What Is Education Really For?

This podcast is brought to you by Ascension. To discover even more free Catholic podcasts, videos and resources, to help you live your faith every day, visit AscensionPress.com. Why do we experience a crisis in modern education? Why do we feel like there's something wrong here? Why are Gen X and millennials and boomers? Why are we all collectively mad at new math and stuff like that? [MUSIC] >> Welcome back to every knee, shound bow. Your weekly Catholic podcast on Evangelization and Discipleship. My name is Mike Gomer Gormley, and I am not joined today by my co-host, Dave Oh, my dear Lord. His life is on hard mode all the time, van Vickle. Yeah, so a moment for y'all to say a quick prayer for Dave. Dave's father was on his deathbed when we were going to record this episode. Dave's mom died, I believe in a couple years ago in November, and then his wife died in February, the following February. Now his dad might be passing. So prayers for him, they think they found an experimental procedure, which will keep him alive. Today is Monday, September 14th. I don't know the status of it. It seemed to be somewhat promising, but they were kind of holding on to hope. So just prayers, let's just pray right now, Hail Mary for Dave's dad and his conversion. Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. And the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. Life is hard, Dave seems to be on hard mode all the time. He is one of my favorite people, obviously. You know, this is why we do the show for so many years, but Dave really is an inspiration to all of us. So he knows how to suffer and suffer well, but that doesn't make it easy. So Dave asked me to do a live episode and I thought, oh, this is going to be somewhat fortuitous because previously, for the healthcare series, I got to do a rant for 45 minutes or maybe 52. So now for this week, I'm going to do a similar rant. So if you didn't hear the healthcare episode, this is going to kind of build on that somewhat. So we did a whole season on Catholic healthcare and it wasn't just an ethics thing. And so now we're doing it on education. We're going to have Catholic leaders in higher education. Come on and talk to us about the different modes of education and what conforms to or deviates from a Catholic ideal. But you know me, you know me and I love to be meta ethical. I love taking us back to the bedrock, to the basics, to the foundations in order to go through this stuff. And I think one thing I want to ask is, why do we experience a crisis in modern education? Why are we, why are Gen X and millennials and boomers? So this is what I have an essay prepared as a, so if it feels a little red, I don't, I hate it when people just read through things because it doesn't feel super natural. As you can tell right now, I'm just out of living. But at the same time, my thoughts are in a million different places. So I'm going to try to run through this as coherently as possible. So buckle up baby birds because mama's going to feed you. Here we go. So the last time, on the last episode, we started this. We wrestled with a foundational concept. What is a human being for, right? You have to talk about things like human destiny, meaning the pursuit of human action towards truth. And you and I, we settled on the claim that we're not just accidents, that we weren't dumped into existence, left to figure it out, that God desires human beings to actually become, become something that we are on the way. This is a journey, okay? So today, that conversation moves out of the realm of abstract philosophy somewhat and lands right where our civilization attempts to form real living human beings. So the central place, the biggest place of formation of real human persons, which is the school education. Modern education is playing in a sandbox of means. The other day, driving in the car, I asked, I want to have one on one time with my kids, I asked, what is the relationship between means and ends? What do we mean when I say the ends do not justify the means? So we have this like funny conversation. This is all to help me translate all my thoughts on education into this. So when we talk about modern education, playing in a massive sandbox of means, we mean that the fight we constantly hear is endlessly over methods, standardized testing, screen time, phone bands, funding, state standards, national standards, common core, whole word, sight words, vocab, like phonics, all of these things. But as a society, we have quietly agreed to do something impossible. We agreed to never talk about the end, okay? Nobody, no human person can act without an end in mind. What is first in intention is last in execution. That's a tomistic Aristotelian formula. What is first in intention, what I intend to do, lives in my mind is last in execution. I did all of these means, all of these things, and now I've arrived at my goal. I want to drink a soda on a cold day or a hot day of yard work. So now that's my intention. I think in my mind, so then I walk into the kitchen and put some ice in the glass, pour the Coke in, wait a couple minutes for the ice to do its thing, but not too long that it gets all watered down. Boom, end in mind is the last in execution, okay? We cannot act without an end in mind. Every human person, every human action is directed towards a goal. You cannot help this, you are goal oriented. So when a school pretends it isn't picking an end, it is lying. The end just gets smuggled