Saying that Government cannot educate is not a partisan political position, but a simple statement of fact: government cannot educate, because government cannot love. Even more bluntly, government should not even try to run institutions of love, because, slowly but surely, its administrators inevitably pervert them in their desire for security or lust for power. All this may not be immediately obvious, so we’ll lay out the facts, one step at a time. First, what is government? Then, what is real or liberal education. Third, why can’t government do it?
What is Government?
A government or regime is the organization of visible offices that claims a monopoly over the tools of power—everything from tax audits to police batons—to serve a people or a nation’s collective, physical necessities. Its core duties are 1) external defense, 2) civic justice, and 3) real public works, like roads and harbors. Within these spheres, the capacity for physical coercion is simply necessary. A government that cannot or will not enforce its laws is no government. So all its enterprises are cast in the mold of legal procedures and enforcement: mandatory, categorical, and monetary. Everything government does is coercive—everything.
Government’s “iron fist” has been disguised over the last century by the growth of its “velvet glove,” its oxymoronic “public social services.” These family duties, 1) educating the young, 2) nursing the sick, and 3) sheltering the homeless, can achieve their humane ends only as truly relationships of friendship or love, so they must be voluntary, personal, and sacrificial.
It is self-defeating for government to exert its coercive authority in these services, because loving care must discern and nurture the Imago Dei or Image of God in each unique human person. Families can and do share these duties with voluntary associations in a free, Christian Society. If they’re surrendered to the State, they become coercive, categorical, and protocol-driven: “checking off the tick boxes.” Government “social services” remain coercive, first, because the taxes supporting them are surely not voluntary (even when its programs are evil), and second, because government inevitably seeks a monopoly over them, like quack grass, squeezing out more nurturing growth. In North America, so far, the only, barely-tolerated exception is home-schooling (among ten percent of Americans and five percent of Canadians).
Real education, liberal education, is a service of love, liberating youth. Governments can train youth, and throughout the ages, it has. Sparta and the Roman republic trained their youth in the practical skills and moral virtues of warriors. The archaic Egyptian priesthood or Chinese mandarins trained narrow elites for running public projects. Historically, natural regimes have trained five-to-ten percent of the population—by the regime, for the regime, like law schools today. A liberal education, however, means to free the minds of children, future citizens, from the threats, ambitions, prejudices, and superstitions of the local regime—the autism of politics. So in Latin, e-ducare means “leading out.” This does not repudiate citizenship, but recognizes the fact that truly human flourishing—wisdom and worship, or “life fully alive”—transcends our immediate, physical necessities, those properly ruled by the coercive regime. And very, very often, the wisdom and worship of free citizens is needed to save a regime from itself.
What is Liberal Education?
The only civilization that’s ever embedded a comprehensive culture of liberal education is Western Christianity, with its roots in Athens and Jerusalem, Plato’s Republic and the Bible. With its explicitly educative purpose, the Republic tackles the perennial political problem: how can society tame that excessively spirited ten percent of young men, who, left to their impulses, will launch themselves into careers of crime or rebellion? This problem bedevils us today: how do we turn young wolf cubs into sheep dogs? (Our cities testify to our failure.)
Plato says, give them the right education. His pedagogy comes in two parts, the first, moral, and the second, philosophic. The duties of politics are necessary, he teaches, but they can’t satisfy the most profound, indeed divine longings of the human soul. So, “unless we can find a better way of life than ruling, for those who rule”—that spirited ten percent—“rival lovers will fight,” either in the halls of government or back alleys.
Plato’s “primary education” (Rep. II-IV) employs “music (poetry) to soften the spirited part of the soul, and gymnastics to harden the philosophic.” His immediate problem: Greece’s then-popular poetry, with gods and heroes like adulterous Zeus and petulant Achilles, nurtured more wolves than border collies (like today’s gangsta rap). Their gods and heroes were bad models. And the young are taught inevitably, first by imitation (mimesis), he argues, so they need virtuous models or icons.
So, Plato’s “primary education” is meant to form what contemporary educator John Senior (The Death of Christian Culture) calls “the moral imagination.” Until the cinema age, Senior says, our moral imaginations were formed by a “thousand good books,” from Potter, Milne, and Grahame, to Stevenson, Dickens, and Scott. In Plato’s day, however, the reigning myths were at least as brutal as our current Hollywood poetry—Homer, Hesiod and their religious tragic theatre. So Plato proposes censoring the malicious and lecherous “gods” of Olympus. All the popular poets lie about the gods, he argues, simply to titillate their audiences and excuse their vices. True poetic education must describe the God “as he is,” perfect, unchanging, never lying, and the cause only of Good. To live life fully alive, we must open our eyes to the light of true Beauty in the Divine Mind.
