Education in America, 2. G.C. Roche, III.

EDUCATION IN AMERICA GEORGE CHARLES ROCHE III 2. Freedom,..7V!orality;and Education To FULLY appreciate the short comings of our present educational framework and face realistically the task of rebuilding it requires a careful and complete understand ing of the concepts we value in society - a "thinking through" of our own first principles. What kind of educational goals do we really desire? To Plato, proper education of the young consisted in helping them to form the correct mental habits for living by "the rule of right reason." But, how do we de fine right reason? Dr. Roche is Director of Seminars for the Foundation for Economic Education. He has taught history and philosophy in college and maintains a special interest in American edu cation. An important part of education centers on the attempts of society to transmit its culture to the ris ing generation. What are the ac complishments of past genera tions? What have been the goals and values by which society has lived? What guidelines should be available to the rising generation as it faces its own inevitable prob lems?

Still, education must be far more than the mere indoctrination of the young into the methods of the past. A hallmark of Western civilization is its educational focus upon the development of the indi vidual's capacity to function as an individual, tempered by recogni tion of the common characteristics 691 692 THE FREEMAN November imposed upon all civilized com munities by the unchanging as pects of human nature. In this sense, the proper goal of educa tion is everywhere the same: im prove the individual as an individ ual, stressing the peculiar and unique attributes each has to de velop, but also emphasizing the development of that "higher side" shared by all men when true to their nature. This educational goal might be described as the quest for "structured freedom," free dom for the individual to choose within a framework of values, values universal to all men simply because they are human beings.

A Framework of Values Education in this best sense re quires no elaborate paraphernalia. It is characterized, not by elabor ate classrooms or scientific "meth ods," but by an emphasis upon the continuity and changelessness of the human condition. The effort to free the creative capacities of the individual, to allow him to be come truly himself, must recognize the values which past generations have found to be liberating, ask ing that each new generation make the most of inherited values while striving to enrich that heritage. True education is society's attempt to enunciate certain ultimate val ues upon which individuals, and hence society, may safely build. The behavior of children toward their parents, toward their respon sibilities, and even toward the learning process itself is closely tied to such a framework of values. Thus, in the long run, the re lationship we develop between teacher and pupil, the type of learning we encourage, the man ner in which we organize our school systems, in short, the total meaning we give to the word "edu cation," will finally be determined by our answers to certain key questions concerning ultimate values.

Those who built the Western World never questioned this conti nuity of our civilization nor at tempted to pluck out the threads that run through its fabric. Ever since the Hebrews and Greeks made their great contributions to Western thought, it has been taken for granted that through the life of the mind man can transcend his physical being and reach new heights. Self realization, discipline, loyalty, honor, and devotion are prevailing concepts in the literatures, philosophies, and moral precepts that have shaped and Inirrored Western man for cen turies. I The necessity for such an un derlying value system has been well established in the work of such eminent social critics of our 1 Thomas Molnar, The Future of Edu cation, p. 30.

1968 . FREEDOM, MORALITY, AND EDUCATION 693 age as C. S. Lewis and Richard Weaver. The case for such an un derlying systeI!1 must not depend upon the whims of debate with the relativistic, subjectivist spokesmen who today dominate so much of American education and thought. Those who hold that cer tain civilized values are worthy of transmission to the young, that some standards are acceptable and others are no~, are on firm ground in their insistence that such val ues and standards must be the core of any meaningful educational framework. Truth The late C. S. Lewis, an urbane and untiring critic of the intellec tual tendencies of the age, used the word Tao to convey the core of values and standards tradition ally and universally accepted by men, in the Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental frameworks. The Tao assumes a fixed standard of principle and sentiment, an objective order to the universe, a higher value than a full stomach. As such, the Tao presupposes standards quite in compatible with the subjective, rel ativist suppositions of "modern man. We are told by the relativists that the Tao must be set aside; the accumulated wisdom of cen turies, the values of East as well as West, of Christian and nonChristian, the striving of the past to discover the higher side of man and man's conduct, must not stand in the path of "progress." Thus, the "revolt" of the "Now Genera tion."