in through the back door, so to speak, completely unexamined. And that brings us to the core claim. This is the core claim. The claim to educational neutrality is a disguise. Underneath that disguise, it's a very real, very non-neutral picture of the human person that shapes every single thing happening inside that building. And this is not a hit piece on public schools or on private schools or struggling lame Catholic schools. This is not a hit piece on any of that. There are heroic men and women who are teaching in all of the different systems. There are great teachers stuck in the middle of a broken system and they can probably accomplish more than a bad teacher in a great system, okay? So this is about stepping back. The target is the absolute absence of a philosophical foundation. That absence is not an accident. It is how our whole modern political set up, how it functions and what it requires. In health care, the parallel holds that we talked about. A society that has no shared definition of what a person is can never have a shared definition of what health is. So medicine devolves into means just like education. What do we mean by that medicine? Managing symptoms, fulfilling preferences, extending life without ever being able to answer what that life is actually for. And education is in the same crisis just in a different building, right? Political liberalism tried to keep the peace, post-reformation when Catholics and Protestants were killing each other and Protestants and Protestants were killing each other. And sometimes the Holy Roman Emperor funded the Protestant side against the Catholic side. And sometimes the Pope did the same thing. It's a wild thing. It was more political than it was religious in a certain extent. How were all the religious wars settled by secularism? It's the rise of political secularism where people just said, look, if your prince is Lutheran, you're Lutheran. If he's reformed or reformed, if he's Catholic or Catholic, that's it. It's called the Peace of Westphalia. It's insane. It wasn't settled by the truth of the gospel by men being humble and committing to that truth. No, peace was made by saying that all of these ultimate questions, who are we? Why are we here? Does God exist? What's the right way to worship him? Which religion if any are true? All of that was shoved into a column marked private or personal opinion. But an institution designed to form children cannot bracket the question of what a person is, what a child is, and still function. A school isn't like a tax office or a court enforcing contracts between adults who already know what they want. A school forms souls. It forms intellects. It forms citizens. These are huge. When you refuse to name the end for a child, someone else will answer it for you. Often silently, subtly, and never, neutrally. So when we go back, now we're into part two here, and I really want everyone to double down on this. Aristotle laid down a rule for human action over 2,000 years ago that we keep trying to ignore. He said that any purposeful activity, the end comes first in the order of explanation. Think about a builder. He doesn't pour concrete in a field, frame out four random walls, and then say, hey, this should be a hospital or maybe a warehouse. Oh, no, no, no, we'll do a duplex. He starts with an image in his head of a finished building, the point of that building. That mental picture explains every single brick he lays, every wire he runs, every nail he drives. The same is true for a school. Every school on earth is working backward from some image of a finished human being. Maybe when they're 18 and out of high school, maybe when they're 10 and out of fifth grade or leave in fifth grade, whatever it is. The only question is whether people running the school have the courage to say that image allowed. And whether that image is actually true. were good. So here's the next point, a school embodies a judgment about human flourishing. What does it mean to be fully human? A school does not merely distribute information, a school embodies a judgment about human flourishing. Look at the sheer number of daily judgments a school makes, deciding what's worth knowing, which is a judgment about what is real, right? It decides what gets rewarded and honored, which is a judgment about what the good life looks like. It decides what gets disciplined and what gets excused. And that's a judgment about human free will. It decides whether recess is a waste of time and whether music is just an extra budget line item, which is a judgment about whether a human being is just a brain on a stick, right? Or a single embodied creature. It decides what authority a teacher holds over a student, which is a judgment about whether a child needs to receive wisdom from someone older and wiser or not. There's no such thing as a neutral school, when a school claims to be neutral about ultimate questions, it hasn't eliminated a philosophy of human nature. It simply protected its philosophy from being questioned. It has arranged the rules so that nobody can challenge the underlying assumptions. A thoughtful defender of the modern system might say, look, we aren't trying to impose a view of the good life or a religious view. We just want to give the kids tools to choose their own good life. And that sounds convincing until you step into a classroom. A curriculum is an aim. You cannot put a book in front of a child, set a schedule or enforce a standard of behavior without declaring