This article is a Christmas gift from me to you.
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has written one of the most eloquent explanations of why we need teachers, schools, and universities.
At a time when we hear hosannas to online learning, home-schooling, inexperienced teachers, the business model of schooling, for-profit schools, and the commodification of education, this is bracing reading.
Here is the way that Wieseltier’s wonderful article ends:
“THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT that we should “out-educate” other countries, but he is wrong that we should do so only, or mainly, to “out-compete.” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory. An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society. The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.) And the schooling of inwardness matters even more in the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, where meanings are often ambiguous and interpretations determine fates. The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit. How much about human existence can be inferred from a start-up? Shakespeare or Undrip: I should have thought that the choice was easy. Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on From experience to meaning… and commented:
Great piece. Does remind me of the question ‘what do teachers make?’ The difference, off course!
Had that been my only Christmas gift, dayenu.
It is wonderful indeed.
Your Xmas present is much appreciated.
The Rheephormistas are sure to get offended at this ‘obvious’ attack on their innovative edu-entrepeneurship [David Rosenberg, you’re on!] but Leon Wieseltier is spot on in describing people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I’ve been a public school educator since the 90s and I don’t deny the fact that home educated children do as well and often better on all standard measures i.e. tests, college acceptance, career than their public schooled counterparts. Why attack parents who are doing a wonderful job of raising happy, successful children?
Why deny the fact that learning in and from the world can be as good or better than learning from 12 years in classrooms under fluorescent lights?
Instead of bashing a learning choice, why not look a little deeper and learn a little more?
I agree Lisa. And one of the best places to “look a little deeper and and learn a little more” is Clark Aldrich’s book, Unschooling Rules (55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education)
Unschooling Rules is a list of 55 ideas, derived from interviews with homeschoolers and unschoolers, to evolve how people imagine and evaluate education.
Here is Clark’s take on where these ideas are positioned in the current conversation about public education.
http://unschoolingrules.blogspot.com/2012/12/unschooling-rules-scorecard-2012.html
“An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society.”
This presumably characterizes everybody without a traditional four-year university degree? What gall; I am appalled. You know, you can be a better person and be an auto mechanic. You don’t turn in your brain or your soul or your love of history or philosophy just because you want to start a business or build things. You don’t have to burn your books or stop attending museum lectures to become a chef or a tech designer or a park ranger or a nurse’s aid. Some people are deeply unhappy in traditional schools or at four-year college. Some people push their way through — whether only part way or all the way to the degree — out of obligation or lack of alternatives acceptable to their snooty culture, and they end up burying their former love of history and despising sonnets for it, or simply feeling inept and awful and out of place because they’re not learning and feeling what everybody says they should. Not everybody finds enlightenment in a rousing classroom discussion; not everybody finds salvation at [cue choir of angels] c~o~l~l~e~g~e. Will you help them find enlightenment — and their own path to meaningful contribution to community — off campus, the way they find it best? No? Then please don’t disparage the people who will.
I support public education and state college. (Yay to teachers unions and boo to standardized tests!) One can do that without insulting those people who need to follow a different path or those people who are helping them do it.
“This is the only way, we say: but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.” –Henry David Thoreau, *Walden* (Economy)
“Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pigmies, and not be the biggest pigmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavour to be what he was made.” –Henry David Thoreau, *Walden* (Conclusion)
I wouldn’t call Leon Wieseltier eloquent, but arrogant in his assumptions.
Anyone who believes that the only way kids will acquire the “ability to reason, a familiarity with argument and a historical memory” is by putting them through our school system has not spent much time dealing with schooled children lately. Schools no longer teach (if they ever did, as a whole) the “ability to reason”. They teach the ability to ace an exam. They do not encourage argument or debate but conformity, docility and a mindless obeying of the rules. And historical memory? What history are you looking for? The basics of how our country was founded, or a deeper discussion of our conflicted founders, their personal hypocrisies and how they rose above them (or didn’t, as the case may be)? The former can easily be found without the aid of a school, the second is virtually non-existant in our public system.
Denigrating unschoolers/homeschoolers and making assumptions about them – that they are only interested in start-ups, for example, or that they won’t have any exposure to Shakespeare or the humanities – shows a shocking lack of journalistic inquiry that I would think has no place in The New Republic. Perhaps the author should look into the work of ceramic artist Brenna McBroom or international activist Birke Baehr. Perhaps he should interview Dale Stephens instead of making broad assumptions. Perhaps he should look at singer Leile Broussard, or talk to the grown (and always unschooled) children of Wendy Priesnitz and/or Sandra Dodd.
