Conservatives…
and Education

It is appalling how little attention is paid to reading and history today. They go had in hand. Television, the internet and cellular phones tell us little about our history. They are technological “now” instruments. You have to put them down to read. And, we do not want to do that. We might miss something!

Education has generally moved from the liberal arts [including history] to technical and specialized learning. And, what is left of the liberal arts is riddled with political correctness. In the academy of today, race, gender and class, with increasing doses of sexual preference, dictate the study of the social sciences. Western civics has become the story of the failure of rich white men, who were probably homophobic, to produce an egalitarian society where every idea has equal validity and importance. You are far more likely to gain admittance to a doctoral program in a US university wanting to study about homosexual black women on southern plantations than the study of any heretofore significant male figure from the 17th to 20th century.

Jude Daugherty, former Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Catholic University maintains that being an educated conservative requires a literary [reading] tradition that puts people in touch with the wisdom of the past. Of, course that flies in the face of those who debunk the past [history] as the story of the oppressive winners who suppressed every dissident voice and view. Even for those who have not bought into the PC view of education, the past and its wisdom still lacks importance. They look at the past as worthless and hopelessly outdated for modern man. The virtues of the past; the rule of law from the past; ideas of society and family from the past; concepts of science and religion believed in the past; none of it has relevance to now and the future. So, why read history?

For conservatives, the past is important and it is imperative that we understand the past. The conservative understands that Western Culture is the foundation of our society. The Greek and Roman classics; Holy Scripture; the early and medieval church fathers; European works on philosophy and science; these all play an important role in the structuring of what we now identify as the west. The conservative cannot understand why someone would espouse the construction of a new order of things ignoring the collective efforts of the past. Preservation of those collective memories of the past is necessary according to Edmund Burke:

…it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society or on building it up again without having models of approved utility before his eyes.

We are 180 degrees from Burke. We reject notions of the past as out of step with the now. We are attempting to build a society without a known foundation. How long can such an edifice stand?

Specifically, this country, the USA, was built by men schooled in foundational works of the past. Conservatives know that, and real conservative educational concepts would propose returning to the classics. Walter Lippmann addressed this matter on the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1940. His topic was, interestingly enough, entitled “Education v. Western Civilization”. He said:

The men who wrote the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights were educated in schools and colleges in which the classic works of this culture were the substance of the curriculum. In these schools, the transmission of this culture was held to be the end and aim of education. Modern education, however, is based on a denial that it is necessary or useful or desirable for schools and colleges to continue to transmit from generation to generation the religious and classical culture of the western world.

Thus there is an enormous vacuum where until a few decades ago there was the substance of education. And that vacuum is filled with the elective, the specialized, the accidental and incidental improvisions and spontaneous curiosity of teachers and students. There is no common faith, no common body of principle ,no common body of knowledge, no common moral and intellectual discipline. Yet the graduates of modern schools are expected to form a civilized community.

Breathtaking! Spoken 68 years ago and unheeded. Where there is no common educational process there is no common anything. Just about sums up where we are today.

Conservatives are not against vocational education. But, for us to have a citizenry that has common principles, knowledge, morals and intellectual discipline, there must be a pursuit by all citizens of the foundation of our cultural formation. Our civilization is becoming increasingly uncivilized, as Lippmann predicted. The education promoted by the true conservative is based on understanding the basis of our western culture and transmitting those principles and virtues to all our citizens. Recapturing such a vision of education is needed yesterday and any other educational philosophy cannot be called conservative.