How Liberal Education Isn’t So Liberal
How Liberal Education Isn’t So Liberal

Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

Legend has it that the greatest school that ever existed was on a street corner in Athens with Socrates engaging in a dialogue with a student or two. We Americans likely would think that this definition is quaint and cute because American education is about as far removed from this as it can get.

Instead of a meaningful dialogue using the Socratic method, American education suffers from aimlessness and confusion.

While Socrates and his students were engaged in one-on-one dialogue, America’s education factories become larger and larger and what passes for education inside them becomes less serious, less rigorous, and less effective.

Consequently, the students coming out of these factories are less equipped than previous generations, have less develop minds and even less developed characters.

Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.

Educators and policy makers have failed America’s students by failing to think hard and be imaginative about what education is supposed to entail.

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

The problem is that most of us stop with the word “education” itself and imagine it as a kind of “hocus pocus” or “abracadabra” where miracles can happen if we would only mention the word. If there is a problem with our economy, “education” can fix it.

The belief is that since our public discourse is failing us, more “education” will cure it.

People believe that if crime and juvenile delinquency runs rampant in our cities, then “education” will save our youth. Or, if our popular culture is in the toilet and more people watch SouthPark than PBS, “education” can arrest the downward trend of our cultural literacy.

We expect to save people and people expect to be saved by a word that they cannot even define.

One of the problems is that those who are in the education profession have done away with some of the very things that were once considered the purpose of education in the first place.

There has been a concerted effort on the part of the postmodern sociologists to deny that human beings have a nature which can only be fulfilled when the higher faculties of humankind are cultivated. America’s so-called “progressive” education is a departure from the educational and intellectual ideals that have been cultivated and practiced since the time of the Israelites and Greeks from classical antiquity.

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In order for civilization to survive — in order for absolutes like truth and values to survive — the educational system must be allowed to cultivate those truths and values that are necessary for that survival.
['William Matthew Mccarter']
['Teaching', 'Culture', 'College', 'Students', 'Education']