Education isn’t a profession— it’s an obligation
As another school year begins, both pupil and educator view the next cycle with both anticipation and anxiety. The memory of last year’s end, with the fatigue and the welcomed termination of papers and projects and exams, has sublimated under the optimism for the possibilities over the horizon. However, after the temperatures decline and the abundance of sunshine is replaced with the doldrums of gray, the fatigue and disillusionment returns to both teacher and student. The disillusionment compounds through the bite of the snow, the sting of the research paper, the tease of green through the mountains of white. Finally, the second semester of the year comes to a close and the people on both sides of the desk rejoice — it’s over! This is a perpetual joke seen across sitcoms and social media — that teachers cannot wait to be free from the labor of the classroom and that students cannot wait for school to be out for the summer. The common theme is that we revel the ability to be in leisure — to be away from the constraints of lesson planning, curriculum development, homework, and exams. And yet, we are also reminded that students must continue to read during their break in order to reduce the amount of lost learning so that the possibilities of a new year are not crippled by the failings of the prior session. Some secondary schools have moved to a ‘balanced calendar’ where breaks are more evenly distributed in order to aide in this effort. When looking into the world of post-secondary education, universities rarely care that students actually learn as long as the student graduates — the graduation and student retention rates are far more important than actual learning or knowledge retention. If we combine these elements with our paradigm of standardizing curriculum, individualizing lessons, and pressure cooker exams, we somehow find ourselves wrestling with knowledge atrophy and a desire, from both pupil and educator, to be free from the odious panopticon of learning so that we may engage in ‘real life.’
What a shallow intellectual condition we are creating for ourselves. Education, not merely just training to repeat a process but actual intellectual development, is the thing that is the most human about us; it is the medium that we use to preserve civilization itself. Now, not all learning takes place within the walls of the schoolhouse; this is a fallacy that is as toxic as it is moronic. Education in schools, in the systematic and compulsory form that we experience them today, is perhaps a century old — a century and a half at best. The systematic education of every citizen was originally intended to align with the economic forces of the age and to prepare students for their civic, economic, and cultural obligations. The home taught children their moral, familial, and cultural expectations. Education was a holistic enterprise that placed the obligation of child-rearing (the definition of the Latin educare) on the entire community: people were woven together in the desire to raise young people.
As the universities became more scientifically based at the end of the 19th century, moving away from the traditional tasks of educating priests, educators, and lawyers, and the principles of progressivism took root within the consciousness of the people, the intellectual paradigm that had defined education for centuries was abandoned. The emphasis on liberal arts education gave way to an emphasis on the technical arts; the devotion to learning how to live was replaced with the devotion on how to make a living. As education democratized in the early 20th century, and the influence of progressives like John Dewey came to deeply influence the operations of schools, the shift away from the great questions of ‘what does it mean to be a good human being’, ‘what is justice’, or ‘what is the best way to live were’ supplanted with questions that asked ‘what is the best way to be financially successful’, ‘what are my private desires’, and ‘what is the best way to enjoy life.’ The two principles of democracy and capitalism became intertwined in the mind of America; that to be free politically meant to be free economically. While such a perspective on this relationship existed prior to this era, it is in the 20th century where it is ingrained in our curriculum as definitive to narrative surrounding American identity. Education was a necessary component to live in a free society, and living in a free society meant living in a free market system. Therefore, education was necessary for operating within the free market system. Education was understood not as a means for living a more fulfilled human experience but as a necessary condition for earning a living. Learning became affiliated with earning, and, thus, schooling became defined with its capacity to generate students who could meet the challenges of an uncertain economic future, as is so often repeated by our elected officials today.
