Why Education Matters

Reforming America’s broken education system starts with treating kids seriously

By Jon Bishop

A friend of mine from college and I like to have conversations every so often on the state of education in the United States. His usual response is to point out that education, particularly liberal education, was once the domain of the privileged. Perhaps a sort of shrinking of our educational institutions might do them all some good, he says. The education bureaucracy has gotten too bloated; too many people are going to college. A course correction is bound to happen.

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe not. But whatever the case, it’s clear there’s something amiss in our schools today, from primary through higher education. And a variety of people, most of whom have little to no experience in the classroom, have offered what they think are solutions, usually ones that are reflective of the politics of the person proposing it: ending “wokeness” in the classroom, reorienting curricula in line with progressive social engineering projects, paring down schools so they’re nothing more than career-training centers. These are ideas, some worse than others. But they are ideas that miss the point of what education is all about: human formation.

In some ways, education is useless, in that there is no direct utility to undertaking it; the students who ask “what am I going to do with this?” aren’t entirely far off. But education, properly understood, is not meant to provide you with a job. We don’t go to school for credentials, as much as we like to pretend otherwise. We go to school to learn how to think, to learn how to become ourselves, and to access, as well as understand, the things that those who have come before us have deemed worthy of passing on:  great books, great ideas, great traditions. And we don’t have to look to the ancient Greek Academy for this. We can recover what we once had in our early schools, before Horace Mann adapted the Prussian—and bureaucratic—lecture model. And it was through small groups and conversations.

I’ve seen this first-hand. I’m a teacher at a Catholic school in the Northeast, a fairly standard one at that. Which means that our students are often good, but are, in effect, regular teenagers. They want to do well in school, but they also want to post inane videos on TikTok and do immature things on the weekends.

Seeing young people being young has led policymakers and commentators to assume that the generation today is irredeemable, more interested in social media clout than in ideas. But this isn’t true. I’ve taught one semester of “the philosophy of human flourishing,” a course I created. It asks the students to think about what it means to live a good life—in short, to flourish. I have the students read T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Simone Weil, St. Augustine, Dante, Aristotle, Matthew Arnold, and Thomas Aquinas, all while considering the aforementioned themes. I thought, perhaps, that my fall semester course, which was very successful, might have been a fluke, but it’s not. I’ve begun the second semester of the same course, with different students, and it’s achieving similar, if not the same, results. And I think it’s instructive.

I don’t do anything revolutionary in the course. I plan a variety of student-centered activities that lead to what I consider to be its centerpiece: a 50-minute conversation with each other on a selected reading from one of the authors we’re studying. I sit back and listen and evaluate, and it’s as if I’m not even there. And what they have to say to each other is often profound. They’re really digging into the texts and trying to figure out not only what they mean but also how to apply that meaning to their own lives.

It makes clear that our students, regardless of their background, crave seriousness. They want to read and discuss great books. And they want to hear each other’s ideas. Again, I’m not doing anything new. But it seems new because we don’t really take this approach anymore. Instead, we impose technologies onto the students. For the uninitiated, a quick search online can show how much of an industry this has become—all to supposedly increase their engagement.

And maybe it will, for a time. But something else will likely grab their attention. That’s the age in which we live—the spectacle. So that approach is likely doomed to failure, particularly because it likely won’t lead to the development of knowledge.

And part of the problem in education is the push to personalize what we teach to what we think kids want; that we should assign books that will appeal to each of them uniquely. But the people choosing these books and making these decisions are in their 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s. They’re assuming they know what the students want. We think the students only want to read what is current and fresh, which means we assign them second-rate young adult novels. We don’t actually challenge them. So we keep them in a state of perpetual adolescence. And in doing so, to quote Michael Gerson, we introduce the soft bigotry of low expectations.

If we want to improve education in this country, our changes should flow from taking our students seriously. And that means we need to see that education, as it was once understood, matters. We need to form young people to be people and citizens, not simply to become employees.

We need to stop viewing educational reform as a political football; as some kind of left-wing social engineering project or as a tool for right-wingers to litigate ascendent progressivism. Let’s remember that, whatever the present state of education is, the future of it needs to be focused on bettering young people, not pushing a political agenda.

So what would that look like in practice?

It would mean recognizing that we don’t need flashy facilities or expensive technologies. We’d just need serious books, contemporary or modern, as well as a dedicated teacher, and students who are willing to discuss the material at-hand. Anyone, from the wealthiest to the poorest, could get something out of such a course. It’s a style that would save money and also save souls.

We live in a time where schools and teachers are trying to rethink their approach to the classroom. And it’s a good thing. But those efforts are still weighed down by voices pushing theories and technologies as the answer, while forgetting about the basics.

After one of the first classes of the new semester, one of the students in my new course wanted to talk to me as we walked down the hallway. As we were chatting about the day, I took the opportunity to explain why I wanted to design a course like the one he was taking part in. I said I wanted to give students a chance to read and think about serious things.

He listened to me, and then he said, “Thank you for doing this.”