The (Real) Conservative View of Education

Not an election season goes by without the usual political rhetoric about "fixing" the education system. News from the boob tube incessantly recounts on how the system is broken. Politicians promise more and more money (and we are all stuck with the bill, if we have children going to a public school or not). They recommend one change and tinkering with the system after another. The masses crescendo cries and complaining rarely takes a holiday. All of this money spent, with the pot seemingly growing every year, and with one tinkering and another to the system the complaining and problems persist.

Just perhaps, as Albert Jay Nock (1870 - 1945) argued, there is a more fundamental problem in which no amount of readjustment, realignment, or other mechanical reconfiguration will produce anything but a vacuous effect. After all the effort in the world a machine that is based on an erroneous theory will only produce a defective machine.

This is what The Theory of Education in the United States by Albert Jay Nock is about. It is a very short book which can be read quickly. The book is based on a series of lectures he gave in 1931 at the University of Virginia.

Who was Nock? He was a man, and one of the most striking and interesting figures, of what Murray Rothbard called the Old Right; the Old Right of forgotten memory with men like Nock, Chodorov, Flynn, Garrett, Morley, and even (strangely enough) Republican politicians like Buffett and Taft.

Nock's Our Enemy, the State, his magnum opus, overturns any notion that the Constitution did anything but crush liberty. It was nothing but a coup d’état of power grabs away from the superior Articles of Confederation. Real liberty never had anything to do with the Constitution. Real liberty is the antithesis of the political state. Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is filled with insights, from a master of the pen. The great Robert Nisbet said that he "practically memorized" this work.

(Some of his other books include, but not limited to, On Doing the Right Thing, Jefferson, The State of the Union, and Snoring as a Fine Art.)

And how can any man carrying on the tradition of the Old Right not love Nock's mind and personality after reading his "Anarchist's Progress" article? He was a master of parable.

As for Nock's views of education, his views will sadly not get anywhere in an era of leftism and egalitarianism. His views would no doubt be shocking to the prosaic masses of a statist culture. And to say that he would have seen right through President George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" would be an understatement.

What is the theory behind education today? There are three basic principles, accepted without much question. The first is based on egalitarianism. It is said that everyone is educable. Who knows, maybe with just the right training or education we can turn the average streetwalker into a Sir Isaac Newton or a Ludwig von Mises. The second one works hand-in-hand with the first. It is based on the notion of democratic rights. The third is based on the idea that a literate population produces a "good" government.

Individuals who wish to become teachers today are not given education but instruction, says Nock. After a certain period, and tests based on this instructional knowledge, they then receive a certificate. However the only thing that a certificate like this really says is that they are instructed persons, not necessarily educated persons.

An educated man is one who sees things as they really are, as Plato said. Such a man is able to learn "formative" knowledge and digest it without any bias or emotional reaction. This is quite different from an instructed man. Virtually all men can be instructed, but not educated. "The ineducable are among us as the sands of the sea for multitude." (p 116) The educated man is assimilated in the classics, in what Nock calls the "Great Tradition."

The Great Tradition is a fixed and invariable education. It is not composed of any electives or vocational training. Nor is it suited to the person. The educable person must become suited to it. It takes man back to the literature and thought of Greece and Rome, "the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity." (p 52) It is what makes a mind an experienced mind. It gives him a record that "covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, . . ., everything."

How did this work in the old days?

After the three Rs, or rather for a time in company with them, his staples were Latin, Greek and mathematics. He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the way through primary, and all the way through secondary schools. Whatever else he did, if anything, was inconsiderable except as related to these major subjects; usually some reading in classical history, geography and mythology. When he reached the undergraduate college at the age of sixteen or so, all his language difficulties with Greek and Latin were forever behind him; he could read anything in either tongue, and write in either, and he was thus prepared to deal with both literatures purely as literature, to bestow on them a purely literary interest. He had also in hand arithmetic, and algebra as far as quadratics. Then in four years in college he covered practically the whole range of Greek and Latin literature; mathematics as far as the differential calculus, and including the mathematics of elementary physics and astronomy; a brief course, covering about six weeks, in formal logic; and one as brief in the bare history of the formation and growth of the English language.