Advances in technology account in part for the denial of our herit age. Since scientific and tech nological knowledge tends to ac cumulate (Le., be subject to em pirical verification as correct or incorrect, with the correct then added to the core of previously verified knowledge), many people assume that man's scientific prog ress means he has outgrown his past and has now become the mas ter of his own fate. Moral ques tions are of a different order. Wisdom, not science or technology, points the way for progress here. For an individual to be inspired by the wisdom and moral recti tude of others, he must first make such wisdom his own. This is edu cation in its finest sense. Plato's "Rule of Right Reason" To grasp the accumulated moral wisdom of the ages is to become habituated to such concerns and to their claims upon one's per sonal conduct. At that point, the rule of right reason, the goal which Plato set for education, be comes the guiding light of the individual.

This rule of right reason could 694 THE FREEMAN November provide the frame of reference so lacking in today's society. Many modern existentialists complain that the world is meaningless and absurd. It is not surprising that the world no longer has meaning for those who recognize none but materialistic values. The world of reason and freedom, the real world in which it matters a great deal what the individual chooses to do, is revealed only in the spiritual quality of man that so many mod erns deny. It is this higher spirit ual quality of the individual, evi denced in his creative capacity to choose, which alone can give mean ing to life and transform the world of the individual. This is the rec ognition of those higher values that lead to Truth. Such an aware ness on the part of the individual, such a rule of right reason, will be, in Berdyaev's words "... the triumph of the realm of spirit over that of Caesar .... " This triumph must be achieved anew by each individual as he strives for ma turity . . . and his struggle for maturity constitutes the educative process.

A Higher Law Despite our vaunted "modern breakthroughs in knowledge," it is doubtful that anyone now alive possesses more wisdom than a Plato, an Epictetus, a Paul, or an Augustine. Yet much of what passes for "education" in our time either denies this accumulation of past wisdom or belittles it in the eyes of the student. Truth, after all, is a measure of what is, a measure of an infinite realm with in which the individual is con stantly striving to improve his powers of perception. As the in dividual draws upon his heritage and applies self-discipline, he comes to recognize more and more of that truth and to understand it. The individual is thus able to find himself and his place in the uni verse, to become truly free, by rec ognizing a fixed truth, a definite right and wrong, not subject to change by human whim or politi cal dictate. The individual can only he free when he serves a higher truth than political decree or unchecked appetite.

Such a definition of freedom in consonance with a higher law has its roots deep in the consciousness of civilized man. In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost partici pation in, the Rta-that great ritual or pattern of nature and super nature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Right eousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that the Good was 1968 FREEDOM, MORALITY, AND EDUCATION 695 "beyond existence" and Wordsworth tha t through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it. The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was be fore the Creator Himself. It is Na ture, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which. the universe goes on, the Way in which things ever lastingly emerge, stilly and tran quilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and super-cosmic progression, conform ing all activities to that great ex emplar. "In ritual," say the Ana lects, "it is harmony with Nature that is prized." The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being "true."2 Thus, the Christian insistence that man must order his affairs ac cording to a higher law is far from unique. Such a view has been held in common by all civilized men. Our own early institutions of higher learning were deeply committed to the transmission of such a heritage. The nine colleges founded in America in the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries, (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton, Penn sylvania, Rutgers, and William and Mary) were all of religious origin. Such was the early Ameri can view of education.

Human Freedom and the Soul of Man There is a measure of truth in the Grand Inquisitor's assertion that many people do not wish to be free. FreedOM can b~ pninful, and someone like the Grand Inquis itor usually is at hand, quite will ing to take over the chore of mak ing decisions for others. Those civilizations which have prospered, however, have been peopled by those who appreciated the trans cendent importance of their indi viduality and who valued the free dom necessa.ry for its expression and fulfillment. "Education is not, as Bacon thought, a means of showing people how to get what they want; education is an exer cise by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having."3 Education is an exercise by which men will learn to want what is worth having. This is a recur rent idea among Western thinkers. Aristotle wrote that the proper aim of education was to make the pupil like and dislike the proper things. Augustine defined the proper role of education as that which accorded to every object in the universe the kind and degree 2 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 3 "Science and Human Freedom,"

pp. 27-28. Manas, Feb. 28, 1968, p. 7.

