Education in an age of commercialism, bureaucracy, and propaganda

There is no point educating students into something that won’t serve them well. That is the biggest problem with American education today.

(Image: Mikael Kristenson/Unsplash.com)

Last month I complained about formal expertise. Although often very useful, I said, it can be blind to obvious realities.

The problem is that it wants its authority to seem indisputably objective and reliable. For that reason, it models itself on the modern natural sciences and emphasizes institutional consensus. So it ignores sources of knowledge—intuition, tradition, informal pattern recognition, personal insight and experience—that are often indispensable, and its conclusions are often affected by institutional bias.

Such at least are common tendencies. The result is that certified experts are often wrong, even obviously wrong, especially when they deal with human affairs. Last month I provided examples regarding education and responses to COVID-19.

Even so, many people seem to believe that institutionally accredited experts should run the world, because the kind of knowledge they possess is the only reliable way to know anything. Ordinary people are thus expected to ignore their own observations and common sense—now considered ignorance and prejudice—and simply accept what they are told. Today many people treat that as the very definition of rationality.

But such complaints about overblown claims don’t say much about the importance of actual knowledge. We need knowledge to deal with the world and place ourselves within it, so it’s obviously basic to our lives. We normally pick up most of our knowledge from experience and the people around us, in a sort of informal apprenticeship in living in the world. But organized effort is also necessary. Some things are better learned that way, and some aspects of life are subtle and complicated and require specialized study.

Schools and universities are therefore, in principle, very good things. But what knowledge should they teach, and how should they go about teaching it? That leads us into the most basic questions about formal education: what are its goals, and how are those goals to be achieved?

The basic goal of education, it seems to me, is to incline people to act well in the world and make them more able to do so. To the extent possible—some things are difficult to inculcate reliably in an organized way—it should also help them in their pursuit of ultimate goods.

But how can these things be done? Providing technical knowledge is certainly part of it. We need people to study medicine, engineering, the natural sciences, and so on. Beyond that, all serious pursuits have technical aspects: literature involves grammar and literary form, history methods of developing and evaluating evidence, philosophy the ability to understand exact definitions and follow detailed arguments. It is all to the good for there to be specialists, and for non-specialists to understand something about the basic principles they follow.

But however important technical matters are, they are secondary because they have to do with means. Overall, education should concentrate on helping young people connect to the human world and orient themselves within it, and through it to the basic purposes of life. For that reason topics such as history, literature, philosophy, and religion should be basic to the education most people receive, and especially to the advanced education intended for future leaders.

These subjects should be taught in a way that points students toward reality and our good, including our highest good. So they should be studied less from an academic or specifically practical standpoint than for the insight into man, God, the world, and our own society they can give us. Without that orientation they won’t have an integrating purpose that makes sense of them.

They should also be studied for their position within the tradition into which the students are being educated. Education needs to be education into a tradition: a tested structure of habits, attitudes, and recognitions that joins us together and orders our lives. Otherwise it becomes either indoctrination or a jumble of disjointed facts and injunctions.

Even scientific and technical education is education into a tradition, the tradition of the particular field of inquiry and practice, and of science and technology as a whole. That is why it is important who a young scientist has studied under—whether his supervisor had learned how to do science well and was able to pass that knowledge on to his students.

What is needed for good education?

First, a coherent tradition that is adequate to the world in which students will live and work. There is no point educating students into something that won’t serve them well. That is the biggest problem with American education today. In an age of commercialism, bureaucracy, propaganda, and multiculturalism, as well as social media that separate us from each other by connecting us equally to everyone everywhere, our tradition as Americans is rapidly disintegrating. What its remnants offer is not a life worth choosing.

To make matters worse, powerful institutions and currents of thought support that trend. Governing elites are unified by an outlook that combines technocracy and hedonistic utilitarianism with desire for stability and ever-more-comprehensive control of social life. They advance these goals by weakening people’s non-market and non-bureaucratic connections, and thus their ability to think and act independently.

Our rulers refer to that process as “educating for change” and “ensuring that everyone participates fully in contemporary society.” Others might call it “technocratic imperialism” and “converting human beings into human resources.” Either way, the question we should ask is whether the life it offers us—one composed of career, consumption, optional hobbies and lifestyle choices, and acceptance of whatever experts tell us—is the best we can realistically hope for.

It seems doubtful a serious Catholic will say it is. He is more likely to see it as practical atheism and worship of self and the social machine. For him the question thus becomes what sort of life and education is best for escaping the hole our society is falling into, and with it its educational system.