right there. And then what matters and what doesn't? Neutrality vanishes the moment you form a human soul. Every philosophy of human nature, what philosophers call anthropology, anthropos, meaning man, right, the study of man, right? Has to answer four questions. Okay, what is man? What does it mean to be a human person? Are you a clever animal? Are you a fallen angel? What is man? Number two, is the mind actually built for reality? Okay, this is important because can we actually know the truth? The truth about the world around us or are we just trapped in our own opinions? This is where the word social construct really comes into play. Do I understand the world or I just impose a construct on the world to make it intelligible right now? Question number three, does human freedom have a purpose? Like is my freedom itself ordered towards something? It's Catholics, we would say the great phrase freedom for excellence, not just freedom of indifference, which is just picking whichever option we want, A or B. And question number four is, can we fix society ourselves? Okay, that might seem like a little bit more obscure, but think about this, put it this way, can we build a perfect world through better management and education? There are some who say yes, some who say no, what is the answer that we give? We can build a better world, maybe, as opposed to the perfect world utopian. For centuries, classical philosophy and historic Christianity gave four firm answers to those questions. Number one, what is man? He is neither a clever monkey or a trapped angel. He's a single creature body and sole United, an animal that reasons, right? Our definition is a rational animal. Number two, is the mind built for reality? The answer is yes, truth is real, truth is knowable, and it exists outside of personal feelings or ideologies. Number three, does freedom have a purpose? Yes, freedom isn't just choice. It is the power to choose the good. What is good? What leads to human flourishing? And number four, can we perfect society ourselves? No, there is something deeply broken inside of a sin that no government program school policy or app can ever fully fix. Every modern educational experiment is what happens when you alter one or more of those four answers. The Christian vision of education in one sentence, you ready for this? To see where we went off the rails, let's look at the vision we abandoned. The Christian view of the human person boils down to one single powerful statement. Man is a child of God, free because he is intelligent, responsible because he is free, impaired because of sin, and glorious because of redemption. So there's a chain of logic here. Intelligence gives us freedom, and freedom holds us responsible. Sin means that our entire nature is diminished in some manner, which means that we need healing, not just more information, not just to overcome ignorance, but there's a problem with our wills, not just our intellects. And redemption means that healing is actually possible pointing us towards eternal glory, our true final end. If you build a school on that foundation, the mission is crystal clear, train the intellect so the child can be truly free, form the will so they use that freedom responsibly, address the internal damage through moral discipline and virtue, and point the entire person towards God. But we are living through right now is the slow motion collapse that happens when a civilization drops those clauses one by one. This didn't start with a phone addiction, or in the rebellious 1960s, or even progressive education in the 20th century. The crack in the foundation happened centuries ago when philosophy, and you know I'm going to nerd out on philosophy, started shrinking what the human mind is capable of knowing. It started with a shift in how we view reality. The idea that the human mind cannot actually grasp the true underlying nature of things. We can observe individual objects, this tree, that rock, this measure of data. But we can't know universal truths. That's what we call nominalism was started by William of Occam, and it's known as the via Moderna, or the modern way, and it was invented about a hundred years after St. Thomas Aquinas lived, and it captured all of European thought. And it led to directly to the reformation, but that's a different story that I desperately want to get into. But we'll bracket that conversation. So once you accept the shift that the mind loses its connection to reality and thus to universal truths, what happens to reason it gets demoted. Science and measurement become the only things that count as hard knowledge. Moral truths, religious claims, deep philosophical realities get booted out of the realm of knowledge and dumped into the bucket called personal values or subjective opinion. That is at its core the fact value split, that there's a split between facts over here and then values which are private. And this is the water that we swim in every day. Facts are what you measure in a lab, they're quantifiable. Values are just private preferences like your favorite ice-cream flavor. When a school swallows this split, the whole curriculum falls apart. Science tells you what is, but nobody is allowed to tell you how you ought to live. Fact value. Religion gets reduced to an optional morality class tucked inside the schedule, but when you remove God as the ultimate grounding of reality, you lose the very thing that holds knowledge together. Everything is knowable because the God of