A Conservative Agenda for Education

A Conservative View of the World

Fundamental to the conservative ideal is a belief in pluralism, which is the honorable coexistence of ideas and systems which are diverse one from another. That is why the article a is used in the title of this article rather than the, for no one speaks for all conservatives.

A second key idea is the importance of the individual person. Each human being is seen as being precious, to be honored, to be encouraged to reach his or her potential. Part of honoring individuality is to reward the person for good things done and to hold the individual responsible for bad things done.

A third foundation idea is that of the importance of morality. There are good things to be done and bad things which may be done. Good things are those acts which a person performs which contribute to the welfare and happiness of the society to which the individual belongs and at the same time ennoble and enhance the character of the person who does them. Selfishness and self-indulgence are seen as the opposition to good.

A fourth key to this conservative approach highlights the importance of the family unit. United in blood, shared language, ideals, affection, and problems, the family is the basic social, educational and economic unit of society. Whatever destroys it, destroys society and human happiness.

A fifth fundamental is the importance of political freedom. Only when free from domination by other human beings can the individual fully develop, can morality flourish, can the family perform its role well, can human beings find lasting happiness.

While the five ideas expressed here are not all of the key notions essential to this conservative view, they are sufficient for illuminating a conservative agenda for the improvement of education.

Item: To improve the quality of education.

Since the development of the individual requires obtaining good education, the quality of educational opportunity is first in importance. Specifics to accomplish this are read at hand.

First, there needs to be a change from emphasis on teaching to emphasis on learning in our society. Learning is a real, measurable, improvable thing, whereas teaching is more ephemeral, difficult to assess, not easily transferred as a skill. Emphasis on learning places more importance on the initiative of the learner, makes the “teacher” a resource for the learner rather than a master. Traditional emphasis on teaching has led to “telling,” the supposition that one the teacher has exposed the correct words on a topic, that the teaching function is complete.

Second, there needs to be a shift from emphasis on “knowledge” learning to skill learning. Were language skills the basis of everyone’s education, it is quite possible that we would release the potential of genius in our society at a hundredfold rate. The boredom engendered by presentation of endless facts and definitions is serious enough, but much worse is the stunting of judgment when the student is shielded from the idea that every assertion is an evaluation of the relationship between evidence and conclusion. Enthusiasm for learning is engendered in creative learning, where skills are mastered in the process of producing ideas and “facts.”

Third, the measure of educational attainment should shift more to competence, away from credit. The common denominator of credit is suffering seat time. Competence, that great threat to poor teaching, is the hallmark of learning, and when skill rather than verbal repetition of prescribed answers is valued, the measurement of educational efficacy is made much easier. Credit for schooling is like our unbacked currency. It has no intrinsic worth, is being progressively devalued, and one day its sham will be so obvious to everyone that this house of house of cards will collapse into regretted history.

Fourth, there needs to be a division of labor. Teaching should not be done by the same person as the one who certifies educational attainment. Everyone who has attended school knows that the best teachers are respecters of persons, that grades and credit are given on differing bases for different persons. Separating out the awarding of competence certification from the facilitation of learning would eliminate a built-in conflict of interest in the teacher who is at the same time advocate, judge and jury over the student, and would align student and teacher as friends fighting the common enemy; which is incompetence.

Fifth, learning needs to be whole, experimental, and multi-dimensional, as opposed to being simply verbal. Skills need to be learned, applied, and evaluated in the life-setting in which they will be used. Large classes and verbal learning would remain only when the application of that learning is to be made in large classes with purely verbal responses. Apprenticeship, internship, cooperative education, laboratory work, and field work need to capture the balance of what we call “higher” education.

Only as the quality of our educational delivery improves do we honor the individual person. Each deserves our best rather than just that which is convenient or traditional.

Item: To improve the quantity of education.

This conservative goal for education is to make as much education available to every human being as he or she desires and is willing to “pay” for. The society in which this goal might be realized would be different from our own. Educational efficiency would need to be increased severalfold. Individuals would need greater confidence that they would not be fed the east wind when they sought instruction. The economic base of the society must be secure enough that every person could support himself or herself in honorable employment and to have a surplus of economic productivity which could be voluntarily applied to further education. It is true that economic requirements are difficult to attain, but would be made easier to realize if individuals cooperate, as in families, so that some earn that others may learn.