Those that could not do it were dropped out or were kicked out. There was no stigma about that because there was no illusion of the nature revolting ideology of equality.

Other subjects were considered vocational, for other institutions. Nock said that there was no teaching, for example, of political economy. It was expected that topics like this, educable and inquisitive minds would learn on their own, and that, no doubt, Nock did.

"The educable person, in contrast to the ineducable, (p 124)

is one who gives promise of some day being able to think; and the object of educating him, of subjecting him to the Great Tradition's discipline, is to put him in the way of right thinking, clear thinking, mature and profound thinking.

Thomas Jefferson, despite being so well known for his support of popular education, seemed to have basically the right general idea when it came to issues of equality. His idea was that all children should be given the "three Rs." And then, from primary school, only the brightest would be sent into grammar school for one to two years. Those students would then be sent away except, said Jefferson, "the best genius of the whole." (p 32) His education would go on for another six years. "By this means," wrote Jefferson, "twenty of the best geniuses shall be ranked from the rubbish annually." And at the end of these six years the ten out of twenty would be sent to William and Mary College.

As you can see, there appears no conspicuous egalitarian sentiment with Jefferson here. (Moreover, Jefferson himself was against compulsory school laws.) On the other hand, Jefferson did believe that a literate mass was needed to produce "good" government. It was this that Nock vividly disagreed.

One only has to look at what the masses do read. The things, as Nock put it, which makes up the "furniture" of their minds. He also paraphrases Joseph Butler in saying that "the majority of men are much more apt at passing things through their minds than they are at thinking about them." (p 43)

For Nock, the masses can be literate (or be instructed to be so), and all for the good, but they were not literate in the true sense of the word.

Unlike many traditional conservatives, Nock did not criticize vocational instruction. He criticized the idea that many traditional conservatives have about the possibility of educating the masses in the Great Tradition. Once you start doing that, it will only be natural that education will have to be dumb downed to the lowest common denominator, and that the Great Tradition will be increasingly replaced with vocational instruction.

All for the good that Bob, who is ineducable, can get vocational training and work in the market place. Indeed, writes Nock, "society is better off for having its ineducables as well trained as they are capable of becoming." (p 112) It is when the State tries to educate everyone that you have problems.

Our system is based upon the assumption popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the beginning; it is taken without question now. The whole structure of our system, the entire arrangement of its mechanics, testifies to this. Even our truant laws testify to it, for they are constructed with exclusive reference to school-age, not to school-ability. . . . The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are six feet tall. (p 30)

It is then that "Gresham's Law" (p 140) kicks in. In political economy it relates to how government drives out good money and subsidizes bad money. Here it relates to how equality pushes down development to the "dreadful average"----the bad wins over the good.

Democratic values have only compounded this (p 38):

The popular idea of democracy is animated by a strong resentment of superiority. It resents the thought of an elite; the thought that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience, achievement and enjoyment, which by nature are open to some and not to all. It deprecates and disallows this thought, and discourages it by every available means. As the popular idea of equality postulates that in the realm of spirit everybody is able to enjoy everything that anybody can enjoy, so the popular idea of democracy postulates that there shall be nothing worth enjoying for anybody to enjoy that everybody may not enjoy; and a contrary view is at once exposed to all the evils of a dogged, unintelligent, invincibly suspicious resentment.

The whole institutional life organized under the popular idea of democracy, then, must reflect this resentment. It must aim at no ideas above those of the average man; that is to say, it must regulate itself by the lowest common denominator of intelligence, taste and character in the society which it represents.

The democratic and egalitarian age in schooling took off by the politicians feeding off of and manipulating a noble idea. Parents want what is best for their children and want them to have more than they have. They want them to have the best chance in life as they can possibly get. Politicians fed on this, says Nock. There was an ethos of urgency. And it was felt that vocational education was the answer to all the ills.

This developed the idea that schooling was "common property" to all and that all children had a "right" to it. Education became nationalistic and collectivistic. And the educable elite are lost to it.

The university today, according to Nock, is not a university at all in the traditional sense. They are primarily institutes of instruction. Even all the way back to 1931 did Nock think that there were too many in number of students and tenured professors. Bigger is not better. A large university will have to be an institution that was not of the Great Tradition for two reasons: Firstly, the many are not educable. Secondly, the law of diminishing returns.