696 THE FREEMAN November of love appropriate to it. In Plato's Republic, the well-educated youth is described as one . . . who would see most clearly what ever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give de lighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her. What is this higher side of 'hu man nature which can be culti vated, this higher side of man which will learn to want what is worth having? According to the standards of Western civilization, it is the human soul. If we seek the prime root of all this, we are led to the acknowledg ment of the full philosophical re ality of that concept of the soul, so variegated in its connotations, which L\ristotle described as the first prin ciple of life in any organism and viewed as endowed with suprama terial intellect in man, and which Christianity revealed as the dwell ing place of God and as made for eternal life. In the flesh and bones of man there exists a soul which is a spirit and which has a greater value than the whole physical universe.

Dependent though we may be upon the lightest accidents of matter, the human person exists by the virtue of the existence of his soul, which dominates time and death. It is the spirit which is the root of per sonality.4 Our Choices Affect Our Lives Some of those who espouse the idea of freedom are quick to de claim such terms as soul, God, or Higher Law, feeling that such "mysticism" denies the individual the capacity to freely choose since it binds him to a higher Authority. This is a groundless fear. In fact, the whole idea of a higher law and a God-given capacity for individ ual free choice only opens the door into a world in which man is constantly remaking the world as he modifies and expands his own horizons. It is precisely the fact that the soul of the individual derives from a higher order of nature that allows man to con stantly remake the world and his own life according to his own un derstanding and his own percep tion. This is the source of the self discipline which produces honor, integrity, courage, and the other attributes of civilized man. This is the source of the framework within which all meaningful, civi lized choice takes place.

4 Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 8.

1968 FREEDOM, MORALITY, AND EDUCATION 697 Still, the existentialists may be right about one point. It is true that man finds himself encased within a body and a material ex istence which he did not choose. It is also true that he finds him self limited by the ideas peculiar to his time. Even if he chooses to fight such ideas, the very nature of that choice and struggle is de termined by the ideas he finds around him. This is why man is at once the molder and the molded, the actor and acted upon of his tory. Weare all a part of an exis tential situation that is, and yet is not, of our own making. In a very real sense of the word, we are shaped by generations long past, yet have a role to play in the ~haping process for generations to come. It is this capacity to choose, limited by the framework we have inherited, which man must come to understand and deal with if he is to be truly "educated."

In principle, therefore, it does not matter whether one generation ap plauds the previous generation or hisses it - in either event, it carries the previous generation within it self. If the image were not so ba roque, we might present the genera tions not horizontally but vertically, one on top of the other, like acrobats in the circus making a human tower. Rising one on the shoulders of an other, he who is on top enjoys the sensation of dominating the rest; but he should also note that at the same time he is the prisoner of the others. This would serve to warn us that what has passed is not merely the past and nothing more, that we are not riding free in the air but standing on its shoulders, that we are in and of the past, a most def inite past which continues the hu man trajectory up to the present moment, which could have been very different from what it was, but which, once having been, is irremedi able - it is our present, in which, whether we like it or not, we thrash about like shipwrecked sailors. 5 Unless he seeks only the free dom of shipwrecked sailors, free dom to drown in an existential sea, the individual desperately needs to recognize that his truly liberating capacity to choose is hinged upon a moral framework and certain civilized preconditions which at once limit and enhance his choice. It is this recognition that constitutes civilization.

Civilized Man What is it then, that civilized man comes to value? One possible answer is given by Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie and of the equally delightful Maw Green, Irish washerwoman and homey philosopher par excellence. In one of Gray's comic strips, he 5 Jose Ortega y Gasset, M an and Crisis, pp. 53-54.

698 THE FREEMAN November confronts Maw Green with a slob bering, unkempt, aggressive boob, who shouts, "I got rights, ain't I? I'm as good as any 0' those big shots! Nobody's better'n mel I say all men are born equaU Ain't that right?" Maw Green maintains her boundless good humor and agrees that all men are indeed born equal, but she turns aside to confide to the reader, "But thank Hiven a lot of folks outgrow it!" Perhaps that civilizing task of "outgrowing it" is how the educa tive process can best help the in dividual. Yet in a time of collaps ing standards, of "campus re volts," such a task for the educa tive process seems impossible of fulfillment. If so, Mario Savio and lVlarkRudd may be samples of things to come, of tomorrow's torchbearers upon whom our civili zation depends. Surely, such a prospect is fright ening to most of us. If we are to avoid such a fate, the underly ing problem must he faced squar ly: Does a proper definition of the nature of the universe and the na ture and role of man within the universe presuppose the existence of a fixed standard of value, uni versally applicable to all men at all times? To accept such a view is to challenge directly the root assumption of the modern world ... a world unwilling to accept the discipline inherent in such a fixed value system, a world finding self congratulation in its illusory man made heaven on earth, a heaven blending equal portions of sub jectivism and relativism.