One great destroyer of quantity in education is intervention by civil government. When the civil government attempts to foster educational opportunity, the quality and quantity go down compared to what they would be in a free society, for the following reasons:

1. Attention is diverted from quality of education to the service of political (re-election) goals, as in busing.
2. Resources are diverted from individuals and families to inefficient government schools, so that individuals cannot always afford the education they desire. Attempts to provide special scholarships for the poor always discriminate against those who are just above the poverty level, and increase their difficulty in affording education when often they are better prepared to receive it and benefit society than those whom the government singles out for assistance.
3. The government effort in education tends to be a monopoly. The incentive for quality control is diminished, traditional inefficiencies become entrenched, curricula reduce to the lowest common denominator, and test scores continue to drop.
4. Special interest groups who are politically effective but selfish perpetuate inefficiencies in the government schools, such as maintenance of teacher prerogatives of tenure and ever-lighter teaching loads among college faculties.

Were both society and schools basically free, with the initiative for education or non-education resting essentially with individuals and families, there would be less compulsory schooling, more learning, and more life-long learning.

Item: Improving the efficiency of education.

To improve the efficiency of education is to improve the efficiency of learning, not of teaching. If more can be learned with less dedication of resources, we are better off.

One great barrier to efficiency in education is the professionalization of teaching. Teachers come to have a vested interest in teaching, and while many are dedicated and delightful, just as many are obnoxious and obstructive. If the resources presently poured into teaching were poured into the facilitation of learning, we could be far ahead. To wit:

1. Most skill learning can be taught as games, thus increasing the emotional interest involved, which of itself facilitates learning. Games foster cooperation as well as competition, and team victories are even more savory than individual triumph. Certainly the boredom that grows among abler students the further they go in school could be, and sometimes is, greatly assuaged by this device.
2. Most skill learning can be taught as well by students one step ahead of the learners as by professional teachers. Once the skill is learned, understanding of what has been learned can come rapidly, even from those same one-step-ahead students, if they understand. A healthy nobless oblige among students would make this reaching out to help other students both a delight and a guarantor of their own over-learning.
3. Over-learning in every skill is the essence of real learning; not to learn so that one can perform, but so that one is able to perform well under greatly adverse circumstances. Professional teachers usually have little stomach for the kind of teaching that produces over-learning, unless they are yet learning themselves. For everyone, the efficient means to over-learning is to teach, and that teaching can be “fun and games,” in the best sense, for all.
4. The greatest problem facing our educational system is curriculum. That is not where the great effort goes, but that is where the great inefficiency is. The focus on knowledge learning is partly to blame. Classroom knowledge is seldom used close to the time it is learned, and thus has to be reiterated, “drilled” in, ad naseum. Thus there is repetition, overlap, redundancy in the curriculum, and very little lifetime retention. But when skill learning is the focus, the skills are used and honed daily, giving a sense of accomplishment, of power. If one has the skill of knowing how to learn knowledge and how to evaluate proffered ideas as to whether they are true or not, one does not have to be taught all basic truth in a school, for one can find and immediately apply whatever they need to know.
5. There is no need to assume that the student must always remain passive in the formation of curricula. The need of the learner is usually a better guide to a learning sequence than is the prejudice of the teacher. If the learner had at least some initiative to change the course of facilitation by an expert, another great engine of educational efficiency would be unleashed.
6. The greatest power to aid learning is to harness the individual initiative of the student. It is well known that initiative and creativity are seldom treasured in our school system; the reward structure clearly favors obsequious conformity. When students are not treated as cattle to be fattened in a pen, the native gifts of each help each to excel in his or her own way. A system which treats everyone the same and rewards only memory will never be very efficient.

Item: To improve the delivery system.

The principal problem with our delivery system is that it is essentially one system. It needs to become many systems.

