The Three Doomsday Horsemen of Public Education

Before this article begins, it must be remembered that American public education has allowed many children to receive great educations. Teachers who deeply care about their students are able to open their eyes to the vast expanse of the world and the knowledge in it, along with empowering them to live more successful lives as citizens and workers. While the school system has done so much good, it has suffered plenty of criticism over the decades, and particularly in the last 10 years. While some criticism is gratuitous, public education overwhelmingly teaches three fundamental lies that are harming the societal, economic, and spiritual well-being of Americans. A fundamental fact of the 21st century American school system is the primacy of individualism, which does little but separate people from fulfilling opportunities and relationships. Additionally, the inherently materialistic lens through which the world is viewed makes it impossible for students to understand the unpredictability and mystery of the world, leading them to vote for increasingly authoritarian policies. Finally, the idea of the steady march of world improvement as a certainty has harmed appreciation for the current state of prosperity and dullened people’s minds to the effort and intentionality that has brought about the state of the world today.

Only you can define your own happiness. This sentiment was spoken in thousands of ways in thousands of different classrooms across the country today. The rejection of any outside standard of morality has rung in the tyranny of the individual. The school system has overwhelmingly adopted this tactic of taking a “non-stance” to morality in the pursuit of serving students from different religious backgrounds, which is a worthy goal. However, rather than a lack of specificity, this stance has created an extremely specific individualistic viewpoint that equally offends all the religions the school system seeks to defend. To say anything other than that everyone’s subjective desires are right is considered extremely offensive. Of course, not every individual can have their way, which makes this sort of logic extremely untenable. Certain wants must give way to others, and a confusion and particularization of individual morality has allowed government power to fill the void. Where families and communities used to stand up together to forms of government oppression, now a sea of disconnected individuals must fight with confusion to establish their own identities before they can even think of reining in government in mutually beneficial ways.

The difficulty of coming up with a general spiritual model that can be used with all religions has led school boards to fill that void with unchecked materialism. Materialism’s first victim is the happiness of all who believe in it. It cuts out all fundamental separation between identity, action, and material state. Even when happiness is spoken of as an active choice, The underlying materialist cosmology tells a different story where circumstances, brain chemistry, genetic predisposition lead to every choice and assign one’s lot in life. Rather than the Fates the ancient Greeks spoke of, matter itself has determined the path for everyone long before they are born. Materialism’s second victim is primarily economic. The idea that subjective everchanging choices can be aggregated and quantified has led to a vast amount of ineffective government programs and an a-scientific method of monetary policy. The scientific method limits conclusions about the natural world to what can be reliably observed, but a primarily materialistic worldview has led the social sciences to reach too far. The social science that drives government decisions has repeatedly caused more harm than good because it attempts to predict human behaviour using strictly material observations. Good governance must recognize the limits of physical observation and govern with a cautious sense of its own ignorance. 

A dark view of the prejudices and physical deprivation of past generations has been elevated from an observation to an axiom of modern social thought. Rather than recognizing the specific forms of government, technology, and ethical thought that have pushed forward through history to create our state of relative material wealth and freedom from physical violence, students are given a sense that history is a linear progression of progress. From this conclusion it is asserted that their job is primarily to push forward rather than safeguard against the errors of the past. As much as people would like to believe that a problem done once in the past can forever be forgotten, the squalor and various abuses of the past are never more than a generation away. Fear of the distant past should engender a respect for the recent past rather than a desire to move away from it. A healthy balance of progress seeking and reversion avoidance is necessary, and teaching children a progressive vision of history does nothing but prepare their brains for a future of voting and seeking for more than reality will permit. Good progress comes slowly, and a linear vision of history all but guarantees that the future generations of Americans will fly too close to the sun in a desire to accelerate what they think is inevitable.