The woke ideology that is permeating American schools has a common talking point. The critics of the woke ideology in American schools have a popular talking point. They say that the schools should get back to basics. Stick to “facts” and leave questions about value and morality up to parents.
Consider, for example, the article that John Halpin wrote in The Liberal Patriot. Halpin correctly notes that administrators in schools have used students to fight their political battles while neglecting basic subjects like reading, writing and arithmetic.
Halpin believes that our national priority is to ensure that children are “well-prepared” for future careers as scientists, business leaders and entrepreneurs.
Take Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is a Republican who removed from a teacher’s manual circulated in pre-kindergarten school across the state. According to reports, the book claimed that the U.S. was a racist system and that “LGBTQIA+ people” needed messages that promoted equality, dignity and value.
Gov. Ivey stated that “woke concepts” have no place in Alabama classrooms, at any level of education, and especially with our youngest students. She added that “we want to focus our children on the basics, such as math and reading.”
These comments are not outliers. Some conservatives have implied that morally toxic material in schools should be neutralized by proper education for years. Some conservatives have argued that the left’s campaign to “teach all children” is not appropriate.
The goal of education is to form a student’s personality , cultivating virtues and good habits.
As the quote from Gov. Ivey explains it well. The primary purpose of education is to form good virtues, and build character . It’s fundamental. These conservatives, however, seem to use “basic” in a different way, such as the “practical skills required to get a good job.”
One may agree that education is important for a child, but say that the family should be the one to do this, and that the schools should focus on the practical. Parents are certainly the primary educators and caregivers of their children. Children don’t have separate “facts” and “values” compartments. The school must reinforce and cultivate what is taught at home.
The “back to basics” argument is worthless as a criticism of the malady that afflicts public education. It is essential to re-establish education in all its facets. Let’s start by looking at the history of American public education.
The “back-to-basics” talk point would have been bizarre to our American Founders, and the authors of the early state constitutions.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams George Washington James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, despite their differences, all agreed that the virtues of its citizens and the role religion plays in forming virtues are essential to a free nation. They also saw education as an important part of transmitting virtues to future generations of citizens.
In his First annual message to Congress George Washington stated that “knowledge” is the basis for public happiness. Education also helps to maintain a free society, by teaching people to “know and value their rights,” and “discriminate between the spirit of freedom and that of licentiousness; cherishing the former, and avoiding the latter.”
Thomas Jefferson also observed, that an important part of education was to “teach the citizens about their rights as citizens and men.”
The early state constitutions and governing document reflected the same view on education. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, for instance, included a provision for local schools since “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 “forever encouraged” schools to promote “religion, morality, and knowledge,” which are “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.”
Such examples could fill entire pages. It is obvious that the Founders of America and the early Americans believed education was a key part in cultivating virtues, religion, and morality. These are all essential to a free, prosperous society.
In the early state constitutions, this goal was explicitly stated in their provisions regarding publicly funded schools. No one claimed that education should be limited to the “basics.” Taxpayers would certainly want their money to benefit the public, which would include teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. The Founders recognized, however, that in order for schools to serve the public good they must form moral students.
They were not breaking any new ground. The Founding generation was simply repeating the Western classical view of education.
According to the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who wrote Education At The Crossroads in the 20th century, education’s primary goal is to mold the human being. A good education will equip students with knowledge, moral virtues, and strength of judgement.
It is also important to consider the practical aspect of learning. We want our children to have the knowledge and skills they need to find a job and earn a living. As Maritain points out, the practical aspect of education must never overshadow the primary goal to form the entire person. Education is more likely to reach these practical goals if it develops the “general human capabilities” – that is, if it is aiming for its primary goal.
It was not enough for the Founders to fill students’ minds with facts, guided by “the light of science.” They also knew that schools must instill the virtues and habits necessary to sustain a republic that is free and sustainable. If you properly educate the student, good outcomes will be achieved such as productivity and a work ethic. By contrast, if you focus only on “practical skills,” then not only will your education be distorted, but also the results may be weaker.
It is not at all conservative to teach “facts, not values”, but rather utilitarian. C.S. Lewis, loved by millions of Christians who are conservative, ridiculed this view of education in 1943.