the universe is logos, is rationality itself. And he orders, like we see in Genesis 1, he orders the universe rationally, knowable. Einstein used to say that he marveled that the universe was knowable by human intellects. Now we come to another part, the utopians, school as the blueprint for earthly paradise. So once the mind is cut off from higher truth, universal truths, truths that are always right, a second mistake immediately follows. If the human person, if the human mind can't reach heaven, right, then the only heaven that matters is the one we build right here on earth. And the school becomes the ultimate machine to build it. This is why commonly on the left, the only answer to so many of life's problems is education, education, education. Okay, this is the exact reversal of that fourth question. Can we perfect society? The modern world said, yes, we can. If we get the education system just right. Notice how these two errors work together. On the one hand, we shrink what education can know, stripping out truth, virtue, God. On the other hand, we massively inflate what education can do. Expecting schools to solve poverty and racism, fixed mental health, deliver human happiness, organize society perfectly. We end up creating an educational system that is completely incapable of telling a child what he or she is for. Yet totally confident, it can solve every problem in society. Isn't that fascinating? This brings us to two major cultural shifts that directly shape the modern classroom. The first is a Frenchman named Jean Jacques Rousseau and his myth of the untouched goodness. This is the noble savage idea. In the 18th century, Rousseau introduced an idea that completely broke with historic wisdom. He rejected the concept of original sin. He claimed that children were born naturally perfect and good and that society is what corrupts them. If a child is naturally perfect and society is the villain, then what is a teacher's job? It's not to form the child. It's not to discipline his desires or to pass down a rich inheritance. sentence of wisdom. A teacher's job is simply to step back and get out of the way and protect the child from being influenced by the outside world. Instead of seeking wisdom to conquer ignorance or grace to conquer sin, russo championed, and you know this word right when you hear it, you feel it in your bones. Authenticity. We live in the fallout of that idea today. That's why modern education constantly elevates self expression over virtue, self esteem over self mastery, personal feeling over objective truth, but an unformed child isn't free. It's just wild. Reason doesn't just spontaneously blossom out of nowhere. It has to be struck into life, like striking steel against Flint to create a spark. But that's not the only person. John Dewey and his pragmatism fast forward to America in the 20th century and enter John Dewey, the Dewey decimal system, you know, Dewey was a brilliant thinker. All of these people who massively changed the world right there are brilliant thinkers. Dewey was a brilliant thinker who rightly hated this rigid splitting of mind and body. But the core problem with his approach was his definition of human purpose. For Dewey, reality is constantly changing. Experience is the only true teacher and the ultimate goal of education is simply growth. That sounds great on a bumper sticker, but the next logical question is growth toward what pragmatism can't answer that. In Dewey's model, human beings are basically smart organisms continually adapting to their environment. It's the evolutionary model, right? Growth just leads to more growth. A political order that has agreed never to declare an ultimate end needs a theory of education that has no ultimate end. Ta-da! It allows administrators to measure progress, test skills, track growth, endlessly without ever having to answer the question, what are we actually forming this child to become? And this is where I insert a quote from G.K. Chesterton. Now, I think this applies to a lot of things, but it was this quote specifically about progressivism of the 19 teens and 20s. And he said, a progressive is someone who, oh gosh, I'm going to butcher this quote. Basically, progressivism is a comparative that has no definition of the superlative. I think I already butchered that. Basically, the superlative is this is the best. So we constantly, the progressive constantly talks about better, but they don't understand what best is. So it's like better to what measurement, where are we going? If we say growth, a tumor can grow, as well as a muscle can grow. Human is bad, the other good. So when you don't have that understanding of an end, what is growth? What does that even mean? So now we have the modern substitutes, the worker and the screen. When you strip away a school of true philosophy of the human person, a vacuum is created. And something always fills a vacuum. Two substitute pictures of the human person have quietly taken over our culture. Nobody wrote a grand philosophical book advocating for them. They just emerge naturally once ultimate purpose was erased. Substitute number one, the student as an economic unit, a producer, a consumer. When a school can no longer speak about the soul, virtue, or eternal life, what is left? Economic utility. The student gets reduced to a future worker in the economic machine. The primary measure of a successful school becomes does this program produce competitive workers for the global marketplace? Does it