A history-heavy collection after the holiday.
A defiantly ignorant person by the name of Allison Benedikt wrote a screed for Slate, If You Send Your Kid To Private School, You Are A Bad Person, so stupid that just about everyone has joined in condemning it from various angles.
Ilya Somin chimes in:
Art Carden, Kevin Grier, Kevin White, and Megan McArdle have pointed out most of the flaws in her logic.
But both Benedikt and her critics have overlooked one important way in which private schools actually contribute to the common good. One of the most important rationales for public schooling is the need for an informed electorate. Public schools are supposed to teach our kids about government, history, and public policy, so that they will grow up to be informed voters. Unfortunately, as I discuss in my book on political ignorance, political knowledge levels have stagnated at fairly low levels for decades, despite massive increases in funding for public education. Many studies show extensive ignorance about politics and history among recent high school graduates. This is unlikely to be accidental and also unlikely to change, even if all current private school students start attending public schools, as Benedikt would have them do.
On the other hand, as I discuss in Chapter 7 of the book, the evidence suggests that political knowledge is higher among students who attend private schools, even after controlling for various demographic variables such as race and family income. I’m not suggesting that private schools necessarily do a great job of teaching history and civics. But they are, on average, doing a better one than government-run schools. Sending all students to public school would further exacerbate the already severe problem of political ignorance.
The elimination of private schools would also increase the power of government to use public education for indoctrination …
I particularly like this because I remember defending private schools, on very much the same grounds (sans the kind of survey data Somin alludes to) in a Rhetoric class writing assignment at Bradley University more than 40 years ago. I thought it was really good – whether before of after the prof extolled it, I don’t recall.
I almost certainly was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s famous comments on the reading of old books:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook — even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” — lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
By analogy, private schools are unlikely to be making all of the same mistakes as public schools, especially as public schools become more and more hag-ridden with duties to realize the pet social causes of politicians.
“Private schools can serve as repositories of currently unpopular truths,” is as close to a quote as I can recall of my most characteristic and central argument then – and now.
Somin’s point about private school superiority at teaching government, history and public policy focuses on “truths” that are a bit closer to the surface of reality than the things I had on my mind back then, but I certainly appreciate the very real risk of public schools becoming remaining tools of cynical indoctrination into idiocies that I may be able to see through precisely because I’m mostly the product of private schools myself (and thus my own idiocies lie elsewhere).
Among those personal idiocies are an incorrigible individualism, which one could be forgiven for calling hypocritical as I decry the atomistic individualism of our time and place. Like a porn addict calling for a ban on porn, I’m probably saying “Help me! I feel so alone! But don’t bug me!”
I suspect that the private schools of which I’m a product contributed to this sickness rather than resisting it, but probably contribute no more than would have public schools.
Orthodoxy is helping recovery in this as other areas. Fr. Stephen Freeman hits the mark in Sunday’s It Is Not Good To Be Alone:
One of the greatest tragedies of the modern world is the continuing collapse of social systems. The most prominent and important of these is the family itself – but many other social systems, including the Church, are equally in collapse. Our consumer culture seeks to maximize our individuality (individuals buy more than groups) and false ideologies of freedom stress the priority of individual over group demands (with the exception of groups chosen for political privilege). A result is increased alienation for all people. In a sea of choice, every small boat flounders.
…
The Christian vision is embodied in God’s first observation of “not good.” Each act of creation is declared to be “good,” until God observes the aloneness of Adam: “It is not good for the man to be alone,” we are told. The joy of communion expressed in the fashioning of woman (“this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”) is crushed in the isolation of sin. The forbidden fruit is made as a choice in isolation – isolation from God and isolation from Adam. The new community entered into by Adam taking the fruit from Eve is a mutual suicide pact – a community of death.
Throughout most of human history, community has … been the hallmark of human existence. We need one another. Human children have perhaps the longest childhood of all mammals (nursing for over two-years in most natural settings). The earliest evidence of human habitation is tribal – we have never lived in an isolated fashion.
Almost no one in the modern world thinks of themselves as opposed to community. Community is a positive word in almost all settings (apologies to Ayn Rand). Its destruction in the modern world is thus inadvertent – a result of our being unaware of the consequences of our actions – or overconfident about our ability to adapt.