I don’t doubt the author enjoyed his own time in the higher education system. Unfortunately it seems to have instilled in him a type of arrogance that promotes the misguided and patently false idea that meaningful education can only be imparted to others; that unless guided, no person will choose to read the classics, learn history or be a good citizen.
And that is not a beneficial gift for anyone.
Of course homeschooling is better than the available alternatives for some children; of course some young adults educate themselves without the structure of college. Wieseltier’s column, as I read it, criticizes not these exceptions but the mounting argument or semi-argument that liberal education as a dead idea.
It is important to learn in the presence of good teachers–who know how to offer perspective without supplanting the student’s own thought, who know how to bring the student into the subject. As a teacher, I trust that my efforts toward thoughtful instruction are worthwhile, however imperfect. I know that my own teachers’ work was and is worthwhile. I continue to be taught (in my thinking and reading, and sometimes in conversation) by my former and current teachers.
There will always be students who take unconventional routes–who take longer than others in college, who skip college altogether, or who otherwise do things differently. That does not mean the institutions of school or college have had their day. To the contrary: they offer needed counterweights, needed challenges, to a student’s own intents. The point is not that we must be guided toward truth by some institutional authority. Rather, there is great value in learning, through the challenges and examples of teachers, that one’s initial suppositions were limited–and that there is more to find.
I saw his essay as a counter to the attack on teachers and education rather than an attempt to denigrate other paths. I may not agree with all of the examples he chooses to make his point or in the way in which he presents them, but I do understand why he chose the examples he did. Public schools and teachers are under attack. While I would not choose homeschooling as an example of disdain for education, I do agree with his attempt to separate the merits of education from a simple drive for economic success.
I don’t really see how this quote – “The new interest in homeschooling—the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy. And now there is the fashion in “unschooling,” which I take from a forthcoming book by Dale J. Stephens, the gloating founder of UnCollege. His deeply unfortunate book is called Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will. It is a call for young people to reject college and become “self-directed learners.” One wonders about the preparedness of this untutored “self” for this unknown “direction.”” – can possibly NOT be construed as “denigrating” homeschooling. It’s snide and unnecessarily rude, and it paints most homeschooling families with a broad brush, although unschoolers get a special mention with a different “crazy wacky hippies” brush.
We unschooled for two years and would have done it longer if we could have afforded it financially. My older daughter was ahead in math and WAY ahead in reading before she went to a small private school; within 6 months there, she was BEHIND in math. I do applaud our neighborhood school for being able to accelerate her again when we enrolled her midyear, even though if she were to enter that school today the implementation of CCSS there wouldn’t allow it.
I’m actually hoping to go back to homeschooling sometime soon, even though I “only” have the music education degrees. I think we’ll muddle through the math and science and social studies somehow, what with our co-ops and learning communities, both online and face-to-face.
I believe that Wieseltier objects to homeschooling as a large-scale approach to education–because it does not offer what a good school can offer. Of course there are individual cases where homeschooling is the best available option.
Speaking for myself here, I know that there are competent and conscientious homeschoolers. All the same, it is difficult for parents to (a) muster the resources to provide a reasonable equivalent of school and (b) see beyond their own prejudices and biases, even when they try to do so. One great thing about school is that you encounter people whom your parents would NOT have selected as your tutors–and who end up influencing you in important ways.
When Wieseltier says about his teachers, “Even what I learned on my own I owed to them, because they guided me in my sense of what is significant,” I don’t think he means that his ideas had to be validated by a higher authority. Rather, these teachers influenced him (as I understand it) by showing ways of thinking and holding up things they considered important and good. One can question or reject what a teacher offers and still be deeply influenced by it.
Yes, his piece is angry, but that’s because he sees too many people speaking of teachers as though they were dispensable. This insinuation (or all-out claim) comes from many directions and builds up to clamor. His piece cuts through the clamor.
I’m angry about the way teachers are treated too – but I don’t spend my blog talking down to homeschoolers, or much worse, those wacky unschoolers who are teaching and learning who-knows-what, can’t POSSIBLY be trusted that maybe homeschooling/unschooling is NOT inferior to classroom teaching, public or private.