give kids the skills to compete in high paying jobs so they can buy more stuff? Work is good. You and I all agree. Our church literally teaches that. St. Joseph of the worker. Work is good. Preparing young people to earn a living, provide for a family, serve their neighbor through honest labor. It's an essential duty of education. We all agree. Catholic tradition has always affirmed this. The tragedy occurs when economic utility becomes the only thing a school knows how to talk about. When career prep is no longer a secondary goal, but the supreme definition of a successful human life, education has ceased to be an act of liberation. It has become a commodity factory. And that is scary. Here's the second substitute. Number two, the person of sensations, the addicted mind you could call it. The newest substitute is even more urgent and sad. It's the view of the human person as merely a bundle of immediate sensations. Instead of seeing life as a noble work to be accomplished, spiritual mission, requiring discipline and endurance, millions of young people have been trained to view life as a continuous stream of experiences to be consumed. They don't have to have a vocation. They have a feed. You cannot educate a mind that has lost the capacity for deep attention. Every historical philosophy of education assumed a student who could sit still with a challenging book, wrestle with a hard mathematical concept or contemplate a piece of art. The person of sensations has been hyper-trained by algorithms to treat anything that requires effort or causes discomfort as an interruption to be swiped away. When immediate experience is your only reality, the deep, quiet truths of faith, of history, of philosophy, of mathematics don't just sound boring. They become literally unimaginable. So where were Catholic schools while all of this was happening? Over the last 50 years, facing immense cultural and financial pressures, many Catholic institutions made a disastrous trade. They adopted the secular framework wholesale and tried to preserve their identity by simply tacking a religion class and campus ministry program onto the side. Math, English science, history, gym, and 45 minutes of religion done. This is not a Catholic school. This is a secular anthropology with a chaplain. When you run a school that way, you create a dangerous dualism in the mind of a child. You implicitly teach him that math, science, and history belong to the real world of facts while faith is just a private emotional extra that you add to your schedule if you happen to like it. You cannot fix a foundational breakdown in human nature by just adding more religion worksheets. The remedy has to go all the way down to the roots. And so this is where we need the next part, restoring the vision. We need to repent to turn back. If the crisis in education is a crisis about the human person, then the recovery must begin with a complete restoration of what a human person actually is. This is the 24 hundred-year-old tradition of Christian humanism. One, Aristotle reminds us. You cannot understand any activity until you know the end. Education is nonsense. Until you answer what a human life is for. Plato. Plato gives us the image of conversion, right? This is the famous analogy of the cave. Religion isn't cramming external data into a passive brain like pouring water into a bucket. It's a turning around of the whole soul toward the light of reality. Augustine, St. Augustine deepens this insight. The core problem of human nature isn't just a lack of facts. It is disordered love. You can know what is right and still love all the wrong things. Therefore, true education must train the desires of the human heart. Thomas Aquinas brings it all together, my homeboy. Every branch of study is ultimately an invitation to pilgrimage. The status of a viator, we are people on the journey, right? We are pilgrims on the way. When you see a human being as an intelligent creature whose ultimate fulfillment is to know truth, to love goodness and to live in communion with God, education changes entirely. It is no longer about information delivery. It is about soul formation. There are three pillars that we need to focus on from that truth, truth, freedom and virtue. Building a school that honors the human person requires three non-negotiable pillars. Chicken tenders every lunch. Number one, truth and unity of knowledge. If the human mind is designed for reality, the math isn't just arbitrary rules. History isn't just random dates and names. Science isn't just cold data. They are all distinct windows into the order, the beauty, the wisdom of God's creation. Truth is a unified whole. Number two, freedom rightly understood. Now, you might have heard the phrase liberal arts. The word liberal comes from the Latin word for free. True freedom is not the chaotic ability to pick whatever you want. We call that a freedom of indifference. Freedom is the developed capacity, internal discipline and strength of character to choose what is genuinely good. