A Review of Nock’sThe Theory of Education in the United States
Albert J. Nock was one of Murray Rothbard’s favorite essayists, and for good reason; his erudition, clarity of thought, and wisdom make his works supremely edifying and a joy to read, and none more so than his Theory of Education in the United States (1932).
Nock sets out to examine the theoretical underpinnings of the American education system, which that had undergone an ill-fated organizational “revolution” around the turn of the 20th century and, after three decades of continuous tinkering since, was universally viewed as decidedly deficient. Any construct, he reasons, builds upon theoretical considerations; if a system cannot be made to yield satisfactory results after so much “improvement,” then perhaps the underlying theory is unsound. Thus, he identifies three axiomatic principles of American education: equality, democracy, and, as a raison d’être for the education system, the idea that a literate citizenry ensures “good public order and honest government.”
The principle of equality holds that everyone is educable, by which is meant the existence of fertile ground such that the process of education as outlined below might bear fruit. The principle of democracy implies that the education system should “give the people what they want,” and thus that what is taught should reflect what the masses wish to learn. And the patriotic nature of the third principle implies that the education system should concern the whole citizenry and the institutions of government. As he compellingly shows, however, all three are manifestly untenable.
His argument rests on the distinction between formative and instrumental knowledge, and between education and training. While instrumental knowledge conveys a useful skill, formative knowledge has no direct applicability to daily life, but rather induces a way of thinking. Analogously, training has as its purpose the conveyance of instrumental knowledge, while education aims to produce, through the disinterested pursuit of formative knowledge, a disciplined mind capable of “right thinking, clear thinking, mature and profound thinking.” The purpose of a system of education is to identify the vanishingly small minority of educable persons in a society and allow them to attempt such a transformation. Consider Nock’s description of the system of education that had evolved since the Middle Ages:
Let us suppose that an educable person found good schools and a good college, … what would he do, and what might be expected of him? After [reading, writing, and arithmetic], his staples were Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the way through the primary, and all the way through the secondary schools. Whatever else he did, if anything, was inconsiderable except as related to these major subjects…. When he reached the undergraduate college at the age of sixteen or so, all his language-difficulties with Greek and Latin were forever behind him; he could read anything in either tongue, and write in either, and he was thus prepared to deal with both literatures purely as literature, to bestow on them a purely literary interest. He had also in hand arithmetic, and algebra as far as quadratics. Then in four years at college he covered practically the whole range of Greek and Latin literature; mathematics as far as the differential calculus, and including the mathematics of elementary physics and astronomy; a brief course, covering about six weeks, in formal logic; and one as brief in the bare history off the formation and growth of the English language.
Given the complete absence of any such concentrated curriculum in the modern world, we are justified in asking why a focus on dead languages and mathematics should be any more transformative than living languages and science. Nock provides the following answer:
The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity [with the exception of music, spanning 2500 years of the human mind’s operation.] … Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage-point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human mind’s operations…. These studies … were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word education; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.
Nock points out that the substitution of a universal system of training for this elitist, classical system of education came about as a predictable consequence of the broad adoption of said three principles. That they should be so popular arises, in turn, from the wish that one’s children should have it better:
First, there was this strong sentiment for one’s children, and for their progress in a civilized life. The conception of a civilized life, of its nature, and of the way to enter into it, was and is often most imperfect, but no matter; the sentiment was itself noble and disinterested. One’s children should have, at any cost or sacrifice, all the education they could get. Then, playing directly into the hand of this sentiment, there was the idea of equality prompting the belief that they were all capable of taking in and assimilating what there was to be had; and then the idea of democracy, prompting the belief that the whole subject-matter of education should be common property, not common in a true and proper sense, but, roughly, in the sense that so much of it as was not manageable by everybody should be disallowed and disregarded. Then finally, all this had the general sanction of a pseudo-patriotic idea that in thus doing one’s best for one’s children, one was also doing something significant in the way of service to one’s country.
Regardless of the noble intentions at its root, the transformation of the education system into one of broad, public training is detrimental to the long-term health of our civilization, for in all of recorded history, “no society ever yet has [neglected the cultivation of serious thinkers] without coming to great disaster.” Nock explains that educable persons are valuable, but since the current system does not allow us to capitalize on their value, they “simply go to waste.” In a passage eerily prescient of the catastrophic institutional failures so common in our day, he explains this value as follows:
At present our society is in most serious … difficulties. The truly mature person, bred in the Great Tradition, could at any time have reached into his accumulation of experience and found a match for each one of these difficulties, and for every circumstance of each, every sequence of cause and effect…. There is nothing new about them, nothing strange or unpredictable. Yet I am sure you have remarked, as I have, the extraordinary, the unconscionable incompetence with which these happenings have been met by those whom our society regards as its “leaders of thought.”
Stoically undaunted, Nock views the Great Tradition as fundamentally invincible: Societies may stamp it out, but will return to it when forced to do so by existential necessity. That being said, he does not believe that it will ever again establish itself in the United States. But that is no great loss:
“The Great Tradition has not left itself without abundant witnesses in contemporary societies, and … the constitution of the republic of letters knows no such thing as political nationalism. Our fellow-citizens are ours where we find them; and where they are not to be found we may regard ourselves as citizens in paribus, uncommitted to an officious and ineffectual evangelism. Our allegiance is to the constitution of our republic; we are committed only to clear understanding and right thinking.”
Nock might have been less optimistic if he had known that those three principles would eventually spread throughout the West and that the universities would then further degenerate from public training institutes into ideological breeding grounds for the mind-virus of wokeism. But modern-day libertarians have every reason to be optimistic, for education’s fate was sealed the moment it came within the government’s purview, and just as in other domains (cf. Titus Gebel’s International Cities), private initiative is beginning to outcompete the State here as well: Jordan Peterson’s alternative university and Katharine Birbalsingh’s conservative charter-school are just two examples thereof.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/
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