Norms and Nobility Prologue

I've just started Norms and Nobility by David V. Hicks. I think the book is going to make a case for classical education. This is a 4-part Prologue.

David Hicks begins by talking about a book called "The Rector of Justin" by Louis Auchincloss, in which a man tries to build a school where students will learn to know, serve and reproduce what is good and realize that their knowledge carries responsibility. But the school fails. In our materialistic culture, is such an education possible? Social theories, important-sounding scientific research and faddish educational models have replaced life's important questions about truth and justice, and old fashioned common sense. Today's people are more fluent in computer language than with age-old questions about what really matters. Our experts are not only inexperienced about wisdom; they aren't even asking the right questions, but people are too awed by their intelligence to notice. They are like raw college graduates steering a ship who are too full of their books and technical skill to respect time-honored experience. We know schools are failing and students are getting involved in drugs and bullying, but we don't know what to do about it. Hicks is going to offer a solution based on ancient classical education. Science should serve and supplement education, not the other way around.

Education reflects what its culture believes about the nature of man, and, whether stated or not, every person who writes about education is influenced by and espouses what he believes to be man's nature, value and purpose. Ancient cultures had an ideal heroic model that they felt man must aspire to, although they varied about whether that ideal was based on bravery or loyalty or duty or whatever. Art, history, science were tools to encourage bravery or duty in the student. But today's experts call such ideas unscientific. The ancients thought that attempts to improve the world with science were arrogant. It was man who needed the improvement. Even math was thought useful only as far as it helped to transform man. Our modern emphasis on using technology to change the world -- and even society and man himself -- is the wrong priority and "can only lead to mental confusion, physical destruction, and spiritual damnation." The problem isn't the world; it's within man himself. Educating man to fix his opinions or environment or circumstances won't fix the evil nature within him.

Our education strives to control our environment [engineer bridges, re-route rivers, genetically modify crops, cure disease, build a business empire] rather than answer age-old questions about our purpose in life. 'Ought' has been replaced with 'can.' Focusing on what seems do-able with science seems more productive than reflecting over questions that make us uncomfortable. Medieval men saw God as being perfect and far off, and their own world as corrupt, they were looking in at heaven from outside God's realm. Modern man sees himself as enlightened and looking from the inside out. Older cultures saw man as a servant who dared not exalt himself to the heights of his deities. Modern man doesn't feel he is out of place to rule nature and rule others.

Education today focuses on the operation of 'can' instead of the normative 'ought:' we exhaust possibilities without questioning whether such a thing ought to be done. And our lives reflect this - the same thinking was at the root of the 1960's attempt to use technology to subdue inequality in Vietnam without asking whether it was a good idea, or simply presumptuous. We teach communication skills to score well on the SAT (and other utilitarian reasons) and rarely ask why communication is necessary for us as people and as a society. [If a person can get a decent job and raise a family, does it really matter if he's illiterate?] We raise brilliant intellectuals who are too prideful to let a bad idea go. We strive to make men more efficient and productive at building and carrying and figuring, as if this present existence is all there is, and ignore his spiritual side. Good education shouldn't just teach what people want to know -- it should teach them what is right to want.