There has been much discussion recently regarding recovery of Christian tradition and community. On the educational side of that question a great deal of work has been done to promote a rebirth of humane and Catholic education. Someone who has not been deeply involved can’t give a full account of these activities. Even so, a relative outsider like myself should be capable of recognizing things that work and people who are worth listening to. Otherwise, reliance on superior knowledge would be a matter of blind irrational faith.

And what is notable is that education that works seems most often—as general principle suggests—to be education that emphasizes history, cultural tradition, and engagement with man’s highest goals. The growing movement toward Catholic classical education provides an example. It turns out that the Faith, together with the Western tradition it formed and within which it developed, can still be the basis for an education that is far better and more sustaining that what is generally on offer.

There have also been outstandingly successful university programs that study the great books of the West within a Catholic setting. The Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, and the Saint Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco, while it retained its independence, provide outstanding examples. The existence of such programs is often precarious, especially when associated with mainstream institutions. That may be because their goals are at odds with today’s world, or it could be a clash of personalities: the leaders of such efforts have often been outstanding teachers, and the academic world has a reputation for jealousy.

However that may be, what has been done can be done again. For years new or rather restored ideals of education have been emerging, taking concrete form, and gathering adherents. The homeschooling movement provides multiple additional examples. And the worse “mainstream” schools become, the better the outlook for true reform. But man proposes and God disposes. Time will tell, and while we wait we can only do our best.


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About James Kalb 148 Articles
James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism(ISI Books, 2008), Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013), and, most recently, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico Press, 2023).

3 Comments

  1. Some of your concerns are valid, particularly the way political and social leaders use expert analysis to move an agenda. Pinning the blame on experts themselves, especially the ones who are not in political office is a problem. Three times in 16 years, US citizens have elected a president with a business background who had promised to make things better because, I guess, all politicians are bad and a businessman in office was good.

    “The problem is that it wants its authority to seem indisputably objective and reliable.”

    Well, no. When you hire an expert, she or he wants to be listened to.

    ” … conclusions are often affected by institutional bias.”

    That happens far more often when non-experts make decisions without consulting widely. It is part of the human condition, not exclusive to people who have expertise in anything.

    “Last month I provided examples regarding education and responses to COVID-19.”

    Most of those examples showed their own institutional bias. Responding to a gobal pandemic at the early stages involved making the best decisions before the mutated and mutating virus was fully studied. Changes in public policy represented the scientific process as well as a willingness to make sure the US health system didn’t collapse.

    “Even so, many people seem to believe that institutionally accredited experts should run the world …”

    Not really. We want competent leaders. Experts make good consultants.

    • Those are some valid points Todd. Thank you for sharing. This is an important conversation and it’s important to hear all sides. Reflecting on this, it seems as if the core issue is how politicized the expert opinions have become. Your comment:

      “Well, no. When you hire an expert, she or he wants to be listened to.“

      Is true. The question this raises is why are some expert opinions “shunned” from public discourse, while others are promulgated as “unquestionable truth”? Recently we have witnessed experts loss their standing, reputation and even their livelihood because they shared their opinion, based on their research and experience just because it deviated from the “narrative of the day”. We have seen how certain information is censored from social media platforms because it was deemed “misinformation” only to find out later that it was true. Everywhere you turn, it seems as if people are celebrating “shutting down” someone with a different opinion. All to often the shutting down is nothing more than a vicious attack on the individual’s character or appearance, rather than having a good faith dialogue. In fact, is there still room for true, good faith public discourse?

      It seems that the whole idea of good faith public discourse has been tossed onto the waste heap of useless ideas, which have no place in today’s “enlightened” society. There will always be “bad actors” on both sides of the issues we face, but we deserve an inclusive society that makes room for “good faith” dialogue, with concerns from all sides of the issues we face, being shared, scrutinized and debated. More importantly, how can we expect students to embrace the critical thinking necessary to advance our society if they are taught that you can’t ask questions like “why” or challenge expert opinions without being attacked as bigoted or hateful. Education is no place for such polemics. Unfortunately , there seems to be no more room for many Christian based beliefs in today’s academic world. Only the current ideological narratives are permitted.

      At the end of the day, we should not fully embrace and “give ourselves” to any ideology or political party. Both the ideology and political party work to enslave us to a constricted narrative. Rather we should become slaves to Christ. He will help guide us to truth. And truth rooted in Christ and his teachings should be the goal of all experts.

  2. The big problem now with Catholic schools is that they are so expensive that they are serving primarily the upper classes while the poor are left in the public schools.

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