Light and liberty essential to education

We’re three weeks past Labor Day now, and teachers are absorbed in learning about their students, finetuning their plans based on who those students are turning out to be, and putting those plans into practice. Even for veteran teachers, this is a full-time job.

Not that teachers have entirely forgotten the wisdom du jour they were served at August’s in-service meetings. It keeps intruding itself in administrative memos and workshop announcements. But when you’re actually teaching a roomful of actual students, you can’t afford to spend much time on the menu of recycled bright ideas and other irrelevancies that traveling experts and their local disciples peddle like the education snake oil it too often is.

These pipe dreams and initiatives typically cite the 21st century’s allegedly novel demands to justify turning classrooms and students upside down on a regular basis. And in fairness, schools and society don’t work exactly as they did when I was a 20th century student. For starters, more families are headed by a single parent, and in more two-parent families, both parents work.

Despite or perhaps because of Americans’ reliance on day care for their preschool children, many elementary students are less prepared for academic learning and lack the social skills appropriate for a classroom setting. Diminished expectations for student behavior condemn children to daily, sometimes violent disruption. Reformers tout critical thinking as essential for the 21st century, as if thinking hasn’t been essential in every century, but longstanding expert disdain for facts and content has denied students sufficient knowledge to develop and exercise those thinking skills.

You can’t think without something to think about.

When reformers do exhibit enthusiasm for content, it’s almost always for STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This clever, pronounceable new acronym accentuates science and math by presenting two subjects as if they were four. Many STEM boosters envision public schools as an “education-toemployment system” and regard the humanities as “expensive luxuries.” Some even propose “defunding” college majors like anthropology.

Ardent tech partisans foresee a “rapidly changing” workplace, upended by automation and artificial intelligence, and decry what they describe as an “alarming disconnect” between high school and college programs and “what the job market actually requires.” They condemn present day schools as “anachronistic” and prescribe “scrapping our entire system.” In their view “technical training is the new path forward.” The traditional liberal arts are “irrelevant.”

Rebutting that charge requires clarifying what the liberal arts are. They’re entirely unrelated to partisan politics and date from the Middle Ages, when “liberal” meant free. They were distinguished from the mechanical arts, which included technical, professional skills like weaving, cooking, and metallurgy. The seven medieval liberal arts, which ranged from sciences like geometry and astronomy to humanities like grammar and rhetoric, were the academic studies that enabled those who mastered them to “function as free citizens in society.”

Liberal arts advocates today claim the liberal arts remain the key to developing “clear thinking, wisdom, and character.” Naturally, being education experts, they take things too far. A “two-hour Socratic conversation on works of great literature, philosophy, art and history” will never be “at the center” of every student’s day. The “joy of learning for learning’s sake” doesn’t stimulate every adolescent and isn’t universally “what makes them happy.”

Reformers contend the workplace is changing so fast that the most crucial skill for students is “agility” in adapting. They accuse schools of harboring a “deeply embedded resistance” to their reforms but fail to acknowledge that their “entirely new” ideas are the same bad ideas that have repeatedly failed since they debuted in the 1970s. Schools have been trudging through the wreckage of school change for two generations. It’s hard to muster enthusiasm when you’re being drafted to reinvent the flat tire.

Reformers justify their zeal as appropriate in a 21st-first century characterized by “rapid and perpetual change,” which pretty much describes the 20th century my grandfather knew — a world war, flappers, the Depression, another world war, mushroom clouds, airplanes, radio, movies, television, Neil Armstrong and me. The surest means to prepare for a turbulent world, in his lifetime, in mine, and in yours, is to equip as many citizens as possible with informed, able minds. This is the proper mission of our public schools.

Technical and vocational skills have a place in 21stcentury education, just as they did in the schools where I grew up. But a liberal education — the ability to reason logically in company with a fund of sufficient knowledge to reason about — is the key to preserving a free society for all of us.

None of this is meant to exclude today’s STEM collection. Jefferson’s assertions about the value of public education and the dangers of public ignorance include mathematics and science prominently in his list of “useful” subjects. I’m an English and history teacher, but I learned the most about reasoning in geometry class.

Too many graduates today suffer from an appalling unfamiliarity with the liberal arts and sciences to the point of ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t mean unintelligent. It means uninformed. Most Americans know far less than we could.

Jefferson warned us that no nation can expect to be both ignorant and free, that “light and liberty go together.”

It is clearly necessary that we each have a job.

But it’s vital for our survival as free men and women that more of us have knowledge.