When Education is Worse than Useless

Considering we have a government that spends 794 billion on pre-college education alone, it’s kind of important that we know why we’re doing it. Luckily nothing could be more obvious. Education is a great thing. It builds community and fosters growth (whatever that means). Mostly it makes it so that people can get money when they grow up, that’s pretty important, right?

St. Augustine has a less favorable view of education. “As a boy I played ballgames, and that play slowed down the speed at which I learned letters with which, as an adult, I might play a less credible game.”

Augustine looks at what adults are doing with their education. They aren’t serving the needs of their communities. They aren’t creating Art that portrays truth, goodness, and beauty. They certainly are not turning their hearts towards God’s love and mercy. What they are doing is seeking worldly pleasure through envy, dishonesty, and manipulation.

The same is undoubtedly true in the modern world. People get educated so that they can make a six-figure salary and be looked up to in society. For too many people education is nothing more than a stack of clearance papers, the odd-misshapen little key to a Western life. It’s the gateway to living out a progressive, utilitarian, hedonistic, materialistic American dream.

A teacher at a nearby high school remarked during a discussion about the prevalence of erotica among teenagers. “Well,” he said, “At least they’re reading right?” Our culture takes it as a given that certain things are just necessarily good, no matter what they’re used for. Augustine recognized this pattern in his society as well, remarking that his schoolmasters “were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory.”

It raises the question: Is it better that children be literate if they’re just going to use their literacy for the corruption of their souls? Is “ignorance” really so bad, so long as one leads a virtuous, happy life? Why do we educate at all if all we’re doing is tearing our children from innocent play so that they one day participate in the ungodly world of money-grubbing, status-seeking, and pleasure-hunting that education prepares one for?

In the world of classical education, we frequently refer to another Augustinian concept when we discuss the purpose of education: “ordo amoris” or “the ordering of loves.”  All of us—or at least all pro-life people—know that a baby ought to be loved more than a sandwich. This is simply because the baby has more inherent value than a sandwich.

 If you apply this concept to every single thing or concept in existence, you find that they are all related to each other by love. Should America go to war with Germany? The question is a question of loves—in that case, the love of peace versus the love of justice. Theoretically, the goal of a good education should be not just to teach children information, but to teach them what they are to do with that information and how they are to order their loves—and lives.

But isn’t that indoctrination? Teaching children what they should like and dislike seems pretty antithetical to freedom. Shouldn’t they be allowed to decide for themselves?

Imagine putting a shotgun into the hands of a ten-year-old. By no stretch of the imagination is it “indoctrination” to teach the ten-year-old where, what, and when it is appropriate to blast that thing. If Francis Bacon is correct and “knowledge is power,” then the information contained in an entire childhood’s worth of education is easily as potent as a twelve gauge. Yet it would be considered blatantly irresponsible to hand firearms to people without instructing them how to handle them safely, but it is the norm to educate children without giving them any instruction on how to properly use it.

Perhaps people have a right to be educated. After all, our human heritage and the wonder of God’s creation belong to all of us. But we also have a right to know right from wrong, to not have virtue obfuscated and hidden from us. If schools were teaching children to habitually self-flagellate that would be considered child abuse of the worst nature, so why is it that we allow schools to teach children to habitually choose vice instead of virtue—a pattern that does more damage to a child’s soul than flagellation does to the body?

If the only point of education is to give people the tools with which to live unvirtuous, dishonest, self-serving lives then society is far better off without it. The truth is though, there is a real point to education—even though we have lost sight of it. That point is not just the empowerment of education, but proper instruction as to where that power ought to be directed. We would do well to listen to Augustine; if we’re going to stop children from wasting their childhood on games, let’s make sure it’s not just so they can waste their lives on less innocent ones.