Education, Not Indoctrination - American Reformer

Should We “Just Teach the Facts”?

Every day or so I encounter a conservative (sometimes even an exasperated moderate on the left) bemoaning the capture of America’s educational system by woke zealots; 2+2=5 and related nonsense. I bemoan the capture of this system too. Although my children are home-schooled I know how bad it is going to be when today’s publicly-schooled children grow up and land in positions of power and influence in government, business, and culture. We’ve got plenty of signs already for what that will mean. However, what I can’t do is join in the refrain of well-meaning conservatives: “Just teach the facts. Education, not indoctrination. Etc.” Such slogans are not only impossible; they are undesirable, even if attainable. They arise out of the same mentality that has left conservatives unable to respond adequately to transgenderism and other social maladies. Instead of addressing the root problem, they address a symptom. We get opposition to men in women’s sports and locker rooms, when the real problem is that transgenderism is a perverse rebellion against the created order that must be opposed in its totality. Likewise, timid conservatives think that the only way to remove harmful ideologies from the nation’s schools is to require schools to teach nothing but supposedly neutral facts, the basics of math, grammar, writing, and so on.

But education cannot avoid moral formation. That is the point of education. Schools exist (they should anyway) to form hearts and minds, to provide students with facts and the moral framework in which to understand those facts. “Education, not indoctrination,” if pressed to its logical conclusion, would produce mindless repositories of random facts, perhaps capable of performing tasks in the marketplace and making money, but little more.

No subject can be adequately taught in a moral vacuum. Consider history. Is the study of history simply the memorization of names, places, and dates? I suppose one could attempt to approach it in that way. In addition to being intensely boring, however, such a study would be utterly pointless. The reason we study history is to learn from the past, not in a superficial “history repeats itself” way in which we think we can predict the future based on historical parallels, but in the sense that we see in our study that people, despite many technological advances, tend to act in certain ways. We learn that certain kinds of situations tend to produce certain kinds of outcomes; “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin warned; “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And so on (all quotations in this column are from Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, chapters 8-9). What about literature? Is literature of value only as a diversion and time-waster? Or is it not beneficial because it enables us to peer into the human soul in its manifold diversity? Can math facts, or physics facts, or grammar facts, be learned without considering the use to which those facts should be put?

With a little reflection I think most people can see that an amoral approach is not only impossible, it is undesirable. While I share the dismay of my fellow citizens as they watch leftist ideologies destroy America’s schools, what is needed is moral formation in what is good, true, and beautiful, rather than an attempt to reject moral formation completely. American conservatives would do well to return to the founders of our nation to see what they thought about education. Doing so would reveal how thoroughly out of step the “neutral” approach to education is with the founding spirit. This was particularly impressed upon me recently as I was reading West’s book. In a section on public education (pp. 192-98) West makes it clear just how essential the founders believed moral formation to be to the education of the nation’s youth, to form them, in fact, to be “the happy, resilient, free-thinking, educated citizens every democracy needs” (the very goal of one non-profit championing “ideology-free” education).

For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the purpose of pre-university education was “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” All of these things are the realm of moral truths. George Washington insisted in his first annual message to Congress that “knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington argued that such knowledge (which had an indispensably moral component to it) was necessary “to the security of a free constitution.” To ensure that Americans were formed in such knowledge Washington proposed that Congress create an adequate educational system for the whole country. James Madison concurred: “Learned institutions ought to be the favorite object of every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.” The post-Revolution Massachusetts Constitution established “public schools and grammar schools in the towns” in order to inculcate “wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue,” all of which are “necessary for the preservation of [citizens’] rights and liberties.” The Northwest Ordinance (1785) maintained that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged” so that “religion, morality, and knowledge” would flourish. In his report prepared for the founding of the University of Virginia Thomas Jefferson wrote that it was imperative that the school’s students “develop their reasoning faculties” so as to “enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.” That education must include moral formation was a basic assumption shared by nearly everyone at the founding.

West also shows how at the founding, and for most of America’s history, the moral formation at America’s schools and universities included instruction in religion. George Washington warned, for example, in his Farewell Address that we must not “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” Massachusetts’ Constitution speaks similarly: “The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depends upon piety, religion, and morality.” John Adams’ comments on the necessity of religion for true virtue show that it was Christianity, not some nebulous sense of the divine, that must be promoted:

One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would that others should do to you, to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. . . . The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy to every creature.

The statute creating Georgia’s first university put things similarly:

A free government . . . can only be happy where the public principles and opinions are properly directed and their manners regulated. This is an influence beyond the stretch of laws and punishments and can be claimed only by religion and education. It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality.

Christians recognize, or should do so, that education independent of moral formation is not only impossible, it is undesirable. “You shall teach [God’s commandments] diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut 6:7). “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov 22:6). “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:4). Yes, children need to know the facts of math, science, history, and the rest, but that is precisely so those facts can be set within an overarching framework of truth and virtue. Facts are useless otherwise; they are simply blips of noise echoing across a cold, meaningless void.

It was not until the 1960s that the Supreme Court “discovered” in the Constitution that public schools and universities could not include basic Christian moral teaching, Bible reading and prayer as part of their instruction. Because of the state of our schools, school boards, accrediting agencies, and all the other institutions that contribute to what is taught in our schools, the introduction of religious and moral formation into these schools today would be disastrous. All right-thinking individuals should support attempts to remove woke ideology from our schools. However, the slogans so often voiced by conservatives about fact-based education, apart from moral formation, are just as harmful, if followed through consistently. The battle for our nation’s schools and universities cannot be waged—without dire consequences—by abandoning the quest for virtue, nor by ceding the ground of moral formation to nihilists and psychopaths. It took a long time to get to where we are today. It will take a long time to find our way out of this mess.

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