The antidote is family and parish life, but the sickness penetrates there, too. Read the whole thing, from which I may have quoted too much already.
The Eclectic blog, Crooked Timber (“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” – words to live by) hosted a terrific essay on “How Moral Revolutions Happen.”
The author has been reading on the abolition of slavery. Excerpts:
I just finished another book that was surprisingly rich on this score: The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830—1860
[amazon].
Here’s what surprised me: the only writer in this group I had read before was George Fitzhugh, who turns out to be unrepresentative. (The editor of this volume says he was popular and influential , but most of these other writers tried to distance themselves from him, because he was not respectable and argued for stuff like expanding the disenfranchise – I guess you would call it – to include poor whites.) Slavery must be defended because the Pope is a socialist! (Yes!) Fitzhugh would have made a good blogger and lit up Twitter.
I thought the whole book would be like that: the rhetorical equivalent of Preston Brooksversus Charles Sumner. Paranoid-style jingo triumphalism plus loopy-cranky pseudo-scientific stuff plus fight-or-flight bursts of logic, concluding in abortive, daft neo-Feudal utopias that evaporate back into conservative stubbornness.
But most of these writers are barely polemical. The tone is concessive, gentleman-scholarly, mild, punctuated by patronizing sighs and arched eyebrows, to add some tone. Of course slavery is … unfortunate; but you can’t expect this old world to be perfect so we must make the best of it together. Does anyone have a plausible, practical plan for abolishing slavery, starting tomorrow? No. So what are we talking about? Just a bunch of Northerners who won’t be personally called on to do anything so painful. Yet they expect Southerners to give up most of their wealth, and destroy the value of their land in the process? Is that plausible? Abolitionism is so wrong not because slavery is so right – it isn’t! – but because utopianism must always fail. Indeed, it must always cause suffering, by the law of unintended consequences. Better to respect existing property rights, even though we know that if you look far enough in the past, there will always be ugliness at the root. It is the wonder of human institutions that beauty may flourish even from ugliness! (It is only utopians who do not appreciate this!)
I’m not surprised to meet these arguments. Fitzhugh makes them, too. And they are completely obvious. But I’m surprised by how all of these authors, except Fitzhugh, make only these arguments. They are a pack of George F. Wills with only one joker – one Southern Avenger – in the deck. I pick George F. Will because he seems a good example of someone who works primarily by trying to suck up all the oxygen, preemptively, by projecting an air of establishment wisdom. You narrow the range of respectable positions and then puff yourself to fill that space, exclusively. Just the right balance of seeming to appreciate life, as it is, and world-weariness. Ever will it be so! In order to pull that off, you have to be pretty boring, lest you open the door to odd ideas and intemperate modes of expression. The thing about Fitzhugh is that he is an unapologetic moral revisionist. A future-bound moral revolutionist! If they’d had talking-head shows back then, most of these guys would have been the guy who was a regular, for 25 years. Fitzhugh would have been the guy who kept getting kicked off, like Pat Buchanan, but then rehired because you gotta love a guy who speaks his mind!
“[A] pack of George F. Wills with only one joker – one Southern Avenger – in the deck.” I loved that.
Do I learn anything from careening around, reading promiscuously? Yeah. I almost certainly, by temperament, would have agreed with the George Wills, sighing about utopianism and property rights, and meaning every word of it. If it weren’t anachronistic, I’d be talking about zero-sum games, too. Change is hard.
But that’s not to say I’m all wrong in those current affairs that style themselves as parallel to abolitionism and in which my reflexes are conservative. It would be interesting to look at the fatuities and disingenuousness of popular abolitionist arguments, not all of which, I’m sure, were above reproach.
I could insert at least one specific current example of disingenuous liberal argument, but an intelligent reader can come up with some, no doubt.
(H/T The Browser, by the way)
Pre-posting update:
I want you to know I wrote every word above before Rod Dreher commented on the same piece, with some of the same quote, and with very much the same reaction. I have forbidden myself to edit a single word of it.
