Comment by lo_zamoyski

It really is a sign of the times that people are totally unable to define what education is for. And when they attempt answers, they usually fall flat on their faces. Perhaps this is because we have suppressed the habit - or fail to develop one - of asking what the ends of things are. Because if there are ends, then there are norms, and when there are norms, there is a right and a wrong, a better way and a worse way. It means there is an objective end written into human nature, and one’s actions and choices either align with that end or deviate from it. These are not something a hyperindividualist liberal[0] culture wants to hear. After all, telos was thrown out centuries ago, an intellectual process we can trace at least to Ockham’s nominalism. Telos makes a moral demand of us and we moderns and postmoderns chafe under moral demands (though we predictably reach for strong men, leviathans, and mortal gods to save us from the inevitable chaos). We would sooner declare life meaningless and plunge ourselves into the void of nihilism and its thrashing violence and nauseating malaise than submit to some objective moral order.

In any case, what falls under the label of “education” today is a disconnected assortment of vague aims and promises. The first on the list is “job training”. Oh, how far we have fallen. Classically, education is perhaps best exemplified by the liberal arts [1], the artes liberales, which were oriented toward producing intellectually free people and contrasted with the so-called “servile arts” (artes serviles) which are precisely what job training is concerned with. Freedom, classically, is not absence of restraint, but the ability to be the kind of thing you are. Thus, if human beings are rational[2] animals - if our telos is to be agents of truth - then the more rational we are, the more obedient we are to reason, the more human we are, and therefore the most free we are. It should be obvious. A drug user says he is free, because he takes drugs whenever he wants. But the drugs blunt his humanity and frustrate his rationality, and they enslave him over time. This example may be extrapolated accordingly.

So, education is fundamentally about enabling people to become competent human beings as rational beings and agents of truth. You can’t mechanize or automate that away as the end is the actualization of the human himself as human, not the production of goods or services. And because we’re social animals - our social nature following from the rational - we learn through speech and through communication with each other. A school is - when run properly - a community of learning.

[0] Inevitably, some uninformed person will latch onto “liberal” thinking I mean this in the partisan sense. I don’t. I mean it in the philosophical sense. We are all liberals today. In the US, both major parties are firmly planted in liberal soil.

[1] When I say “liberal arts”, I don’t mean what we call today the liberal arts. Recall that the classical liberal arts existed before the whole “Two Cultures” nonsense, after which they became a kind of stenography for power and an apologetics of the hyperindividualist liberal culture.

[2] “Rationality” in the classical sense is not confined to just inference and calculation (which would fall under ratio).