This collusion between education and occupation, between learning and earning, has, by the 21st century, transformed education from being a public good that was paid for at public expense to being a private commodity that is subsidized begrudgingly by the public. The university system in America is one of the best in generating scientific developments and a spectrum of research that matches the width and breadth of human curiosity. However, what the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education systems have lost is the argument on the nature of the human soul which is best presented by Plato in the Republic. He argues that, “Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods to turn the mind towards the light.” The Greek περιακτέον (periakteon) means to ‘turn around’ or to ‘bring around’ and ψυχῇ (psyche)means ‘soul’ and/or ‘mind.’ So, in this translation, what is presented as ‘to turn the mind toward the light’ could also be translated (loosely) ‘to turn the soul over to illumination.’ In essence, education is a turning over of the soul, a turning of the mind. It is not aimed at securing material gain, physical gratification, or even at citizenship. The true purpose of education is to align the mind, to attune the soul, toward the Truth, toward Beauty, and toward Goodness. We’ve lost not only the desire for such a turn but even the idea that such principles exist. The process of education should be the most illuminating experience of someone’s life; it should be the most transformative event for any individual. This kind of academic education, in contrast with the kind one receives within one’s home toward the moral, familial, and cultural expectations of one’s private life, should shatter one’s preconceived notions of reality, should question one’s constructed sense of self, and should engender within that person the yearning, the desire, to seek out those things that are the most true about this world and man’s place within it. Education should be about awakening the soul, challenging it to find its place in the world, and encouraging it to never stop striving to better understand humanity with all of its great successes and failures.
The modern education system has abandoned any such understanding of the purpose of learning. We have, quite lamentably, replaced the confusion of intellectual exploration with the stunted certainty of standardized curricula and high stakes testing. We have replaced the turning of the soul with the inundation of the mind. We have supplanted the painful and difficult process of identity creation with the placid and vapid process of identity affirmation. This shallow understanding of education is what fuels our perpetual posturing at the beginning and ending of academic years. It has reduced education, and educators, down to being an occupation— for students to learn the proscribed curricula and formulaic routines of custom and habit while teachers engage in the same repetitive pattern of standardized capitulation, soul-numbing testing procedures, and pedantic personal politics of appeasement. Education, through the democratization and commercialization of the 20th century, has been reduced to a commodity for consumption which is devoid of any meaning and any consequence. It’s a profound failure of our obligation to aide this generation, and subsequent generations, in the pursuit of the most important question in life: what’s the best way for me to live? We’ve abandoned the notion that such a question can even be answered beyond individual idiosyncratic experience, and we’ve replaced it with the philistine problem of how to make a living in order to meet my desires. Such pursuits do not lead to a turning over of the soul. Such aspirations do not lead to Truth or to Beauty or to Goodness. Where Plato called for us, as educators and students, to engage in the arduous process of self-reflection, identity construction, and knowledge acquisition, we have responded with a defining silence to the needs of our soul in order to meet the transient and vapid desires of our bodies.
We have bastardized education, in pandering to the democratic and material forces of our age, to such an extent that education is now understood as an entitlement. It is the farthest thing from an entitlement; it is an obligation for both teacher and student to be devoted to turning over the soul, to orienting the mind toward illumination, and to demanding that learning be in pursuit of the highest things we are capable of, not accepting a curriculum that merely facilitates our cultural and biological desires. The leisure that we so seek in our modern age is woefully silent of the pursuits which force us to question what we know, how we perceive the world, or how we perceive ourselves. Our education system, and our desire to only engage with it as minimally as possible, conditions us to believe that the work necessary for true happiness in this life is something we can temporarily abdicate to fill our transient proclivities. Leisure time, from the Greek schole, is the beginning of education, not the abdication of it. We have so perversely transformed our understandings and expectations of education that we confuse the beginning of learning with its absence. In our desire to live in the ‘real world’ and to manifest as much of our time as possible in wanton abandonment, we live lives that are deeply hollow and filled with dissatisfaction and disillusionment because our understanding of education confuses learning with earning. By doing such a thing, we’ve created a myth that if one merely earns enough, we can abandon the truly difficult task of living a human life. It leaves us bereft in the face of great tragedy, bereft of the ability to discern what is true from what is illusion, bereft of believing there is more to life than material comfort and soft hedonism. It traps us in the bigotry of low expectations and cleaves us from the most important question for any human being: what is the best way to live? Education is an obligation that we share from one generation to the next, from one parent to their child, from a community to its members; an obligation to remind us to think beyond our own experiences, our own prejudices, our own inadequacies. By lowering education to be merely a profession in the marketplace, we sublimate the transcendent experience of turning over the soul for the banal experience of standardization, the vapid experience of self-affirmation, and, the worst of them all, the anesthetizing experience of intellectual abdication. By abandoning the pursuit of why we are what we are outside the schoolhouse gate, we have transformed the most important instrument of achieving human happiness into the most banal instrument for sustaining mere existence.