Dreher:
This got to me, because I recognize all too well this approach to questions of law, morality, and public policy. It is my instinctive approach, and the instinctive approach of most conservatives; it is what makes us conservative. I do believe that in the main, it is a more reliable approach than liberal idealism, which rarely seems to consider that the progressive cause it champions today may bring disaster. But at its worst, this conservatism serves an evil like slavery and, later, Jim Crow.
In our own time, liberals would accuse conservatives of making the exact same mistake on gay rights, while conservatives would say (and do say) that liberals are pushing for a utopianism that disregards human nature and human flourishing, and are doomed to fail. I don’t want to raise that argument in this post, but only wish to show how this tension plays itself out in a heated contemporary debate.
Slavery is the best example of the moral failure of the conservative instinct towards prudence and gradualism. Can you think of examples of the moral failure of the liberal instinct towards utopianism? The first thing that comes to mind to me is the Sexual Revolution; a second case is forced busing. You may have others.
In the conservative case, we find an evil defended because the alternative is supposedly worse; in the liberal case, we find the potential for evil denied because the existing alternative is supposedly worse ….
I feel in good company – Dreher, that is, not Fitzhugh or the “George Wiils” of 160 years ago.
“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received ….” (Paul of Tarsus, f/k/a Saul)
“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” (Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James)
“We will change often. We know that God is progressive and so we will lay our ideas, agendas, programs, and everything else down.” (The idiots misleading Innovation Church)
I come late to actually listening to an excellent, excellent podcast series, which I subscribed to some time ago: Paradise and Utopia: Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Christendom.
This is a series of forty reflections on the history of Christian civilization, or Christendom (and will include additional introductory and concluding episodes). It is divided into two halves tracing the “rise” of Christendom in early times and its “fall” in modern times. The entire podcast is organized around the theme of “paradise and utopia”—that is, of the civilization’s orientation toward the kingdom of heaven when traditional Christianity was influential, and of its “disorientation” toward the fallen world in the wake of traditional Christianity’s decline in the west following the Great Schism.
Yes, the podcaster, an Orthodox Priest and Professor of History, traces the fall of Christendom to Rome’s break-away from the eastern (Orthodox) Patriarchs.
Apart from the podcaster’s lack of teaching awards from prestigious universities, it sounds like a sort of alternative “Western Civilization” course, expanded to “Christian Civilization” by adding Byzantium and the East, on a par with the paid courses from The Teaching Company (a number of whose course I’ve taken or am taking).
The series is maybe 2/3 toward the end, but all podcasts are still available.
Theses introduced early in an introductory episode:
- Christendom arose not with Constantine or the Edict of Milan, but with early Christian engagement with the world – i.e., with the Great Commission.
- The apogee of Christendom came not during the “High Middle Ages,” but (if there was a high point) before the Great Schism – during what western history calls “the Dark Ages” (because it was relatively dark in the West).
- The fall or decline of Christendom came not from secularization, beginning in the Enlightenment, but from the Great Schism. Secularization is a response to the sometimes dysfunctional culture of Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.
- Christendom overall does not see creation as of little value or the individual as naturally depraved. This overlooks the Orthodox view. Under traditional Christianity, Christendom celebrated the created world and exalted man’s place within it, albeit through the lens of Paradise.
And a powerful quote, that I’d say echoes my opposition to a utilitarian view of religion except that the author wrote before I was old enough to form such a view:
We should not regard all beliefs as constructive by themselves, and should not welcome every faith as an antidote against doubt and disruption. It may be perfectly true as sociologists contend that cultures disintegrate when there is no inspiring incentive, no commanding conviction, but it is the content of faith that is decisive, at least from a Christian point of view. The chief danger in our days is that there are too many conflicting beliefs. The major tension is not much between belief and unbelief as precisely between rival beliefs. Too many strange gospels are preached, and each of them claims total obedience and faithful submission. Even science poses sometimes as religion. It may be true that the modern crisis can be formally traced back to the loss of convictions. It would be disastrous, however, if people rallied around a false banner and pledged allegiance to a wrong faith. The real root of the modern tragedy lies not only in the fact that people lost convictions, but that they deserted Christ.
* * * * *
“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 