The Theory of Education in the United States
Albert Jay Nock's classic lectures on education:The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it.
Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (5)
Thank you for posting this article. I read it in its entirety as I lay in bed today recovering from an illness. I have often wondered myself whether I am an educable or ineducable person. I do like to see things as they are, not as I would like them to be. But I feel so undisciplined; hence, am I able to make a difference? Best wishes to all at The Mises Institute.
Published: November 17, 2007 1:27 PM
Very interesting. It could have been written today. My wife is an elementary school teacher and would agree with Nock's assessment of our educational system.
I wonder, however, if his dream of an institution that teaches the Great Tradition is practical today, and he seems to hint at the end that it would be hard to accomplish. It seems that the Grand Tradition was developed in a time when only the aristocracy received an education. Their children didn't need skills training because they had their land and would receive a good income from it. Their laborers may have needed more skills training from an institution, but not them. With their income certain, they would devote themselves to management and politics. The Great Tradition suited them and served them well.
Today, the only people who could afford the Grand Tradition style of education would be the children of the very wealthy who intended to go into education or politics. Nock is exactly right that our system is a vocational system for training people to get jobs. An education in the Great Tradition would make a graduate virtually unemployable.
Nevertheless, I agree with Nock that the Grand Tradition is vitally important. Some compromise might work and I think the history of the education of Baptist ministers might offer a clue to the answer. Until WWII, most Baptist congregations were too poor to support a pastor full-time. Most Baptist pastors were bi-vocational; they worked at a regular job during the week and pastored in their spare time. That's the reason for seminaries being post-graduate schools. The future pastor would attend an undergrad school to learn a vocation, such as business, and then attend seminary to learn theology. A similar school for the Grand Tradition might be a graduate school.
Published: November 17, 2007 1:38 PM
Randy: "I do like to see things as they are, not as I would like them to be."
That is a difficult frame of mind to get into. I think it's what Nock had in mind when he writes about being "informed and disinterested." To know the truth about anything, you have to put yourself in a state of mind in which you don't care about the consequences or the outcomes of what you discover; you simply want to know what the truth is. I think few people can achieve that.
As a result, I don't think that even if we had a large group of people educated in Nock's Grand Tradition that they could make much of a difference in the country because few people would listen to them. After reading Mises and Hayek, I felt defrauded by my university. Today I can't imagine someone claiming to be educated and not having read their important works. Yet Greg Mankiw at Harvard has the honesty to admit that he has read just one book by Hayek, Road to Serdom. I consider Hayek and Mises to be two of the greatest minds of the 20th century, yet few people pay attention to them. Very sad.
Published: November 17, 2007 1:52 PM
"I do like to see things as they are, not as I would like them to be."
"To know the truth about anything, you have to put yourself in a state of mind in which you don't care about the consequences or the outcomes of what you discover; you simply want to know what the truth is. I think few people can achieve that."
For many people, the truth has become no more than wishful thinking based upon a select few and incomplete set of facts that allow them either to remain within their comfort zone or to fulfill an agenda.
Over time I've come to realize that it's not my place to tell them how to think/live; but when they try to pull me into their fantasies, I extricate myself from the situation. The problem in the schools is that many teachers are drawing their unsuspecting students into these self-serving fantasies.
Published: November 19, 2007 1:05 AM
IMHO: "The problem in the schools is that many teachers are drawing their unsuspecting students into these self-serving fantasies."
That's true. And the left places all importance on emotions, so things that they feel deeply emotional about must be true.
Published: November 19, 2007 8:05 AM