Once upon a time a liberal education was just that--an education that liberated man from ignorance and made him fit to govern himself as a citizen.
The concept goes back to the Greeks and was incorporated in the medieval university, where a young man would be required to study language for more than only utilitarian purposes. That is, not just to have him fill an available job slot or order a meal in a French restaurant or do business with a foreign firm and such. But to understand "the structure of language, and hence of language itself--what it was, how it was put together and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument." So wrote Dorothy Sayers in The Lost Tools of Learning and The Mind of the Maker.
Lost they were. And still are. To quote one instructor in our own era: "The students are woefully under-educated, and before I can discuss philosophical theories, I usually have to explain the meaning of basic English words. The number of students who have some idea of what the Incarnation is remains at the normal level of approximately one per class, i.e., 1 out of 50. The number of students who find it incredible that anyone could ever have believed the utterly ridiculous ideas of Plato and Aristotle seems higher."
Gerhart Niemeyer, who's made a study of education or what passes for it in our time, put it this way: "Entire chunks of knowledge drop into oblivion. People of today cannot communicate any more with the people even of the previous generation. Allusions are no longer understood. Language shrinks in scope and power of differentiation."
In another century, Jose Ortega y Gasset called this sad and still disturbing trend the barbarism of specialization. But he may have been doing the barbarians an injustice. For they had their own rituals, myths, beliefs--a whole value system that they upheld despite their supposed betters lecturing them about how backward they were.
Sound familiar? Now our intelligentsia tell the rest of us we should no longer cling to our Bibles and guns. And we wind up fit prey in this election year for demagogues like Donald Trump or time-servers like Hillary Clinton, whose dubious deals circle the globe.
But what, our "educators" worry? Here in Arkansas we're told that almost 90 percent of our kids are ranked Proficient in algebra, the doorway to the language and logic of mathematics. Yet close to 60 percent of our college-bound high school seniors need remedial math as freshmen.
A former U.S. secretary of education (Margaret Spellings) once said of the creation of still another study commission that it was out to "create the illusion of inclusion." Which is essentially what Arkansas has been doing time and again--substituting method for content and labels like Proficient for meaning. Begin with the corruption of language and the corruption of the populace follows soon enough. Logically.
It is a marvelous gift, human reason, but when it is used only to advance one's own political or economic interests, philosophy has crossed the line into sophistry. And in the end we all wind up not knowing what we most need to know--the difference between means and ends, between justifying a course of action or just satisfying our baser impulses, and in the end the difference between good and evil.
Education--the real thing--should never end. Accept no substitute for it.
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 08/28/2016