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, freedom is given not that you can choose what you are. It is not as an opportunity for license, but to choose what you ought to do. A student who has acquired high level technical skills but cannot govern his own lust, his own anger, his own greed is not a free man. He is a highly trained slave to his appetites. And when we hear this, we can directly draw a line to that health care episode where Plato in his "The Laws" contrasts its slave medicine with free medicine. And now we find the same mentality, the liberal arts are meant to free you. It's the education of a person who pursues the true, the good and the beautiful. Whereas the mechanical arts or the survival arts are just meant for job-y jobs. and that's it. So now we come to principle number three, virtue and the formation of desire. We must train the heart to love what is good long before the intellect can fully grasp all the complex reasons why. When a child is raised to love truth, beauty and goodness, from an early age, then when mature reason finally arrives, he greets truth not as a stranger or a set of rules, but as an old friend he has already known his entire life. And now intellectual charity and the ultimate end. This is where the Christian vision completely transcends a purely classical approach. I love classical education, but Christian classical education is where it's at. Education does not stop at mental sharpness. It doesn't even stop at moral virtue. Education must end in love. Pope Benedict the 16th called this concept intellectual charity, leading a young person to the truth is not an aggressive imposition or an academic game. It is a profound act of love. Evangelization is not really handing someone a list of doctrinal propositions to memorize. It is introducing a human soul to reality itself, a reality that is intelligible, beautiful, meaningful, because it flows from the mind of Christ, the eternal logos, the eternal word, the eternal truth, teaching a child to read, to appreciate beauty, to think logically, to hold an argument to the light, is a physical and spiritual work of mercy. The ultimate goal of Catholic education is not just the sharpening of the mind, but the formation of saints. So let's bring it home to the family. Both the church and natural law insist upon this fundamental truth. The school does not own your child. The state does not own your child. And I am so thankful that COVID showcased to a lot of parents, the shenanigans going on in their schools and they walk by a computer and said, you're learning what today and pull their kids out of that school. Parents are the primary and irreplaceable educators of their children. A school, no matter how incredible, classical, faithful it might be, is always subsidiary. It exists to assist and complement the family not to replace it. If a school sets itself up in opposition to the moral and spiritual life of the family, it becomes an engine of destruction. We as parents have to be honest, the smuggled secular ends often take root inside our own homes. It is easy to get caught up in the sandbox and modern metrics. Did my kid get into a top college? Did they secure the athletic scholarship? Well, this program set them up for us six figure salaries straight out of school. These aren't inherently evil questions, but they are radically incomplete. The Christian tradition demands deeper questions. Is my child becoming wise? Can he govern his own passions and appetites? Is she reading a challenging deep book all the way through to the last page and wrestling with it? Can he tell the difference between a sound argument and cheap media propaganda? Does she know how to pray? Does he know how to love well? You don't need a pristine or perfect school to raise a child who can answer yes to those questions. Countless young people turn out heroically because a mother and a father, and a vibrant parish community stepped up and supplied the ultimate purpose that the culture tried to erase. At the end of the day, the question that echoes across the centuries from Aristotle to Augustine down to our own present moment is the exact same question we started with. What is a human being for? If the answer is God, if a human life is meant to culminate in knowing the truth, loving the good, and living in eternal communion with our creator, then our families, our parishes, our schools must be fiercely, joyfully reordered to that end. The educational crisis surrounding us isn't simply that test scores are dropping or systems are breaking. The crisis is that we have forgotten who and what we are. The work of recovery begins in one single place, remembering the dignity of the human person, and building a world that leads that person home. Thank you for listening to every news shop out. If this episode challenged you or sparked ideas for your own family or prayers, please share it with me. Share this episode with a friend. You know, shoot me an email, [email protected]. If you like this, share it with a friend. Leave a review. Join us next week as we continue the conversation, but I just want you to remember. Everyone acts towards an end, even institutions that claim that they don't. That's why so many parents are homeschooling. That's why so many parents are in private, Catholic schools. That's why so many public schools have to be radically supplemented. Things are not working right now. And we have to realize it's because deep questions are not being answered. We're at least not being answered publicly. As Chester Chen said, it is the oldest things that ought to be taught to the youngest people. And one of his critiques of the modern educational system was there are kindergartners, there are children going to school who are older than the educational theories that propose to form them. What are we to do? What are we to do? Ask these questions and do your work as a parent to get to the right answers? God bless you all. [Music]