A Brief History of Western Education

What's the good?

Recently as I’ve been experiencing western culture both here at home and in places like France and South Africa, I keep asking this question: Which came first, our computers or our computer-like minds? Put another way, do computers dominate our New World because we are imbibing computer culture or are computers dominant because we have created our culture in the image of our computer-like minds? 

Which way does history flow? From the mind outward or from the material world inward, toward some ready-to-change inner self?

And as I’ve tried to grapple with these heavy epistemological questions on my journey, something weird presents itself again and again; deep down these questions are questions about school, as in, they are the kinds of questions that moms and dads ponder when they decide where little Johnny should go to learn how to read and write. These highfalutin questions are at the core of what I’ll call the “education question” in this edition of Heavy Things Lightly. 

When we walk into a school we are being subjected to a way of knowing. The same can be said of most things. When you join a family as an infant you are brought up in that family’s way of knowing. You become a Smith. You know things as a Smith knows things. When you join Islam you become a Muslim, one who submits. You learn the world as a submitter. Knowing is about imbibing, and imbibing is always related to the environs we navigate. The thing is, few of us ever think deeply about the water in which we swim. What kind of water do the children of Light People swim in today? 

Let’s start way back in the Greco-Roman pagan world. That’s back before Christ, back around the time of the Buddha, around the 5th Century BC, when folks first applied this democracy thing to their lives.

In the 5th Century BC, education as a recognizable institution was in its infancy. Greek philosophers of great fame – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their Roman inheritors, men like Cato the Elder and Quintilian, all aimed to “educate” their students in a certain way. School was for making moral men. But how should we hear this word “moral” in the Old World? What did that mean in light of the environs of Old World Greece and Rome? 

Put simply, Greek and Roman teachers answered the education question by pursuing beauty, truth and the good life.

Early Greco-Roman chiseled bathroom graffiti.

For these teachers, the academy was the place where students pursued the truth about goodness. Learn what it is to be good, that was the goal of a young man entering the academy. And while the hard sciences were surely a part of the ancient curriculum, they weren’t “on the side” things to be studied on their own for their own sake. Even math and geometry were things students did to help them answer the big question: What is the good life? The journey was thus.

And hardly anybody went on the journey.

The Academy catered to the upper class in ancient times. It allowed a few women from time to time, but mostly, it was a place for free men of landowning nobility.

With the death and resurrection of Christ, encroaching Germanic culture, and the subsequent Christianization of the Roman Empire, things began to change in Europe. Monastic communities, starting 150 years (or so) after Christ, began to be places where the pursuit of the good took place. For a thousand years, starting with St. Anthony and the desert dwellers of Egypt, men and women of Europe went off in large numbers to the monasteries, praying and effectively being educated in the ways of Christ. Christ became the good, the answer to the education question, the center of the bullseye that classical Greek philosophers had aimed for in their academies. This monastery education, though radically different from the highly discursive reasoning of the Greek academies, retained a fundamental attentiveness to the pursuit of the good. Purification of wrong ideas and an illumination of the good remained the point of education, though now it was meant to end in the union of fallen man with the God of creation. As Basil said in the 4th Century A.D., “God became man so that man could become God.” This was the mission statement of the great monastic missions. It was the goal of education.

Weird, I know. 

And so it would go, more or less, until the 12th Century when the Christian West began a series of reforms under Pope Gregory VII who, in 1079 set out to regulate and reconstitute the laws associated with training the clergy. In his attempt to reform the clergy, he decreed the regulation of monastic and cathedral schools of learning. This decree led to the establishment of Europe’s first universities. Bologna in Italy, 1088, Oxford in England, 1096, The Sorbonne in Paris, 1150. These reforms, coupled with later reforms of Thomas Aquinas, a man who set out to rationalize Christian theology along the lines of Aristotelian philosophy, led to a catechetical curriculum which began to replace the cycle of prayer found in the old desert dweller style monasteries. Things were beginning to change. But in what kind of water did these late medieval fishes start to swim? Were they still going to school in order to learn about the good life? I think the answer is yes. It’s pretty clear that new non-monastic universities still set out to learn about God in order to learn about the good life, though it can also be argued as many Orthodox Christians do, that the papal reforms introduced a passive rationalism that would lay the groundwork for a type of Cartesian anthropology that tended to elevate individual thought to something like the point of life. More on that in an upcoming post.

However you choose to see the advent of the university system in Europe, you really can’t avoid the next step in the history of Light People education. This part of the story is when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Things have never been the same.

Starting with the plague and ending with lots of protestors we’ll call reformers, men of all stripes started to preach their own gospel, a gospel not recognized by western Christians we’ll call Catholic. These reformers set out to fix what they saw as Papal hubris and well, lots of other things we can’t get into here. Let’s just say that after 150 years of terrible internecine warfare between Roman Catholics and Protestant reformers, even more universities were born, and each closely affiliated with a particular flavor of Christianity. Baptizers started schools, method-focused-men started schools, presbyters started schools and so on. The very first North American university (1636) was created to train men to congregate properly, to be Congregational pastors. That school? Harvard. And yet, in this maelstrom of diversity these shiny new-fangled, New World universities still managed to answer the education question with words like God and good and heaven.

