Education and Its Ends

In words addressed to his son, Cato the Elder set down an educational ideal for the Romans: the vir bonus dicendi peritus, or the ‘good man, skilled at speaking’. Cato’s definition can be framed more generally. We, too, want school leavers to be decent people (think of Cato’s ‘good man’), and we want them to be knowledgeable and competent (‘skilled at speaking’).

 

Education as formation of mind and character

We might go further and say that any education, whether in school or at home, will shape a person’s mind and character. This is true even if parents, teachers, and administrators do not realise it. Those formations come through in the classrooms and corridors and at lunch. Whatever goes on at school, those young minds and characters will be formed. They may be formed well or they may be formed poorly—deformed, even, sometimes by good intentions wrongly pursued, or occasionally by bad intentions, or very often by simple neglect due to ignorance and exhaustion and bureaucratic burdens. But formed they will be.

If a school is aware of what it is doing, it may take those two formations explicitly as twin goals rather than as mere by-products en route to the ends we tend to hear more about: jobs, for instance, or places at university. Important as those goals are, classical schools find that they are best achieved when intellectual and character formation are put well ahead of them. These schools emphasise academic effort and achievement, so as to prepare their pupils for a lifetime of learning. They also instil a sense that virtue is a noble adventure, and vice, at best, a boring distraction.

 

Education as transmission of knowledge and culture

So far, so good. There is, however, another reason schools exist, one that is often overlooked: the transmission of knowledge and culture.

In Culture Counts, the late Sir Roger Scruton writes that knowledge, not the pupil, is the centre of education. That is not to say that the learner and the learner’s relationship with a teacher do not matter. The trust placed in a teacher implies a sacred duty to cultivate the pupil’s intellect and ethos. Sir Roger acknowledged as much in his writing and showed it in his own practice as a professor.

Yet, Scruton argues, the teacher has another sacred duty: to his discipline and to civilisation itself. He stands in the present, in the middle of a human story stretching back thousands of years. His own years of teaching amount to a very small and very fragile link in this chain. Yes, he must remember that his wards are human, that their feelings are as real as their spiritual lives; but he must not forget to pass on the torch that he himself once received. If he drops it, he fails all those who came before him, he fails his colleagues elsewhere in the educational trenches, and he fails the countless others who will one day depend on his alumni: their future families, neighbours, patients, pupils, readers, parishioners, pilots, passengers, and so on—and those who in turn will follow them. He also fails those alumni themselves by cutting them off from that part of great project of civilisation for which he is responsible: that is, from the arts of speech and number, or from the literatures and languages that explore what it means to be human, or from the history of our shared adventure as it has unfolded in time, or from the stories of the relationship between man and God, or from the study of nature, or from the sciences that have transformed our abilities to know the world and to live in it. Teaching needs to prioritise the transmission of this body of knowledge and the practices that reveal, support, and refine it.

 

Breaking the chain 

Few sane people set out deliberately to interrupt that transmission. But forgetting that it is an essential end of education can result in the same effect. Unfortunately, this happens all too often, even at well-meaning schools and universities.

One way to undermine a teacher’s ability to transmit that bit of culture entrusted to him is by encouraging poor classroom pedagogy. Take mathematics. We all want a young person of any background and any future career to leave school able to use numbers proficiently. Numeracy does not happen spontaneously. It belongs instead to that body of knowledge which we must painstakingly hand down from one generation to the next. But some have worried that marks, objectivity, standard methods of problem solving, and even deadlines are unfair. Sadly, the games, presentations, videos, faddish technologies, and elaborate but shallow projects often invoked as remedies tend to entertain rather than to teach—and even then, if we are honest, the entertainment value tends to be rather poor. The time consumed by such methods leaves precious few hours for ensuring that the children really learn how to do what they need to be able to do as adults. The unglamorous habit of practicing, say, the multiplication tables takes time, too, but it, by contrast, is effective, leaving behind a real ability that will be useful and satisfying in any field and in countless situations over a whole lifetime.

Analogies can be found in any subject. Without giving their pupils knowledge-based skills, schools leave behind a grave rupture for humanity and a gratuitous handicap for individual persons. A fear of hurting a pupil’s feelings—in a sense, a misguided concern for the real end of forming character—directly undermines the teacher’s ability to pass on humanity’s shared knowledge of mathematics to the next generation.

The environment, too, makes a difference. The posture encouraged by classrooms with beanbags instead of chairs and desks is hardly conducive to careful listening, questioning, writing, or thought in general. More common, but still unhelpful, is a fixation on collaborative learning: pupils are seated around tables facing each other—emphatically not facing the board and the teacher. To see the teacher and attend to whatever is being taught, most of the class must turn or strain their necks 90 degrees. These things may seem trivial, but that is the point. Against any teacher’s probable hopes, mundane elements like ‘collaborative’ table arrangements teach another lesson, one reinforced every day, year after year: that it is more important to chat with (or perhaps kick) the pupil opposite you than it is to pay attention to the lesson.

The result? Flawed pedagogy once again prevents the transmission of knowledge. The pupils simply do not learn as well as they could. Bad pedagogy, in turn, also undermines those other educational goals of forming mind and character. What may have seemed pastoral and compassionate turns out to be a crippling indulgence. As such, it feeds the spread of that oblivion in which so many of us today have been educated.

 

The way forward

This is all less likely to happen if the school’s purpose as a conduit of knowledge is kept in sharp focus. Those of us who are teachers, especially classical teachers, should indeed remember Cato’s old ideal, that twofold formation of intellect and character. We ought also to remember our third sacred duty, asking ourselves now and again: Are our pupils truly learning the knowledge, skills, and culture we hope to hand on, and are they learning in such a way as to hold those gifts firmly and for life? If so, we will be doing our part. Even if we are not quite there yet, asking the question will keep the target clear. That itself will go a long way toward strengthening those links in the chain for which we are responsible.

* * *

To learn more about Memoria’s work in the United Kingdom and Europe, write to schools@memoriapress.co.uk.