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I saw this piece by Daniel Walden on THE POINT a few weeks ago, and am delighted to see it reprinted in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.
You may absolutely disagree with Mr. Walden's political or cultural convictions, but please do read through the whole piece, and see if you resonate with his conclusions. I certainly did--because they have nothing to do with being "left" or "right", and everything to do with being human.
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...[D]espite our eggheaded reputation, the American left has failed to articulate a broad and unified vision for education. We are generally successful at toeing a line on issues of policy — robust funding for public education, opposition to charter schools, strong support for teachers’ unions, etc. — but the left, having painted a compelling and persuasive picture of a political life that should empower ordinary citizens and of a working life that ought to be a source of pride and dignity, has not been able to make a similar case about what education is for.
As a leftist myself and a university professor, I find this failure particularly galling — especially at a time when the various symptoms of postindustrial capitalism have leeched away the university’s public financial support, pushed students into ever-narrower vocational training for ever more uncertain job prospects, and so inflated tuition rates that a four-year degree can cost as much as a three-bedroom house. What is being offered as education is so far removed from any recognizable articulation of the good life that an alternative is not merely desirable but necessary for education to be considered part of the good life at all.
The American right also recognizes that there is a crisis in education — and has responded to it in a variety of ways. The most substantive of these responses generally goes by the name of “classical education,” although the term encompasses a great variety of visions and practices. In some cases it seems to mean nothing more than a preference for old books and discussion-driven teaching; in some it puts a Montessori-like emphasis on creating a beautiful and stimulating learning environment; and in others it decries liberalism, communism, and gender theory as the harbingers of social collapse. The movement’s contemporary shape and name can be traced back to Susan Wise Bauer’s 1999 book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. Bauer’s book views the medieval trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric — as a framework for moving cyclically through subjects as a child matures: first learning a subject’s basic elements and how they fit together (grammar), then learning argumentation and causality and abstract thinking across various domains (logic), and finally how to make arguments that are elegant and persuasive in addition to being valid (rhetoric). The various practitioners of and advocates for classical education share a commitment to teaching accepted canonical texts (drawing largely on the “Great Books”), to education as inseparable from character formation, and to the thesis that the abandonment of the two prior commitments by K-12 schools and universities has hollowed out their ability to effectively educate students. Many proponents of classical ed draw on the ancient distinction between liberal education, suitable for free persons who are to govern themselves and others, and servile education, suitable for those who are to be useful to others, noting that education in a democratic society ought to prepare all people to lead meaningful lives in pursuit of a vision of the good, not merely to work as someone else’s employee or to serve a particular social function.
Education like this, based on “great books,” has a somewhat unsavory reputation on the left. This is due, in part, to its recent association with conservative or reactionary political movements. It’s also because we do not wish to be elitists or chauvinists. Great-books advocates have been guilty of both; it is all too easy to slip from reading things because they are recognized as good to reading them because they are merely recognized....
Yet the underlying theses of classical education do not strike me as baseless, nor even particularly right-wing. I have always found the distinction between liberal and servile education to be compelling, and the idea that value-free education is desirable or even possible strikes me as absurd on its face. The notion that students should mainly be acquiring “skills” or “competencies,” so prevalent in high-level discussions of education policy and in ranking school systems, rings hollow to anyone who has ever cared enough to become a teacher: One teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves. We on the left generally agree that education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever. We are sometimes embarrassed to say this, I think, out of misplaced or excessive courtesy: We have seen too many snobs tell people what they ought to like. But we shouldn’t be. It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new — it is a gift...
We are very far from the world that we on the left would like to live in, the world in which simply living is possible for everyone, and building that world demands difficult work. But it also demands thought, and perhaps we can carve out a little bit of time to think and rehearse for a world in which we can all be more human. If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was.
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www.chronicle.com/article/the-left-wing-case-for-great-books
thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-left-case-for-great-books/
The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine
thepointmag.com
A great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the United States.2 days ago
Thank you for sharing! Very well said. I really hope more and more people across the political spectrum will recognize that education should not only prepare people for job functions. At a minimum, it should prepare competent citizens, participants in civil dialogue, and life-long learners.
Well, that was unexpected (in the most delightful sense). “Books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force. I might be accused here of advocating that students be put inside a bubble and disconnected from the real world, and I would answer that yes, that much should be obvious. It is precisely the world, understood as the social and economic structures into which we are born, through which we secure the necessities of survival and which hedge the boundaries of our social worlds, that an educational community must shut out, for the same reason that a monastery must do so: There is common work to be done that demands the cooperation of free and equal human beings.”
“These are not questions to which any honest instructor can pretend to have a definite answer: they demand serious thought from many people who can take one another’s ideas and test them or turn them in a different direction. In this way, the contributions of each student help their classmates step into larger, more thoughtful versions of themselves: like my students did on that post-election morning, they step through and beyond their present concerns into what they didn’t know they needed. They see more sides of the question; they take in a greater share of humanity; they are, in Freire’s understanding, more free” (Walden). This is one of the things I love most about education and open, honest discourse. It can change lives. Great read. Thank you for sharing.
"One teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves." Beautifully said.
One of my must read journals.
