Whatever else the results of the past few federal
elections demonstrate, they demonstrate this: The politics of
those active people who compose our ruling class are continuing
to coalesce -- under the strain of a terrible myopia.
This affliction allows a man to see clearly only those aspects of human nature that are close to his eyes and writ large, preventing him from seeing clearly the distant parts of himself, and blinding him to the natures of other men. In consequence of this defect of insight, our ruling class have a too contracted notion of human happiness, and ill-imagine what constitutes humane order and freedom, humane security and resource -- tending to over-estimate how much of what they have discovered to be good for themselves will be good for everyone else.
During the past century they have run this tendency into extremes.
And being political creatures, their extremism always consists in the same thing -- gratuitous imposition. Their myopia, concealing from them the actual natures and real interests of those with whom they are treating, continually leads them to impose horrendous sacrifices on us and others in the name of interests that are either wholly imaginary, uncharitably partisan, or irrelevant.
The net result of these gratuitous impositions is an America increasingly inhospitable to a growing number of Americans, though very congenial to our myopic ruling class.
Inhospitable to a growing number of Americans, though very congenial to our myopic ruling class. Herein lies a great problem, perhaps the great problem for America, and the world. Our entire structure of association in America has been, and continues to be, warped by a class for whom the warped structure is not a significant impediment to satisfying living, though it is a significant impediment to almost everyone else's happiness --and our ruling class are blind to the injuriousness of the warp. Their imaginations have been stunted by the myopia and are incapable of placing before their mind's eye anything more than the simple-minded illusion that society is composed of people whose natures are identical to the fragment our ruling class see within themselves.
A potent social poison, indeed -- the bad government resulting from this simple-minded illusion of our ruling class; the kind of poison that works slowly, attacking every organ of society, sickening but not immediately destroying, its lethality veiled for awhile, until one organ eventually succumbs, and the rest follow rather quickly under the added stress. It has killed several civilizations. It is quite profoundly sickening us.
The poison is coursing so thoroughly through our body politic now that it probably makes little difference where we begin to fight it. Certainly wherever I pick up the poison's path, it will lead me inevitably full circle. But I am going to begin where I think the poison is doing us the most harm.
Men must learn how to live by living. And what we learn depends in part on the school in which we live our lives. Therefore, I am going to begin with education, where the simple-minded illusion has given us the scheme of obligatory government-controlled schooling, poisoning the well of society at its very source.
And nowhere is the essential unanimity at the
core of our ruling class's illusory view of us more clearly evident
than in the chimerical debate over this scheme of education. To
be sure there are skirmishes within our ruling class over how
to remedy the manifest deficiencies of this scheme. But there
is no significant voice among our political rulers calling into
question whether this enormity can in fact be fixed. In the thrall
of their simple-minded illusion about human nature it is inconceivable
to our political elite that they are being anything but generous
and beneficent in foisting this scheme on us, at gunpoint. And
so it is that a self-described compassionate conservative Republican
President proposes to "fix" this scheme by making it
even more uniform and burdensome under the aegis of the federal
government than any liberal Democrat had yet contrived to make
it.
But, the remedies being proposed will not cure what ails. For
obligatory government-controlled schooling does not fail and destroy
because of incompetent teachers, or insufficiently uniform curricula,
or lack of money.
It fails and destroys because it collides with the variety in human nature as it exists from man to man.
And obligatory government-controlled schooling unquestionably fails, often, even on its own simple-minded terms. It fails to teach well to each student what it putatively attempts to teach. The eleventh graders at the high school in my town just got back the results of their performance test. In no discipline did more than 8% of the students demonstrate they had attained mastery over the subject matter they were being subjected to, and in most disciplines nearly 50% of them failed to demonstrate any competence at all over the subject matter.
This failure of the scheme is due almost exclusively
to the fact that much of what government-controlled schooling
is putatively trying to teach children is irrelevant to the happiness
of most of them. And the relevance of almost all the rest of the
curricula is too remote to have as yet come to the children's
notice adequately. If the motivation to learn the experientially
irrelevant material being taught in school does not arise for
ulterior reasons (say, because something else a child wants will
be withheld until he learns what is otherwise irrelevant to him),
then very little learning at all can occur. In short, subjection
to most of the material children are subjected to by obligatory
government-controlled schooling is ill-timed, when that subjection
is not an outright impediment to their happiness.