Having imagined—ahem—a healthy popular culture, Plato’s “secondary education” then faces the challenge of establishing “a better way of life than politics,” for the spirited ten percent. Truly noble humans never scramble after power; he argues. Competing for pre-eminence in politics or the ‘hood is like fighting over the Shadows in a Cave. Truly noble humans seek the Good in the philosophic life. To lead the young from the political Cave, into the natural Sun, he proposes (Rep. VI-VII) an education that ascends from arithmetic to geometry, astronomy, and harmony, and then to dialectics—contemplation of the Good. This prescription, a pedagogy of the Divine Mind, was the seed of Western liberal education, its goal, minds shaped by the Logos, divine Reason. So one ancient commentator described life in Plato’s Academy as “pursuing the elusive Good and finding happiness in geometry,” free at least from lust for the harlot power.
Plato provided a perfect diagnosis of the problem of liberal education: freeing youth, not from their civic duties, but from the seductive ambitions and anxieties of politics. Yet he offered (said with humility) only a pantomime solution. The cultural or institutional zenith of his legacy was found in Roman Stoicism, with its abstract deism and morality of apathia, dispassionate fatalism. Stoicism could nurture truly noble characters like Cato (a political suicide) or Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but it lacked any real cultural traction. Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, Commodus, for example, was notably vile and sadistic even by Roman standards. Stoicism’s abstract intellectualism might provide solace amid the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to those already virtuous, but it provided no real motivation to become virtuous: no accountability, no fraternal purpose or love, and no obligation to renew the world.
The problem with Stoic education was its failure to provide a real, personal loyalty, outranking the regime of political necessity and lust for dominion. Families might provide loving service, teaching, nursing, and sheltering, for those lucky enough to have one. But in a world of “powers and principalities,” what alternative was there, but competing powers? The real solution for Plato’s problem, the cure of the political obsession, depended on a new revelation of the real Cosmos: not an impersonal, ethereal Mind, floating above a world of violent necessity, but the providential creation of a loving Father. By celebrating the Triumph of the Cross, the victory of love over death, Christianity liberated myriad, free societies of love from their death-dealing local regimes. Celebrating the Imago Dei, Image of God, in every human being, Christian society freely offered services of love: educating, nursing, and sheltering. By celebrating each soul, lovingly educated, Christianity unleashed true hope, free human association, science, enterprise and innovation: the promise of e-ducation in escaping from the shadows of Plato’s Cave.
The Marriage of Heaven and Earth
The first truly liberal education arose spontaneously in scattered, free societies—rag-tag monasteries and ruined cathedral schools—in the anarchy of the fall of the Western Empire. Plato’s secondary education (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and harmony) was “baptized” as the Quadrivium by the philosopher Boethius (executed by the barbarian Theodoric in 525 AD), with the place of dialectic or philosophy taken by Christian worship. The later Trivium’s language arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) evolved spontaneously, given the necessity of transmitting sibilant Latin learning in a sea of guttural German dialectics. The Seven Liberal Arts were then formalized and broadcast to thousands of monastery schools by Charlemagne’s schoolmaster, Alcuin, in the ninth century, just in time for the Vikings to shatter the precocious yet fragile Carolingian political crystal into a thousand shards.
However uncomfortable at the time, the Tenth Century’s desolate anarchy nurtured the universal culture of liberal education amid tribal ignorance and brutality. Its monks were mostly celibate, so, despite holding a monopoly on the ancient learning, they never developed a hereditary ruling caste, like India. They thus recruited clever farmers’ and merchants’ sons into a true meritocracy, history’s first “social mobility.” They also offered a supply of useful “clerks” (clerics) to their local warrior princes. Eventually, this voluntary, spontaneous, decentralized liberal culture seeded the historically unprecedented, independent universities in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Only with the growth of revenue, communications and authority among both kings and bishops, did inevitable tensions develop between secular and sacred authorities.
Burgeoning trade and communications eventually grew an independent “middle class,” hungry for learning, but independent of the Church’s purposes and constraints. So secular learning took off with the Italian Quattrocento or 1400s, once called the Renaissance, but truly the West’s third, after the Carolingian and High Gothic. Plutarch’s studia humanitatis popularized the literature of the Greco-Roman world, appreciative of its natural wisdom, but cheerfully blind to its pagan superstitions, cruelty, and despair. Renaissance humanism assumed the Christian axiom of the Imago Dei or Image of God, in each unique (and inventive) human being, but barely acknowledged its debt to Revelation, and largely ignored the reality of sin. So Castiglione’s Art of the Courtier establish courtesy as a moral virtue. This seeded the uniquely Western social status of the Christian lady and gentleman, people worthy of respect for their learning and civility, regardless (or even contemptuous) of political office.
So, until recently, enduring Western cultural education answered Plato’s problem, providing “a better way of life than ruling, for those who rule,” and stopping “rival lovers from fighting.” It put politics in its proper place, the mere management of things. So the wisest and most beautiful flowering of Christian Humanism were the plays of Shakespeare, who sang most beautifully about the disintegrative and suicidal tragedy of power politics.
