It was a grand occasion recently when this state's governor and educator-in-chief helped dedicate a brand-new factory for education on the campus of North Little Rock High School. For it's a new day in this state's educational history, and the governor's remarks indicate it's going to be cloudy with frequent showers and low visibility.
The old idea and ideal of a cultured, well-informed citizenry governing itself is to be replaced by a tamed team of little more than draft horses, their blinders firmly in place, looking neither to left or right but plowing straight ahead on a course laid out for them by their betters. Any uncertainty about that, the governor assured the students, will be eliminated by the end of this fiscal year. So giddy-up, y'all, and keep plowing.
Naturally this step backward for liberal education--meaning an education worthy of the free--is to be sold as a great leap forward. For as anyone who's read George Orwell's all too prescient 1984 knows all too well, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. While here in contemporary Arkansas, the goal of education is only to meet the demands of the job market. So that the state's Arkansas Future Grants will look resolutely to the past, when the only goal of schooling was either to teach school or find some dead-end job that would assure three squares a day. Only now the state has replaced the foreman on the job with its governor.
The head of state can be just as persuasive as the old boss man when it comes to selling security as more than adequate recompense for giving up mere liberty. "I think it's important to reduce the uncertainty for our students," says The Hon. Asa Hutchinson, major-domo of this plantation known as Arkansas, and it seems he's out not just to reduce uncertainty for this state's young and their families but to eliminate it altogether. "If we can eliminate uncertainty, then your future is a little bit more clear and there is more opportunity," he told the students gathered for this gala celebration of something other than liberty.
In a speech that might as well have been a poor translation from the German, he was telling these students that Arbeit Macht Frei, or work will set you free from having to make any decisions of your own. O happy day! Forget that Arbeit Macht Frei was the slogan engraved above the gates to Auschwitz. The governor's memory may be fallible, but his forgettery is mighty near perfect.
The campus of North Little Rock High School is also home to a workforce education program to be known as the Center of Excellence charter school, a large theater arts program, and competitive student athletic teams. "Young people," declared the governor, "you are going to be given a lot of opportunities" to do just as government decrees. And before being marched off campus in serried ranks, the governor reminded these students of the wondrous opportunities awaiting them, for those opportunities "are extraordinary and they are enhanced by this learning facility. I hope you will take full advantage of it." Or else, he might have added.
Eddie Armstrong, a state representative from North Little Rock, was on hand to add his voice to the Hallelujah chorus: "Young people," he announced, "you should be most proud. You should understand that you are deserving, you are valued. The proof is in the pudding. The proof is in the hallways that you walk in every day and the TVs you get to watch in your cafeteria and the food you get to eat and the quality of education that you are getting from the teachers who are providing it every day." But don't ask too many questions--just march straight ahead, do as you're told, and all will be well. Just take his word for it.
Don't tell anybody, but there is a higher end to life than just material gain. It used to be called high culture, and Matthew Arnold described it way back in 1869 in his matchless essay of a book, Culture and Anarchy, in which he advocates the study of "the best that has been thought and said." Joseph Epstein, who may currently hold the title as the best essayist in the American language, notes that nowadays Matthew Arnold's definition of culture could be enlarged to include "the best that has been composed and painted and sculpted and filmed."
Matthew Arnold may have believed that the study of high culture had its "origin in the love of perfection" and the study of how to achieve it. But after the industrial revolution, human beings still needed "more than the idea of the blessedness of the [electoral] franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own industrial performances." For man does not live by bread alone, or even by new school buildings. What matters is what's being taught--and learned--in those buildings. If they're just empty shells, all this generation will have going for it is an edifice complex.
Happily, according to Matthew Arnold, "In each class there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery ... for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection . . . . And this bent always tends . . . to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their [social origins, wealth or status], but their humanity." No elite, no culture. It's as simple, and as complicated, as that.
Is this nothing but snob appeal? Not if the gates to this elite are open to all. And they are in this self-governing republic now being transformed into just another mass democracy. To quote Mr. Epstein: "The sad truth, the bad news, is that one never really attains culture in the way one attains, say, a plumber's license or a CPA. If anyone says he is cultured, or even thinks himself cultured, which no truly cultured person ever would, he or she, like those who think themselves charming, probably is not. In striving after the attainment of culture, one invariably falls short. Other people are soon enough discovered who have it in greater depth and make one's own cultural attainments seem paltry ... . No one is fully rounded--which is why no one is fully cultured and why culture itself remains an ideal and, like so many deals, may well be ultimately out of reach, though still worth pursuing."
For if perfection is not of this world, that scarcely makes our imperfections anything to brag about. Like the light from distant stars, the idea of education is still worth admiring, even pursuing. If these students at North Little Rock High School have much to learn, they may also have much to unlearn about what real education is.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 04/12/2017