Physically imprisoned in a school, intellectually confined in
a pre-set curriculum, a child is quite literally cut off from
the variety of experiences of living that can actually make some
of that spoonfed curriculum relevant to him, and consequently
desirable to learn. Add to this the bad example constantly coming
to children's attention through the various outlets of information
and so-called entertainment, the limited opportunities for valued
occupation in society as an adult (resulting from the poison's
work in other organs), and the fierce competition for those opportunities
that crabs the spirit of even those few whose gifts lend themselves
to success in that competition, and we have a setting in which
ulterior motivations for learning are in very short supply for
more and more children.
At the very core of the grotesque idea of prolonged obligatory
uniform schooling, then, there is a radical mis-conception about
both what humane education is and how it can actually be acquired.
More about this later.
Unfortunately, the misbegotten scheme of obligatory government-controlled schooling does not cease its destructiveness here. The hectic, relentless, contracted life it imposes on children robs them of much more than a rich experience-grounded imagination and an adequate familiarity with the alphabetical and mathematical symbols we commonly use to communicate with one another.
It robs them of opportunities to find valued
places and a sense of maturity.
Strength flowing to relative weakness is vitally necessary in
human society. It is one of the more important means by which
communities successfully meet the challenges they face. It affords
the relatively strong an opportunity to find valued places among
those whom he is aiding. The satisfaction obtained by aiding others
is often a powerful motivation to increase one's capacities to
further aid others. The mutual interplay between experience and
desire to learn is manifest.
But imprisoned for a great part of the day, their energies consumed in vain effort to acquire what they have no desire to acquire, their minds stultified by the regimen, children are returned to the world of their community too tired and bored and disengaged from the life of the community to partake in the activities of aiding others that could garner for them self-knowledge, valued places, and a sense of maturity.
All in all, subjection to the obligatory government-controlled
schooling regimen quite literally infantilizes a youngster, stunting
his development throughout his adolescence, and often beyond.
Such subjection accounts in large part for the increasingly adolescent
character of many adults, vividly exemplified of late in several
holders of high political office. And a perpetual child can never
see the world through adult eyes or imagination -- he is a perpetual
myopic.
Within the school regimen itself children are likewise largely
deprived of opportunities to acquire self-knowledge and find valued
places through aiding one another to learn. That task is reserved
for Teachers.
In the specter of Teacher we catch a glimpse of the blackness
of obligatory government-controlled schooling seeping out of the
school walls and into the home, darkening parenthood. By setting
up the Teacher as the pre-eminent purveyor of things important
to know, obligatory government-controlled schooling robs parents
of liberal occupation and valued place. It robs them not only
by demeaning in their child's mind the value of what they attempt
to impart to him, but by forcing parents into burdensome toil
for the purpose of paying the taxes imposed on them by the government
school apparatus, it deprives them of the time to engage in the
occupations of teaching their child themselves should the desire
to do so arise, which in turn robs parents of experiences that
could motivate them to further increase their capacities. It likewise
robs many members of the community of teaching opportunities.
All of this has the effect of poisoning relations between teachers
and the rest of the community. As the failure of the scheme becomes
apparent to parents and the community, teachers come to be looked
upon as incompetents and burdens. In turn, teachers come to look
upon parents as impediments.
Called to intervene between these disgruntled parties, the illusion-based
policymakers have thought to institute the further grotesqueries
of more thoroughly uniform curricula, competency testing of teachers,
and a voucher system.
The putative purpose of the more thoroughly uniform curricula
is to ensure that "no child gets left behind". The imbecile
illusion that we all want, or ought to want, the same things (for
instance, a high-tech job) at the same time in our lives, and
therefore need to learn and can learn the same things at a pre-specified
time, lest we get left behind in our lives, stares us in the face
from between those quotation marks.
