiar? It is increasingly the norm through all state education systems in the West. It is not without significance that the "new" curriculum adopted by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand is nothing of the sort. It is a listing of broad subject heads, about which motherhood-and-apple-pie statements are made. The implication: each school, teacher, and pupil will make it up as they go along. We kid you not. The new, enhanced, super-dooper state curriculum, with which all state schools and state teachers have to comply, is a mere fifty pages long. Yes, you read that right. Fifty pages only. For everything. For thirteen long years of state education. This means the de-facto state curriculum is really a wax nose to be bent, shaped, and moulded by schools into multi-perspectival irrelevance and confusion. It has become a pedagogical Balel.

The NZ state Curriculum document boasts a motif of the nautilus sea shell. Lest any miss the point, the preface to the Curriculum explains its meaning and significance:

Since it first appeared on the cover of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993, the nautilus has become a familiar symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. It reappears in this curriculum with a new look.

In real life, the nautilus is a marine animal with a spiral shell. The shell has as many as thirty chambers lined with nacre (mother-of-pearl). The nautilus creates a new chamber as it outgrows each existing one, the successive chambers forming what is known as a logarithmic spiral.

This kind of spiral appears elsewhere in nature, for example, in sunflower and cauliflower heads, cyclones, and spiral galaxies. Physician, writer, and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94)
saw the spiral shell of the nautilus as a symbol of intellectual and spiritual growth. He suggested that people outgrew their protective shells and discarded them as they became no longer necessary: “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

It is as a metaphor for growth that the nautilus is used as a symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum.

Note how this metaphor fits perfectly into the dominant meta-narrative of relativism. Did you learn a bit of grammar in primary school? Soon you will discard it as no longer necessary as you grow and develop on your personal journey.

Actually, as so often happens in God's world, using the nautilus as the motif and metaphor for state education is profoundly ironic. The real (hidden) message is that the state education system produces people who go around in circles in a system that is forever turning, turning, turning.

With respect to standards we note that a lot of the resistance to the New Zealand government's attempt to introduce knowledge standards into primary schools comes from schools, principals, and teachers who reject the whole notion on the grounds that there are no standards to begin with. They have a point, sadly.

Another disastrous, but perfectly consistent trend in state schools is the "personalisation" of education.

The recent announcement that delivery of education will become more personalised represents the logical outcome of this trend. Personalised learning displaces the idea that there is a coherent body of knowledge that need to be assimilated in favour of the principle of teaching what works for the individual. Ibid. p.8)

Truth and knowledge is replaced by an endless perspectival particulates. The only criterion for choice is "if it works for you . . . ." This is to say that "state education" is now an oxymoron.

Can it be reformed? Is reclamation even a possibility? We do not believe so. As long as Unbelief remains regnant in the culture, scepticism will invariably dominate democratic state education systems. Truth can be nothing more than "as you like it".