We know that state education systems are in trouble all over the Western world. For the vast majority, this poses no insolvable problem. The solution is ready to hand. Vote state education systems more taxpayers' money and, hey presto, all problems will be ameliorated and wither away. Quality education will break out like a plague of pimples. (We note in passing that this "solution" is always endorsed by teachers and teacher unions. No prizes for figuring out why.)
Anyone who can think their way out of a wet paper bag knows that this is a con. In fact there is a very strong negative correlation evident in the West: the more money that is spent on state education systems, the worse the educational outcomes. Ignorance rises the more money spent.
Our thesis is that the decline of Western state education systems is inevitable. The dominant religious and philosophical forces arrayed against education in the West are sufficiently powerful they rapidly outflank any sound initiatives, encircle, then obliterate them. To change the metaphor: to attempt genuine education in state education systems is to paddle up the Huka Falls on a boogie board. In the end the opposing torrent is overwhelming.
To educate its children, any society must have two prerequisites. Firstly, a dominant tradition of knowledge and truth; secondly, an authoritative order in society which requires that the older must teach the younger, and that the younger are obligated to learn from the generation that precedes. The West has neither. Therefore, state education systems fail to educate.
We have described how the emergence of the soft-despotic, redeemer state in the West has led to an inevitable demand that its schools create redeemed citizens. All social problems are deemed solvable provided state schools succeed in socialising students into New Men. Education is no longer focused upon inherited truth, knowledge, or the tools of further learning. It is upon making better people.
Secondly, because the West has turned away from the Living God it has lost all ground of truth. Sartre once said that if a truth or fact has no infinite reference point it has no meaning. Scepticism is the result. In democratic societies this has resulted in an endless "pluriformity" of "truths", the individualising of "truth" and the fracturing of the curriculum. In the end the pluralistic West has no foundation to determine whether learning to read is more important than peace studies or sex education. In fact, there is a phalanx of narratives asserting that peace studies are far more important than leaning to read. After all, peace studies help prevent crime, don't they? And as for global warming consciousness--it will save mankind and the planet. What use is reading and writing properly when the world has ended, huh?
There is a third force at work undermining state education and state schools in the West. It is the religious belief that all men are equal and all pupils have equal rights. Egalitarianism in state schools means a number of things. Firstly, it drives all education to mediocrity, to the lowest common denominator. Striving, teaching, and training for excellence is regarded as elitist (the "elitist privilege of decile ten schools"); teaching to the lowest common standard so that all can be included and affirmed as successfully achieving is mandated.
In New Zealand the revolutionary NCEA qualifications system was overtly designed so that every pupil would graduate from secondary schools with achievement qualifications in something. No-one would depart a failure. All would be equal in being an achiever. Anti-intellectual ideals are now actively promoted by educators through the state education system. Being a philistine is cool. Hence the plethora of cultural activities in secondary schools. Everyone can be affirmed as being cool in something.
It is important to realise that there is a serious philosophical and religious grounding to all this. Human rights have morphed into "demand rights" (where others have to provide what I want) and "affirmation rights" (where others have to affirm and approbate me at every turn). The prevailing ideology is that equality is undermined without a constant providing for, and a constant accommodation and affirmation of, pupils. Hence state schools are orientated to affirming everything and denying nothing.
Michele Ledda, in an essay entitled "English as Dialect" describes the prevailing philosophy and practice on teaching English in the UK by making reference to a training day.
Recently, during a training day on the teaching of A-level English, a senior examiner and exam question-setter for one of the main examination boards told a group of colleagues and myself that the idea that there is a correct way of speaking in English is something that "we have to batter out of students". She was surprised that pupils keep asking their English teachers about the correct way of speaking.
Robert Whelan, ed., The Corruption of the Curriculum, p.23
Egalitarianism in society promulgates multi-culturalism and pluralism. Everything is to be affirmed. In education it leads to anti-academic standards, mediocrity, a lowest common denominator approach to education, an an affirmation of all learning as valid and worthy. Ultimately it leads to the oxymoron of a personalised national curriculum.
This is the sea in which state schools endeavour to swim. It is a sea in which education loses any meaning, subjects have no coherence, and everything is equally valid and true. This sea is bottomless and those in it have no compass. As G.K. Chesterton acutely observed, those who stop believing in the Living God end up believing in everything, which is to say, they end up bobbing like a cork in a sea of meaninglessness. Everything is possible and nothing human is foreign to us.
Marvel not that state school systems in the West are failing--and failing badly.
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