Such talk is taboo, no question. But, really, how many average men need to go to college, even as presently configured? Certainly not everyone should, as we are told today. Even the most basic and simple of jobs require college degrees in the present age! This idea has been engrained in us.

As "Mr. Libertarian," Murray Rothbard, wrote,

America was built by citizens and leaders many of whom received little or no formal schooling, and the idea that one must have a high-school diploma----or nowadays, an A.B. degree----before he can begin to work and to live in the world is an absurdity of the current age.

Concluding----and Politically Incorrect----Thoughts. It goes without saying that the chance the Great Tradition will be upheld in the future is zero. But for you and me, we can try to educate ourselves. I am an instructed man----not an educated one. And I do not presume (as a reader might think) to say that I am an educable man and not an ineducable one, according to Nock's high standards. [One of my goals is to learn Latin so I can attempt to give myself a classical education, care to join me?]

"[T]here is no possible compromise," Nock wrote, "with an unsound theory; nature always steps in and exacts her penalty." (p 142)

This is why we all should heed Albert Jay Nock's---the Tory Anarchist's---words. Once man realizes that, if he ever does, we can leave behind the nonstop tinkering with the "educational" system which is based on false ideas.

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And we see these false ideas everywhere in education. It is not only displayed in the attempt to try to make everyone more or less bright (or, shall we say, dull), but it is also displayed in the attempt to fight against achievement gaps between groups of people. That is, between females and males, blacks and whites, and so on. Larry Summers tells some politically incorrect truths concerning the fact that men on average fill the high-end sciences whereas women do not, and for that he got the ax. James Watson, while not directly relating to the education system nonetheless overlaps in implications, tells some politically incorrect truths about (average) racial differences in intelligence, and he gets the ax.

Fred Reed in the April 7th edition of TAC wrote about how Harvard's most difficult mathematics course, Math 55, is made up of "45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male." I doubt it is "evil" discrimination or a random anomaly.

Why, yes, we should all judge individual persons qua unique individuals and treat them as such. This should go without saying. Obviously I am all for judging people by individual merit. But then to make some kind of jump into group egalitarianism is something quite different.

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Addendum ~ A Few Random PI (politically incorrect) Thoughts:

Above and beyond the politically incorrect thoughts above, here are a few others that I have...

• Girls and boys should be separated in schools. Why? Because girls and boys learn differently; have different strong and weak points; have different aptitudes; have different personalities and require different kinds of environments and emotional support; and, obviously, for reasons of sexual distraction.
• Bring back a more stick and conservative dress code in schools. Aren't we all tired to seeing boys' underwear because of, for whatever reason it makes it "cool," unnecessarily baggy pants? (Where are the parents in this?) And have girls dress with some decency. Make them women; not sluts. The male mind, being what it is, is easy to indulge in imagination. Just dress decently and modestly. Women (and men) are not mere objects, but dressing as such invites such an image.
• As explained above in this blog entry, we must all accept the fact that not everyone is equally educable. Mankind is not made up of equal drones, ready to be programmed into robots waiting commands from the collective. So give the truly gifted elite, who are a rare and valuable group, all the encouragement possible with no constraints. To this end, as Nock and Frank Chodorov said, because the masses cannot stand differences, we must de-democratize education.
• Beyond bringing back the classics to the educable, mathematics must be learned correctly. Real learning and education is not memorizing idealized steps to solve idealized textbook problems. A parrot can parrot information but that does not necessarily mean it understands what it is parroting. Today mathematics, echoing the terms used by Nock, is instruction. One can insert a function into their graphing calculator, and that is all well and good, but that does not mean they know what they are doing. They are not learning or becoming educated in today's math.
  
• Most importantly, end government schools and compulsory attendance laws. Short of that: decentralize as far as possible.
  

Ah, well. I can dream, can't I? Were I to be somehow zapped into the distant future for a while, and wanted to find out if this future society were a free one or not, I would go find out if there were government schools in place. If it so happened that none were to be found after such a trek, I would then know that I discovered that a future free society exists.