Schooling is not education
To no small degree what’s wrong with “education” in this country is that too many of those who should know better go on expounding on the nature and value of the liberal arts as if clarification and greater understanding of that would stem if not reverse the failure, or at least widely held perception of failure, of our schools to effectively educate our young people.
Writers who should know better are these — Leigh A. Bortin in his book: “The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education,” Martha C. Nussbaum, in her book: “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” Diane Ravitch in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.”
Then there are the writers of recent op pieces in defense of the liberal arts —Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, in “Coming to the Defense of Liberal Education,”, David Brooks in his piece, “Race to Sanity,” and Stanley Fish writing about his own high school education in “A Classical Education: Back to the Future.”
Instead, these same individuals, and countless others, past and present, ought to be writing about the schools as they are, not as they would like them to be in some ideal world. For if they would really build something better they must build on what’s there. And that means writing about what’s there, and what’s there is not what they’re writing about.
In fact, the liberal arts are no more in our schools, no more in the hearts and minds of our students (there may still be a remnant of the liberal arts in the textbooks, especially in those no longer used), than they are in the life of the country, in the hearts and minds of the citizens.
And they probably have never been in our schools, probably not even in the Classical high school in Providence, RI, that Stanley Fish attended and over which he gushes, other than in the minds of the teachers, the best ones anyway.
Yes of course the liberal arts are threatened, as is the best of all that we possess. The arts have always been threatened, as is now our Western civilization threatened by fundamentalist religions. But the answer to this threat is probably something else entirely from continuing to “teach” the liberal arts to young people who are not ready to learn them.
In any case the greatest threat to the liberal arts is not from what is going on, or not going on, in the schools. For now no less and no more than in the past, the greatest threat comes from the way we live. For bread and circuses, not Socratic questioning and dialogue, are still for most of our people the norm.
In the way we live, more even than in the schools, one finds few of the values that the liberal arts would promote, little of the truth, beauty, and goodness that ought to be the final product distilled and extracted from their proper study.
The writers I refer to, but also many others I have not mentioned, all sensitive and intelligent people who themselves clearly possess a real understanding of the liberal arts and of even what might be the nature of an education therein, have all announced in their books and op-ed pieces that traditional education in the liberal arts is, if not absent in our schools and colleges, in steep decline.
They claim that in our schools a narrow curriculum emphasis on word and number skills has left little room for broad curriculum emphasis on such subjects as history, the humanities, science, foreign languages, and the arts.
No less important, they say, is the fact that an inordinate amount of classroom time given over to testing or measuring whether or not the desired word and number skills have been learned, makes thoughtful classroom discussion (the sine qua non of a liberal arts education) more and more unlikely if not impossible.
There is a lot to say about all of this, and in the recent past Mortimer Adler, who died at age 99 in 2001, has probably said and written more about this than anyone else. He was probably the first to say (that which was not unusual, his being the first to say something) that education is not schooling, or in his words that schooling is not education.
I ask myself if schooling could ever be the same thing as education and usually I answer no. Adler, before anyone else, pointed out that if the schools, and colleges, ever did provide a real education in the liberal arts it would not be today or tomorrow, —why? because of our not being ready, — but only in some distant future, hundreds, if not thousands of years away, at a time when men would have become substantially different from what they are now. Better? I think Adler would say yes.
A controlling insight into Adler’s own educational philosophy was the recognition that “no one has ever been — no one can ever be — educated in school or college.”
I wonder what the writers I mention above would have said in reply to Adler.
In any case they don’t seem to have read Adler, nor do they seem to have ever had similar thoughts of their own. They don’t even seem to be standing on the ground when they write, for they don’t speak of what actually goes on in the schools and colleges, only about what does not go on and, according to their view, what should go on.
They’re really talking about something else, something which I will readily admit is much more important, something that gives gravitas to their words, much as talk about God does to the words of the preacher.
They’re talking about an educational ideal, but one that doesn’t come close to the reality of our schools and what goes on in the schools. They ought to have realized this and again, like the preacher, not confused a wished for and better life with the actual lives of the kids.
In fact, they’re talking about learning, and what learning should be all about. But didn’t it ever occur to them that the kind of learning they are describing is not limited to the school years, and may even be out of place in school. The kind of learning they describe is much more what life itself is all about, or should be. That’s my view anyway.
Once again, what we know as school and schooling are something else entirely.
I wonder what it would mean for the rest of us, and for the schools, if these writers about the liberal arts were to come down from their high perches and talk about what actually goes on in the schools? That might be a first and giant step in changing the schools into something that actually helps the kids. For at the present time the schools are not doing that.