Man Must Be Free to Choose There have been among us those men of intellect and integrity who have challenged the dominant men tality of the age, warning that man must be free to choose and yet properly instructed in the mak ing of his choice. They have in sisted that proper values can emerge and be defined by the pass age of time and the accumulation of human experience. This accu mulated wisdom, this framework of values, thus provides an en hancement of meaningful choice, not limiting but rather clarifying, the individual's power to decide. Such individual choice, plus the framework within which that choice takes place, is a reflection of higher values than society it self: Freedom of the human personality cannot be given by society, and by its source and nature it cannot de pend upon society - it belongs to man himself, as a spiritual being. And society, unless it makes totali tarian claims, can only recognize this freedom. This basic truth about freedom was reflected in the doc trines of natural law, of the rights 1968 FREEDOM, MORALITY, AND EDUCATION 699 of man, independent of the state, of freedom, not only as freedom within society, but freedom from society with its limitless claims on man. 6 To a maverick like Berdyaev, freedom was the key word, but even he admitted that man was a spiritual being and that nature had her own laws demanding re spect from the individual as he made his choices.

Many others in the civilized tra dition of individual freedom and a fixed moral framework have per ceived that the individual must be not only free, but sufficiently edu cated in the proper values to per mit intelligent choice. Albert Jay Nock, for instance, believed that . . . the Great Tradition would go on "because the forces of nature are on its side," and it had an invincible ally, "the self-preserving instinct of humanity." Men could forsake it, but come back to it they would. They had to, for their collective existence could not permanently go on without it. Whole societies might deny it, as America had done, substituting bread and buncombe, power and riches or expediency; "but in the end, they will find, as so many so cieties have already found, that they must return and seek the re generative power of the Great Tradi tion, or lapse into decay and death."7 6 Nicholas Berdyaev, The Realm of Spirit and The Real'l1J-of Caesar, pp.

59-60. 7 Robert M. Crunden, The Mind & Art of Albert Jay N ock, p. 134. Nock was not alone in his in sistence upon such standards for the education of future genera tions. He stood in the distin guished company of such men as Paul Elmer More, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Gilbert K. Chesterton, to name but a few of the defenders of the Great Tradition. These have been the civilized men of our age. With Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, the distinguished Episcopal clergyman who saw so clearly the tendency of our times, we might ponder our future: I am quite sure that the trouble with us has been that we have not seriously and bravely put to our selves the question, "What is man?" or, if and when we have asked it, we have usually been content with answers too easy and too super ficial. Most of us were trained to believe - and we have gone on the assumption ever since - that in order to be modern and intelligent and scholarly all that is required is to avoid asking "Why am I?" and im merse oneself in a vast detail of specialized study and in ceaseless activity. We have been so busy go ing ahead that we have lost any idea of where it is exactly that we are going or trying to go. This is, I do believe, the thing that has ruined the world in the last half century.8 We have lost our philosophic 8 Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Edu cation, p. 162.

700 THE FREEMAN November way in the educational community. We have often forgotten the moral necessity of freedom, and have us ually forgotten the self-discipline which freedom must reflect if it is to function within the moral order. As parents, as human be ings, as members of society, we must insist that our educational framework produce neither auto matons nor hellions. The individ ual must be free to choose, yet must be provided with a frame work of values within which mean ingful, civilized choice can take place. That two-fold lesson must lie at the heart of any renaissance of American education. ~ The next article of this series will discuss "Scientism and the Collapse of Standards." THE FREEMAN ON MICROFILM Microfilmcopiesof currentas well as of back issuesof THE FREEMAN may be purchasedfrom Xerox UniversityMicrofilms 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106.