Education: Where We Stand - The conservative end of education

Harvey Mansfield

Education policies are not enough. What we say we want them for matters too, and matters more. Con servatives have not been saying enough about the content of education.

To see what I mean, listen first to the opposition. On a radio ad in Massachusetts, the National Education Association makes a pitch for reducing class size. You hear a noisy hubbub when the class has 24 kids; but when the number falls to 15, there's nothing but quiet- productive quiet, you are led to suppose. The ad ends: "If you want to improve education, ask a teacher."

So, the woes of our education have nothing to do with the teachers! On the contrary, teachers will tell us what we must do. What we need is smaller classes, which, it is not said, will require more teachers. Quite a few more-60 percent more, if the example given is generalized with the aid of some elementary algebra. The result will be more quiet, or better discipline, in classrooms.

The teachers' union asks us to believe that it wants order in classrooms, that fewer children in them will do the trick, and that this is all we need, or the first thing we need, to improve education. It's easy to guess that the unstated means to more decorum-more teachers-is really the end that the NEA has in view.

Yet to do the union credit, one also suspects that it has a more serious end in mind. It wants not only more jobs for its members, but also a certain kind of education for our children, the kind its members, or its activists, believe in. The end they desire is an equalized citizenry averse to risk, competition, and conflict, in which each person is simultaneously wrapped up in himself and compassionate to others.

Conservatives need to oppose this degeneration of our democracy. We need to get beyond the banality of the self-comforting self and the superficiality of a compassion that always ends in a government program. We need to expose the deliberate leveling of our people by the liberals who are in charge of our education. The best way to do that is to be explicit about the conservative end of education.

At present, conservatives advocate school policies such as more discipline, learning by rote, going back to the basics, teaching right and wrong, and making teachers accountable. They promote changes such as vouchers and charter schools designed to liberate our schools from unions and liberal bureaucrats. These are reforms worth fighting for, but it is tempting to invest too much in them by treating them as ends in themselves.

Conservatives should keep their eyes on the end beyond: the content of our education. We get a glimpse of this end in the general concern over falling standards in education. Though many deplore the obvious relaxation that comes with easy grading, only conservatives raise it as an issue. Here above all we witness the amazing decline in our time of liberalism as a philosophy of education. When I was younger, my father (a professor) and my teachers were liberals, but they knew, unlike liberals today, that true education is exacting. They took it for granted that a good teacher is above all a demanding one. Even today, the teachers we remember are not the easygoing, ever-smiling, all- tolerating ones, but the taskmasters and the hard graders.

What is so special about high standards? High standards make you excel, and to excel you have to look up to something above yourself as you are now. You have to aspire to something. The gravest fault of our education today is that its content gives us nothing to aspire to. Conservatives need to say that the end of our education is to make democratic citizens with minds-or why not say souls?-that can love, admire, respect something or someone above themselves. This end has to be spoken or asserted because it is not beside us, tangible, ready-to- hand. It is above us, and invisible.

From this elevated outlook we can look down on the impoverishment of today's education, based as it is on self-esteem. Our liberals' notion of self- esteem derives from a distinction between self and other- abstract terms for me and you. The distinction is then overcome by mutual recognition when the self sees itself in the other-or you and I decide we are not so different as we first believed. Abstractness is as close as liberals get to profundity, but the effect is merely to level people out to their common denominator. I recall that when I was in high school, the worst thing you could be called is "stuck up." The liberal notion of self-esteem is nothing but that juvenile attitude dressed up as philosophy. It says that you can be known as a nice guy if you drop your pretensions-the pretensions that arise from aspirations, from the determination to look up.

The conservative end of education is certainly to make democratic citizens, not aristocrats. Democratic citizens are loyal to democracy and capable of maintaining or advancing it. The content of our education should include both loyalty and capability, because both are necessary and neither element guarantees the other. We want a great people that is sustained by great individuals. The word "great" comes easily to Americans; it is our common aspiration to be a great people. But there is little of greatness in the content of our education now.

This need not be. The worst of the liberals' education is visible now in their promotion of multiculturalism and environmentalism. Multiculturalism tries to show that when you look at the apparent diversity of peoples they turn out underneath to be all the same. The moral lesson of multiculturalism is a lazy, cynical relativism of "nothing matters." All rulers are oppressors except the ones we like. But multiculturalism can be saved if it is improved-in courses of world history that focus on the excellence of each nation and its contribution to progress. Here is genuine pluralism without flatness, unafraid to pass judgment and eager to teach respect.

Similarly, environmentalism need not be the exercise in moralism and self- hatred it is now. We can teach our children to look up to the beauty and sublimity of nature. We can also show them that nature poses a challenge to man: We must struggle to survive against nature; we want to improve on nature; we yearn for immortality beyond nature. These are subjects for the discoveries of science and the high themes of literature.

In the course of thinking over the content of our education, conservatives might educate themselves. Why do we call certain human beings great? Why are they heroes? Of course they had great capacities, but they were heroes because they looked up to something greater, more perfect than themselves-an ideal. Conservatives must capture idealism from the liberals. We look up to those who look up. A man is never more manly, nor a woman more womanly, than in devotion to something greater than the self. Today, heroes are reduced to role models, and heroism is leveled to make it more attainable. But a hero is to be admired. He is beyond you and your precious self, just as a hero is devoted to something beyond himself.

Our education needs to return to simple right and wrong, that is true. Not all moral questions are complex, and it is time to call a halt to the liberal sophistication which consists in making excuses. Still, some moral questions are complex and require thoughtful de lib era tion. Why did the American founders compromise with slavery, and why did Abraham Lincoln move so cautiously against it? Here is an example with which to introduce our students, at the appropriate age, to moral complexity, to the need for reflection, and to the puzzles of human life. Idealism charges up the hill, but moral reflection looks carefully and calculates. We need both, but they are not easy to combine.

A word on religion, since many will assume that when I speak of looking up I mean to God. Well, probably, but not necessarily. Our country is so constituted that it needs religion but cannot rightly adopt a religion. The conservative end of education must respect this difficult fact, and we must hope that God understands it as we do. Maybe this sounds irreverent, but education is not a perfectly solemn affair. Right now, I feel myself to be in the ridiculous position of having delivered a commencement address that nobody invited me to give.

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