You and I agree that there are situations where homeschooling is best, and I don’t think anyone has proposed that it be a large-scale solution, so he has no need to be so defensive about it, or so dismissive of it, or so snide about it. There’s righteous anger, and there just plain rude.
“Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.”
And what, I wonder, is the wisdom which he finds in the old sources of the humanities. Can he name it, point to it? And if he can, why doesn’t he? What one additional sentence does he need to utter to save his article from seeming the mere sour grapes of an un-success, of another union whore who doesn’t even know his quoit from his quant.
“eloquent”?? really?? when he uses the adjective “demented” to describe homeschooling?? my son was in a middle school in east harlem where lines were painted on the floor; where “lining up” and staying silent was the only way they could get into a classroom; where there was a “safe room”, and the ids treated it like a joke… the author of the article you link to is elitist—not eloquent…
“An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society.”
I agree with this. But then, homeschooling parents or people who opt-out of traditional college only fit the authors definition of “ignorant”; and by making such scathing remarks about people who do not conform, Weiseltier shows his own ignorance to alternatives that actually work (and have data to support that they work).
“The new interest in homeschooling—the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy.”
I am a former teacher with a Master’s in the craft and “time in” on the front line. I now homeschool my children and there are parents I am involved with who outperform my creativity and knowledge on a daily basis. It’s awe-inspiring. Yes, to state that “children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love” is indeed an insult to the profession of pedagogy. I, too, lament over the time and money I wasted on my “education” to become an “educator”. But then, these parents have had the freedom to learn how to teach the way they felt they needed to be supplemented where I was given a template and told to conform. Just like Weiseltier, who notes “Even what I learned on my own I owed to them, because they guided me in my sense of what is significant.” It’s akin to saying that his own ideas had no value if not validated by a higher authority. It’s no wonder he doesn’t value an entrepreneur’s experience. My father has supported TWO families as an entrepreneur. It’s no cake-walk or fairy tale. Certainly it is easier to be a cog in a machine.
And to say that these parents are isolated and sheltering their children is just clearly ignorant of the homeschooling community. A level of ignorance that is really just unconscionable in this day and age when it takes but a few taps on a keyboard to see what is going on.
Last, this particular piece: “(There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.)”
Right. It’s because they have read a lot of books that have zero meaning to them. They have NOT learned all of the wonderful skills Weiseltier would have us believe happen in school.
If he had wonderful teachers, good for him. I had one or two great teachers in an entire career. Some people may have never had that. Viva la difference for those with the courage, humility and intelligence to acknowledge that their way is not the only way.
Seriously? Censoring comments? Nice. Proves the point I made in the comment and the blog I wrote on this topic.
Leon Wieseltiers article is best described as the arrogant, self absorbed prose of a demented scholar, who belongs to the cult of institutionalised education.
The reader is asked to idolise the superior intellect of the pedagogical teacher, and belittle the intellect of parents. The picture is all too clear.
The idol stands at the alter, before a group of inert bodies, bestowing their gift of knowledge, and encouraging their students to develop thought from a carefully crafted doctrine. The idol hands out work sheets or assignments, a process designed to either validate their pedagogical superiority or identify the student as learning disabled.
The image is horrifc, demoralising and illustrates where education has gone astray. This supposedly superior intellect cannot see the whole picture. The most important entity in the learning process, is the human being who is exploring and learning about his world and environment.
This process starts at birth and the most significant facilitator is the mother and family that the entity is born into. A student that start schools is not a blank piece of paper for the teacher to colour in, they are an entity who possess an array of experiences, individual personality and mastery over their own environment. They are bustling with the desire to grow and explore, and knowing they are attaining mastery in their home environment, are confident that this will continue in the classroom.
What does the classroom offer?
The idiocy of institutionalised pedagogy.
A taste of failure and humiliation.
The inhumane insistence of subjugation to a cruel and uncaring bureaucracy.
In reality the idol is a savant, corrupted by the economic burden of their own lives, a slave to an orchestrated and systematic abuse of the development of both thought and education in the underprivileged mass.
The parent who rejects this cult possess true intelligence, and I honestly pity this false idol’s aspirations.
What suggests this is the letter of a homeschooling parent?
Diane I educate my children not school them.