For two millennia, Christian liberal education shaped the “moral imagination,” nurturing virtue and contemplation in the next generation, almost unaware that it was freeing them from the oppressive pragmatism of their local chieftains. Young Billy Shakespeare (“the whining schoolboy…creeping like a snail unwillingly to school”) read Plutarch’s Lives, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Cicero’s de Officiis, and the Bible, and then wrote plays subtly scolding his patron Queen Elizabeth. The young Abe Lincoln, living a day’s hike from any school, read Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s plays, and the Bible; then taught himself Kent’s American Law, and re-founded the American republic. Canada’s founding Prime Minister John A. Macdonald studied grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, geography, Shakespeare and the Bible at a parish school, articled in law at age 15, and then later united the Canadian Confederation and built its Canadian Pacific Railway. Shakespeare and the Bible alone were almost sufficient for a liberal education.
Why Government Cannot Educate
As homeschoolers know, children who are led and allowed to study—to cultivate freely their own studium, zeal or dedication to a purpose—have the character needed to acquire for themselves any skills later needed. When children are trained only in skills, however, they lose their natural wonder at the meaning and purpose of life, and they end up the servants of other people’s purposes—like government clerks, collating mountains of meaningless data in beehive offices. So Aristotle stressed the difference between contemplative versus the productive intellects: the big-picture, What or Why questions of a free citizen, on the one hand, versus the stove-pipe How to or With what questions, on the other, the questions of mere servants or slaves.
Now, the atheists of the scientific Enlightenment (like Francis Bacon and David Hume) were too clever to attack Christianity openly. They argued instead that the Why questions were irrational and irrelevant. If “man is the measure of all things,” the Why is simply… whatever we want. Only the How questions of materialistic science are truly rational, they insisted, and the Why answers of religion are all very nice, but keep your private opinions to yourself.
Yet, as Aristotle says, the love of wisdom begins in wonder, Why? We can answer, what we should do, or How we should live, once we begin to ask, Why we live: what it means to live “Fully Alive.” Free citizens must wonder, Why, What is our purpose? Clerks and laborers must be trained only in How, directives. So, ironically, the Enlightenment’s Bacons and Humes sought to free us from the “bondage of religion,” but by suppressing our deep awareness of the Imago Dei in each, they prepared us for the shackles of our local political bosses and their purposes.
This brings us back to our original axiom: government can train in skills, but cannot educate in true freedom or virtue, because government cannot love. Government is the coercive rule over the non-negotiable necessities of life: defense, justice and (truly) public works, in ways that are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary. It has always been families and clans that nurture the next generation in love: teaching, nursing, and sheltering, voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. As with Plato’s education in geometry, harmony, and philosophy, a truly liberal education draws the soul beyond the Cave of immediate political crises and demands.
The Progressive movement of the early 1900s brought education under the bureaucratic rule, selling them as “public works,” for which government has greater resources and expertise. Locally elected school boards at first provided some parental control, but those boards have since been captured by Progressives. Under the necessities of government and its tyranny of protocols, education became, first factory training, and now public ideology. As the bureaucratic culture spread, loving, personal nursing care became, first categorical medical protocols, and now herd control (like “euthanasia” culling). Likewise, loving shelter (in families, monasteries or free shelters) became, first welfare ghettoes, and now tribal alliances, occupying dying city centers.
The Family Springs Eternal
This diagnosis may seem depressing, but as pediatrician-philosopher Herbert W. Ratner said, commenting on Soviet efforts to eradicate the family, “The traditional family has a habit of burying its undertakers.” States cripple themselves in the attempt to substitute for families. “Nature has a vested interest in the traditional or monogamous family, the reproductive mode of her highest creature, man,” Ratner says (“The Family: An Office of Nature”). And families have already been stepping up, spontaneously, to replace the crumbling public school system, with (no surprise) Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s plays, and the Bible; Natural families are cheerfully paying the time and treasure to declare natural, loving autonomy in teaching, nursing, and sheltering, foregoing the illusory security and economy of “state social services.” Our current cultural confusion is simply back-handed proof once again that families are the primary educators of their children.
It’s difficult to detail where all the urgent family needs are being met. Homeschooling co-ops? Crisis pregnancy care centers? Addiction recovery residences? Church mothers’ groups? But face-to-face, there’s no shortage of opportunities for cheerful sacrifice. Given the carnage of dysfunctional families, following the Sexual Revolution, many, many young parents have rejected the selfish ideology of their Boomer elders, and are now trying heroically to recover the blessings of family life. Certainly their efforts should be acknowledged with the evangelism of the family dinner table.
This first appeared on the the Canadian Centre for Home Education website (cche.ca).
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The featured image is “Group portrait of members of the 24’s Council,” a detail from the “Allegory of Good Government,” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.