In the same Wilson Quarterly issue I linked to last week, First Things’ own Wilfred M. McClay reflects on what the perennially relevant Alexis de Tocqueville can teach us today, especially on the subject of education.
McClay reviews the genesis of Democracy in America and quotes a letter in which Tocqueville explains to a fellow Frenchman his purpose in writing the book: to point out the “dangerous tendencies” of the “new social state” towards individualism, materialism, and isolation, conditions that together would enable the rise of a benevolent, all-encompassing bureaucratic state.
In issuing this warning, Tocqueville continued, he intended not to argue for a return to aristocracy but “to make these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will which alone can combat them—to teach democracy to know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain itself.”
That concern led Tocqueville to emphasize the importance of education. But, as McClay specifies, “not just any kind of education”:
He was talking about what we call liberal education, in the strictest sense of the term, an education that makes men and women capable of the exercise of liberty, and equips them for the task of rational self-governance. And the future of that ideal of education is today very much in doubt.
For more on Tocqueville, liberal education, and the technological revolution, read the whole article.
October 2nd, 2012 | 8:15 am
The future of the right kind of education for free citizens may be in doubt, but the present is all too free of doubt. There is no doubt that public education in the present is badly broken.
The evidence? Ignorant graduates, who not only can’t write a coherent paragraph, do rudimentary math, think through a logic chain without derailing, or have the slightest clue where there considerable wealth comes from–but are also indoctrinated into a leftist mindset, and have no sense of ethics, morals, or decent behavior.
We have the unhappy situation of a negative correlation between the amount of money spent per capita and any measures of success of the enterprise. It seems that more money just helps the education system fail more efficiently!
The cause–the culture itself gets the education it deserves, aided and abetted by teachers’ unions, and of course the heavy hand of government at all levels. Government and unions are not necessarily the cause of failure, but they are its enablers.