Competency testing is plain unjust. Insofar as the success of
a teacher's efforts to impart subject matter to a student is largely
dependent on the student's desire-forming life experiences, it
is manifestly unjust to punish the relatively unsuccessful performance
of a teacher who is faced with undesiring students, as it is unjust
to reward the relatively successful performance of a teacher who
is faced with students who are very desirous of learning. Competency
testing will exacerbate the ill-will between teachers and community,
and accomplish little else.
Vouchers are a triplicate horror. They concretize the notion that
schooling is something properly made obligatory by the state.
They concretize curriculum-control by the state. And they concretize
the tax burden imposed by the obligatory schooling apparatus.
Having noted all this, it remains probable that no family can know enough about everything to be able to successfully teach one of its members all it is beneficial for him to know. Nor do most families possess adequate resources to be able to provide their members all needed instruments of learning. Society beyond the family affords some advantages. Schools and teachers are sometimes desirable. And certainly, improving our means of education is necessary if we are to avoid even more rapid reversion to barbarism than we are experiencing.
How do we achieve this improvement?
First, we must get hold of a principle by which we can reckon
whether a proposed reform in this sphere is truly an improvement.
To discern what this principle is it is necessary to remind ourselves
what humane education truly is, why it is needed, and how it can
be acquired.
Humane education is nothing more or less than learning about oneself,
learning how the world operates, and learning how one may pursue
happiness successfully in it.
We need humane education because we come into the world quite ignorant. We aren't equipped with a set of instincts (pre-formed patterns of behavior and infallible knowledge) adequate to see us through a happy life. We don't know what things are good or bad for us until we become acquainted with them -- practically or imaginatively -- by living. Without educational assistance from those who have our welfare at heart the chances are slim that we would survive the trial and error school that is mother nature. The society of men of goodwill can be a humaner school.
And yet mere survival doesn't usually satisfy
a man's nature completely. We have capacities for doing more than
is normally required for mere survival. The attainment of the
objects of these more-than-surviving endeavors is usually accompanied
by satisfaction, and these satisfactions give life a sweet quality
that makes it more desirable to be alive than not. The more able
we are to attain the objects that our tremendously capacious natures
make us hungry to attain, the more likely we are to continue to
pursue happiness.
Ah, happiness. There's the rub. What in the world is this happiness
we are all supposed to be pursuing? We are usually very vague
about this in America. In consequence we are able to delude ourselves
that many impositions we visit on one another which actually thwart
happiness, don't.
From the standpoint of moral and political philosophy, happiness
is an ideal. I think it must be this ideal: An entire life lived
by endeavoring justly to attain ALL the goals established by one's
nature and enriched by acquiring all that is needed in order to
attain those ends.
And what are these ends?
Each man's natural impulses point to them. We recognize these impulses in one another. The impulse to find valued places points to the goal of social utility, which points to the goal of capacitation adequate to social utility. The impulse to find food, clothing, shelter, and a hospitable environment points to the goal of capacitation adequate to self-preservation. The impulse of reason to restrain us from seeking an object of desire by means that will ruin our chances to obtain something else we also desire points to the goal of an adequate capacity for harmony of endeavor. There are many others, but I think it unnecessary to enumerate them all. Those I have mentioned suffice to indicate that our natures are not instinctively harmonized -- raw impulses can and do conflict -- but there is a human function that aims to harmonize our natural impulses -- Reason.
Reason speaks for all impulses, correcting
and taming an impulse only to the extent required to prevent it
from inconsiderately foreclosing the likelihood of fulfilling
other natural demands. Reason's ever-present task is to achieve
and maintain an internal equilibrium and an equilibrium with our
environment (a dynamic, not a static equilibrium) in which no
good is missed unnecessarily, an equilibrium which will endure
until our powers of impulse and actualization and re-adaptation
are exhausted and we are destroyed by the continuing intrusions
of our environment.
And if our politics are to be an expression of rational ethics,
then this ideal of happiness, these goals must be presumed by
law-givers to be attainable harmoniously by the members of the
polity. If it is not presumed possible that all members of the
polity can attain happiness in harmony, then it is impossible
to fashion a government policy that can be just with regard to
each man's pursuit of happiness. All talk of the government securing
each man's right to pursue happiness would be nothing but vicious
jest; one group of men could fashion policy and say to all the
others, "Sure, you have the right to pursue happiness, but
you must pursue it within those two-foot squares of land we have
allotted to each of you."