But you know the story. God isn’t going to last forever at Harvard. Princeton isn’t going to remain a college dedicated to training Presbyterian preachers. No. Secularism was coming fast and like an angry conjoined twin, it would cut itself loose of the protesting Christians and in so doing drain the life out of reformed Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic.

The first truly secular university was founded in the United States by a guy named Benjamin Franklin. Originally named the Academy and Charitable School of the Province of Pennsylvania and then renamed the University of Pennsylvania in 1779, Franklin’s school was dedicated to the liberal arts. Students no longer read solely from the Christian tradition as professors aimed to “balance” competing perspectives by providing the antithesis of any philosophical or theological subject. God stuff was no longer required on exams and student papers. The same can be said of the University of Virginia, the school founded upon the ecumenist dogma of the Masonic Temple, a dogma championed by Thomas Jefferson. Education had come a long way and was, indeed, becoming deistic and atheistic. Still, in the 18th Century, every university in every corner of the globe remained, in some way, dedicated to the proposition that life had a spiritual dimension and that education must be dedicated to the pursuit of the good. Jefferson says this clearly (even if he did cut up the Bible and take out the miracle parts, including that whole resurrection ditty). Universities were keeping the good parts of the good life, but shooting the God parts out into space, out there in Deism-land where God took up residence. The watchmaker had wound his watch and now it ticked on its own.

All of this stripped down the pursuit of the good. The good gods of Deism wouldn’t last long. After the American Civil War and during the final settlement of North America by European settlers of all stripes, education took on the character of the practical merchant. It took on the character of its new creators, the oligarchs of our Gilded Age. Education became the millstone upon which the Robber Barons of rail, power, coal, steel and telecommunications would grind out a workforce. Entire curricula were designed to pound out cultural differences and homogenize the myriad immigrant experiences. History books told the same stories from cover to cover and from sea to shining sea. Bells rang out in high schools across the nation, signaling students to move from English to History to Math where they, like the new Model T, were outfitted with the latest educational fashion. High schools turned out highly regimented students strictly geared-up for a stripped-down workplace.

If you listen with your ear to the ground of history, you can hear the Captains of Industry designing their workforce: “Basic reading. Basic writing. Shape ‘em up and inject that sweet pure reason. 1-0-1-0, step by step, keep it straight and give me modern man!”

More and more young people went to school every year. Between 1890 and 1910 the literacy rate in the United States rose from 40% to 70%. By 1970, 60% of all high school age children attended school, this up from 2% in 1901. Today that number is above 95%. In short, the United States underwent a massive education revolution, creating a workforce of blue collar workers unrivaled anywhere in the world. But what was the epistemological water in which these new modern students swam? What was their pursuit? Was it for the good life? 

Spoiler alert: No, it was not.

The goal now was to produce product-making people. But just as important was the design of product-consuming people. The world builders needed both. And lots of both. In 1902, JD Rockefeller donated one million dollars to create the General Education Board. His family foundation proceeded to donate another $182 million more. Many more billionaires chimed in too. Together they offered billions of dollars worth of donations to the General Education Board.

And… what is the General Education Board you ask? It feels like something from Bugs Bunny or Orwell’s 1984.

A “real” man in the 21st century. Possibly an incel.

As it turns out, the General Education Board is basically the thing that spawned the thing we call “the American public school system”. That system quickly went to work to end the irrational pursuit of the good. And what did that mean for the educatiaon question and the Creator of the Universe? Mandatory theological studies for students joined prayer and navel-gazing in a land called irrelevant. History curricula that leaned into “the good life” leaned themselves into non-existence. Courses where students sat around and asked, “What is moral?” began to disappear in favor of courses that told students to ask, “What is logical?” Modernity was getting a new educational epistemology, our young people were beginning to think like computers, or perhaps more accurately, were beginning to not think at all. We fishes of modernity now swim in what I’ll call R20; one part reason, two parts opportunity. Opportunity here just means the opportunity to get a job. A job, we’ve finally arrived! We’ve reached the holy grail of modern schooling. A job! Rockefeller wanted to create people who would see the logic in working for him and consuming his stuff. He accomplished both by literally teaching us to forget the good.

Crazy?

Let’s put it another way. The pursuit of the good, the pursuit of the God, has been replaced by the pursuit of things rational. The deification of reason is the result of a scientific-style education that worships reason. Doubt the unseen and trust your reason. I mean, if we teach anything anymore we definitely teach skepticism. Doubt is how we have lived, it is the sound of the New World, the sound of science, the timbre of empiricism, the whine of atheism. We are taught to question everything because that is the method by which we will find truth. 

The good.

Weirdly, there it is again. The pursuit of the good! The pursuit of the good didn’t go away, it just shape-shifted from the pursuit of the God-man to the pursuit of the perfection of a method we call science. It shape-shifted from the pursuit of the good life, to the pursuit of good stuff, acquired by applying the scientific method to every walk of life.

Ones and zeros.

But such a pursuit is dying now. Doubt can’t plug the hoary holes it created. Humans only seem to be computer-like. We are meant for more than the acquisition of a method, even a method so dynamic as the one we call scientific. The epoch of practical stuff is over now. The computer mind can no longer explain itself and we have a meaning crisis. Education must begin again, and it will, whether we like it or not. The good life is our calling.

---