Education Is Not The Answer
In which I discover that anything out of which you make an idol will ultimately fail you.
When I was young, I thought it was.
A story only had to hint that a character might be devoted to furthering the cause of education, and the work gained my full attention
Let them be forwarding the cause of educating females, and I was ecstatic.
I truly believed that the path to a good future lay in educating everyone.
But I was wrong.
Several things changed my mind.
First: the discovery that education wasn’t doing what we had been promised it would.
We had been told that education was the great equalizer.
What did the rich have that the poor did not? Education!
What did the successful have that the unsuccessful did not? Education!
What did men have that women did not? Education!
When we were all equally educated, we would all be equally rich, successful, and powerful. Particularly, we were promised, that education would give the young man in the ghetto the same chance to know how to correctly spell ghetto as the rich Harvard chap.
Er…sorry, the same chance to get ahead in life as the rich Harvard chap.
(In my defense, ghetto is not an easy word to spell.)
Only, come forty years later, after dozens of studies examining the lives of successful and unsuccessful men who had begun life among the poor, it was discovered that education did not matter nearly as much as we had been led to believe.
But there was one thing that did matter.
One factor, and one alone— among the many they tracked—that made an enormous difference as to whether a young man born in the ghetto grew up to be successful or not.
It was the one thing we were assured in my youth was absolutely unnecessary. The one thing they told us that we needed…like a fish needed a bicycle.
A father.
According to a study, the one element that, across the board, significantly affected whether a poor young man would grow up to be successful was not education. It was not the quality of his food. It was not how much time he spent outside or playing ball.
It was whether or not he grew up with a father in the house.
The real blow, however, to my adoration of education came from the book that changed my life, completing my slow, two-and-a-half decade-long creep from Liberal to Conservative: School of Darkness by Bella Dodd.
I have written about my experience with School of Darkness at length here, so I will merely say: Bella Dodd was a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party. She was involved in setting up the public school system.
She revealed that their motive in creating the public school system was: to break up the family.
Not to educate, but to bring in socialism through the seduction of the young through the mechanism of a public school.
Another blow, small and yet significant, was watching those videos of guys who walk around asking questions of people on the street and realizing—thirteen years plus college, and a huge part of our population still knows—basically nothing of valuable.
No history. No clear grasp of the American Constitution and how our government works.
The argument “We need a public school system in order to have an educated populace in order to maintain our democracy” falls apart if the school system fails to teach the basics needed to maintain our system of government.
Such as: that our government is not a democracy. It is a republic.
If thirteen years of school leaves you not knowing the basics…might the children have been better off doing something else with their time?
The final nail was watching the foolishness that many highly educated people have displayed over the last four years.
People I had looked up to and admired. But instead of making them wise, their education had made them prideful, and their pride made them easy to trick.
Do I think education is a bad thing?
No. No more than good food or exercise or any other thing in life that, in balance with other things, can contribute to a healthy and whole individual. I love learning myself. I know many others do as well.
Education turns on lights; it illuminates the soul; it opens horizons.
But I no longer think education is the answer to society’s ills. And it is not just education. I used to think that Socialism would save us, that voting Libertarian would save us… The list goes on and on.
Socrates was known for asking the question: Can virtue be taught? I will not offer an opinion on that ancient quandary, but what I came to realize as my disillusionment with education as the ultimate panacea grew was:
Virtue cannot be legislated.
Laws can be used, I believe, to increase virtue, to encourage men to lead a better life. But which laws will lead to this cannot be deduced ahead of time. There is no one ideal that, if put above all others, will lead to the good life, the happy country. Because any ideal taken by itself, out of balance with other things, will eventually be draw out of proportion.
To put it another way, anything you idolize will become corrupted.
There are two ways of explaining this.
The longer way is thus: Power corrupts. Anything men value, unprincipled, corrupt men will find a way to use that ideal to their own benefit. So the more you emphasize a single quality, however good—peace, tolerance, education, etc.—the more it will be distorted, taken out of context. Without other good qualities to keep it within moderation, any ideal becomes an ill.
The shorter way is: God is goodness. Anything you make more important than God loses its goodness.
Excellent article!
Calls to mind a video by YouTuber and Substack author Dave "The Distributist" Greene: The Kid Who Reads. That one was painful to listen to, since I saw a little too much of myself in it. The vid is a little spicy and takes a while to get to the topic, but it takes on the archetype of the "intelligent" kid who loves education and does well in school, represented by characters (usually girls) like Daria and Lisa Simpson, but these people aren't really intelligent and don't even really care about learning things, just for being seen as intelligent by their left-wing teachers and getting validation and approval by those teachers.
But at the same time, we're asked to feel a little sympathy for The Kids Who Read. The opportunities they were promised haven't materialized, and it's too late or they're too proud to strap on a toolbelt like many in Gen Z are doing, and they're saddled with debt from being convinced a gender studies degree - or any kind of degree - was their ticket to success.
What does The Kid Who Reads have to be proud of, except her intelligence? So they cling to those useless degrees like...like...
My imagination fails me. Maybe ask Mr. Wright to come up with a good metaphor for holding onto something that's bad for you because of sunk cost.