But though this ideal of happiness is the same for each man, in
practice every man's happiness is unique.
This is so because in actuality each man's nature is unique, a constituting interplay between his matter and energy. This nature biases his being to take on the form it does take on. It biases his being to engage in the activity and acts it does engage in. And it does this in an interplay with his external environment, which is unique from everyone else's external environment because his does not contain him. Thus, what actually constitutes his happiness, should it be attained, will be unique for each man by virtue of the unique synthesis of his capacities and the demands of his nature as they arise by his living his life. Practically speaking, then, whatever is actually good in particular, is good by virtue of its reference to a unique life at a particular moment in that life, a moment in which the thing we are calling good actually aids that living being in attaining a natural end without needlessly thwarting the attainment of any other natural end. And, for reasons already given, this prohibition against thwarting ends must extend, politically, to include the natural ends of all members of the polity.
This description of happiness comprehends and does justice to all a man's natural demands and potentialities and ends such that no good is unnecessarily missed by him. It is the only truly moral description of happiness.
Humane education, then, implies availability of fecund experience, access to means of communication, sensibility to personal uniqueness, and the harmonizing discipline of reason -- all combining eventually to make possible self-discipline and capacitation adequate to the harmonization and fulfillment of natural demands as they arise.
The principle by which we can reckon whether
a reform represents a true improvement in our means of education,
then, is this: The reform would alter the laws so that the means
of education did not conflict injuriously with the natural and
mutual affection and valued-place creating interaction of parent,
child, and teacher; the reform would remove impediments to liberal
occupation by both children and adults, reshaping the means of
education so they did not impose injurious restrictions on moral
freedom; the reform would return initial responsibility for a
child's humane education to its proper place -- the child's parents,
who launched the child into existence and thus created a rational
interest within the community that the child be nurtured sufficient
to the reasonable security of the community; and, the reform would
make possible a more just availability of the instruments of humane
education.
Two practical reforms that comply with this principle spring immediately
to mind.
1) Repeal the legal requirement that children be subjected to
a pre-set curriculum, while strictly enforcing the right of each
child to seek humane education and the right of every person to
seek his own security by seeing to it that each child is adequately
supervised.
This will allow parents and children moral freedom without demeaning
the demands of each child's nature for humane education further
than they are being demeaned by the government-controlled schooling
apparatus. For if moral freedom is truly moral, then it is bounded
by reason. A child ought not to be allowed to indulge in whims
that will likely cripple him or present a danger to others. And
parents who neglect their duty to provide their child with discipline
and supervision are acting outside the bounds of moral freedom,
as they would be also by maliciously denying their child access
to instruments of humane learning.
Thus, if a child expresses a desire to learn the skills of reading, for example, and is prevented from gaining access to the needed instruments of learning by his parents, the child's hue and cry will be heard by the community and the rationally charitable will act accordingly -- towards child and parents.
2) Recast the wealth distribution and re-distribution schemes that currently are used in America so that a more charitable and reasonable distribution of resources -- educational and otherwise -- results.
For instance, re-structure our scheme of taxation so that parents who remove their child from the tax-financed education system receive a tax credit equal to the amount of taxes exacted from them by the obligatory government-controlled schooling apparatus for schooling that child. This will, at least, weaken the unjust mold of taxation that is being imposed on us all in the name of education, while at the same time keeping available tax-financed schools to those children whose parents or guardians have insufficient alternative means of accommodating their child's educational needs at present.
As other economic reforms are made, the government-controlled tax-financed schooling apparatus can be further reduced, and eventually abandoned completely.
These reforms in our ways of educating will
help keep the myopia-causing poison from getting into some wells.
And perhaps from some of the unpoisoned wells will spring men
who possess rational charity, and the guts to live accordingly.
Their good example may eventually bring into existence a ruling
class that can see more clearly than our present one where the
line lies between harmonizing our natures, and maiming them.
The poison's path has brought me into the sphere of economics,
where the simple-minded illusion is sickening our society in almost
as many ways as it is through our system of so-called education.
In my next article I'll chart the charitable and reasonable course
of practical reform in this sphere.