1. Individual study should be an option in every field of learning. This would demand a great curricular effort. Thus opportunity for education would be extended to nearly everyone, to all those who are motivated to learn.
2. Family study is another place where a massive curriculum investment would pay great dividends. Parents and children learning together could use otherwise wasted time, and solve many of the families’ problems at the same time by all being members of the same learning team.
3. Private schools should spring up in all directions giving stiff competition to government schools as entrepreneurial ingenuity smothers the bureaucratic inefficiency in a great heap of educational accomplishment. Accreditation problems you say? No bother. They are that quaint remnant of counting credit instead of ability. When we pay for learning we will get learning as we now pay for credit and get lots of it, including no small portion that is undeserved.

In a society where every person of good will is both a teacher and a learner, each individual will be able to attain his own personal delivery system, suited to his own personal needs, desires, abilities, and circumstances. Thus will every person become able to learn everything that is known should one be willing to put himself or herself out as needed.

Item: To make education moral.

Most people are moral in their own eyes. By whose standard should we make education more moral? By the standards of Jesus Christ. E.g.:

1. Let there be a plain espousal of the fundamentals of that social behavior which strengthens the ability to cooperated and to trust. The fundamentals are to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, to do good for all. These are not simply the preferences of some sect. They are the ineluctable requirements for the solidarity and continuity of social order. Any opinion to the contrary flies in the face of thousands of years of human misery brightened by the few occasions when these standards have obtained. And educational system which does not promote honesty, the keeping of promises, the blessedness of marital fidelity, having a good will towards all men, and doing good to everyone who is one’s neighbor, that society is headed for destruction. The fabric that holds society together is trust; these principles are the basis of trust.
2. There should be no distinctions of rank, no classes of persons among our population. Each person should be esteemed as honorable in his or her own right and noble to all who wish to accord them so. The weighty particular in this matter is the class distinction usually made between professors and students. Honor should go to professors for their service to learners, not for their own success as students, as is the case. Facilitators of learning who truly can help and who truly care about their learners as persons will always be rewarded. The others don’t deserve honor as teachers, but nevertheless deserve honor as persons. There must be a dedication to truth, to wisdom, and to the value of individual judgment that is never compromised by rank of social pressure, especially in educational settings.

Item: To gain a better philosophical base.

We are indeed captives of our own beliefs. None are so captive as those who know not or will not see alternative beliefs. The following are offered as alternatives to what many seem to believe.

1. The important thing about a human life is what one does, not what one knows. Does one relive suffering? Does one share his gifts and abilities? Does one build fine buildings, productive systems, efficient mechanisms? Does one make his environment cleaner, more beautiful, more desirable to others? To be judged as one who knows much, should be relatively worthless except as one helps others with what one knows. The pathetic insistence that knowledge is good for its own sake and that to be a knower makes one better than his fellows has plagued us long enough.
2. Individual persons are free, and furthermore are responsible. They are free inasmuch as they know how to and are able to contribute to the welfare of the people with whom they live. They become good persons when they use that freedom to help their fellow beings without taking any freedom away from those fellow beings. No man needs to go to heaven to find out that we are responsible for our acts. Inasmuch as we are free and do good, we each reap a harvest of self-acceptance and esteem that makes happiness a reality. Every imposition we make on the integrity of any other human being leaves us personally scarred, unable to face ourselves, needing more and more to blame something or someone else for our unhappiness.

Item: To have hope.

Is there reasonable hope for the implementation of this and other unmentioned items on this conservative agenda for education? Yes, for the following reasons.

1. There are many people of good will who see plainly the limitations of the present approach. They, with all genuine conservatives, will preserve, conserve all that is good in the present approach while moving to a new synthesis of insight and power which will lift us to a new educational orbit.
2. There is enough freedom left, in some places, at least, to produce some genuine alternatives to the present system which can and will have measurably superior results. Notwithstanding the difficulty of purifying the context to produce their results and the opposition from entrenched privilege and power base which will automatically be engendered, it will be well worth it.
3. A new generation is rising to whom the present system will appear to be humorously naïve and passe. Presented with a reasonable alternative, they have no vested interest in perpetuating inefficiency, and will move the system forward.
4. Look at how far we have come in the last five hundred years!