Lewis, in his book The Abolition Of Man argues that education systems of his day focused on the rational aspect of man at the expense of the spirited component–what Lewis compares to the chest. Lewis bases his argument on the classical understanding that the soul is divided into three parts: a rational part (associated to the head), an spirited part (associated to the chest or the heart) and a stomach-related element.
Lewis calls the “Green Book” a popular grammar book of Lewis’s time that reduced value statements to sentiment. Lewis refers to the authors as Gaius and Titius. They claim that “This waterfall is sublime” was a statement of sentiment about the waterfall. Lewis argues that the reader of this passage will come to the conclusion that all statements about value are merely emotional, and are therefore unimportant.
Lewis warns that Gaius and Titius might have succeeded in removing emotion from young minds, but denying a student the proper emotions makes him more vulnerable to propaganda. To guard against false feelings, cultivate good ones.
Aristotle believed that the purpose of education was to teach students what they should like and dislike. by virtue of their nature deserve to elicit a particular response from the observer, whether it is praise, blame or disgust. Virtue is the ability to properly order affections: we learn to love things in a way and degree that is appropriate. The education system should instill “ordinate affections” as well as “just sentiments” into the student.
Plato presented a vision similar to this in the Republic. He believed that early in life, before children reach the age of reasoning, schools should teach them to appreciate beauty and reject ugly things. So trained a student will be able to embrace the reason whenever it is presented. He is formed by habits and dispositions which lead his soul to love and know the truth.
Modern educators, who focus solely on data and facts, may think that they are being clever, but this is not the case.
Lewis acknowledges that the division between fact and values is artificial. By saying that schools should only teach “facts”, it implies that we are limited to what we can observe or measure. Values become mere sentiments. But as Lewis makes clear, normative judgments–expressions of like and dislike, awe and disgust–also convey something real. If we speak of the beauty and literary value of a work of art, or of the justice of a particular act, as mere feelings and opinions, then this is a truncated view of education that takes the student’s chest away.
Lewis recognized the contradiction. In a war-torn England, Lewis wrote these words when public education was utilitarian and progress. His society demanded the very virtues that emanate from his chest. It demanded more dynamism and creativity, as well as more self-sacrifice. Lewis wrote that:
We remove the organ in a ghastly manner and demand that it perform its function. We expect men to be virtuous and brave by making them chestless. We mock honour and are horrified to discover traitors among us. We castrate the geldings and wish them fruitfulness.
It is a bitter irony that some Americans on the right now invoke the very thing Lewis critiqued as the cure to the ideologies that have replaced progressivism–critical theory, gender ideology, and the like.
The primary goal of education is to form the entire person. Solutions that focus only on the “basics” and aim at producing good future workers distort this.
Take Social Emotional Learning. The “holistic approach” is now a part of most public education. The leaders of the program describe it as a “holistic” approach that aims to develop soft skills like self-awareness and mindfulness, as well as honesty, integrity and self-discipline.
Sounds nice. SEL, on the other hand, is not rooted within the classical moral tradition but rather in the most dangerous ideas from the past two centuries. This includes Marxism and critical race theory. In teaching “social awareness,” SEL, for example, trains students to view the world through a lens of systemic injustice, racial conflict and so on.
SEL is a way to develop character, something that was missing in American education. Many critics are reductive and not conservative when they demand “just the facts ma’am.”
C.S. Lewis’s book The Weight of Glory is a classic. Lewis admits that an emergency or war might require more “practical education” in the field of education. No matter how bad the situation is, our need for meaning will not be diminished. We can’t sacrifice a rich cultural life by sacrificing “useless” topics like philosophy and literature.
Students must read at least something. Lewis writes, “If you do not read good books you will read bad books.” If you don’t value aesthetic pleasures, you may fall for sensual pleasures.
It sounds like 2023.
The schoolroom is no different from nature. We can’t, and shouldn’t want to, remove the moral framework from the classroom. This leaves a gap for false or vicious ideas to fill.
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The critics of the state of education in the United States have two choices: either recapture the system and replace toxic moral indoctrination by a better option, or challenge public schools monopoly through universal education options, such as universal Education Savings Accounts, where dollars follow the students, not the systems. We should do both – at least where it is possible.
To call on schools to “get back to the basics” is to give up. Those who propose such half-measures do not understand the nature of education. In public schools, or anywhere else, there is no such thing a neutral moral education. Stop pretending that it is otherwise.
The author would like to thank Rachel Alexander Cambre, for her contribution to this essay.
