The Irrelevance of Education

Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected. For the teacher, respect for children means giving them whatever one has by way of knowledge, teaching them to distinguish real knowledge from mere opinion, and introducing them to the subjects that make the mind adaptable to the unforeseen. To dismiss Latin and Greek, for example, because they are not “relevant” is to imagine that one learns another language in order, as Matthew Arnold put it, “to fight the battles of life with the waiters in foreign hotels.” It is to overlook the literature and history that are opened to the enquiring mind by these languages that changed the world; it is to overlook the discipline imparted by their deep and settled grammar. Ancient languages show us vividly that some matters are intrinsically interesting, and not interesting merely for their immediate use; understanding them the child might come to see just how irrelevant to the life of the mind is the pursuit of “relevance.”

Roger Scruton: The Virtue of Irrelevance

“Why Don’t We Make Things Like This Anymore?” is an endemic phrase in a certain corner of social media, usually with an Avatar of a Greek statue posting old statues, lamenting of how far we’ve fallen as a culture. It’s a low-effort sort of post, emphasizing the degradation of modern life catered to an audience that has not been to an art museum in decades. There’s a sort of cheap currency on the mainstream right, praising the achievements of Western Civilization while the symphony halls are empty and Universities with Music and Humanities majors become inundated with left-wing ideologies. Through it all, conservatives have focused on learning “practical” skills and then wonder how all the theatre kids got in control of the government.

I recently finished of “Against the Tide”, a compilation of essays and articles Roger Scruton wrote in his long and prolific life. Roger Scruton was a staple of British conservatism for decades, and while it’s easy to dismiss him as another political pundit who failed to conserve, this would be doing him a great disservice. While he didn’t have the capacity to save Britain from its disastrous trajectory is his lifetime, his philanthropic work, his wide body of academic output, and most importantly his deep love of his country and its institutions putting his legacy far above your average cultural critic.

In the book he talked about many topics familiar to those on the right. He laments the architectural changes that destroyed the character of Britain, the hatred of the past by a revolutionary guard that wants to wipe the slate clean, and the deterioration of education standards from the early years up to the university.

In all honesty, most of the articles aren’t that interesting, the short 1500-2000 word essays over very broad topics only giving a brief glimpse into the thoughts and values he held. There were some gems though, with “The Virtue of Irrelevance” quoted above being worth reading the whole work for. Other interesting insights I gleamed when his thoughts focused on the more everyday and small. Such it was with the essay he wrote regarding, of all seemingly petty things, the redesign of British phone booths. One might think something as mundane as this would be beneath a statesman and philosopher like Scruton, the type who has a multitude of scholarly work to his name, the person who was constantly in the newspapers, the person who had an entire T.V. series devoted to the marvels of Western Civilization. Why the fascination with a Phone Booth? Well, according to Scruton:

With the privatization of the telephone network, Britain took a giant leap into the future. The first sign of this was the rapid disappearance of Scott’s familiar landmark in favor of a barbarous concoction in alloy and shatterproof glass, of the kind familiar from the streets of New York. The new telephone booth is open to the elements and to the commotion of the city street. It offers neither shelter nor privacy to its occupant; it is void of style or architectural meaning and looks as impermanent and provisional as the activities that invade it. It represents not stability and lawful order but hectic movement and unceasing change. It is a visible reminder of the futility of listening for ancestral voices amid the din of a modern city.

Why Lampposts and Phone Booths Matter

Another illuminating part of the book were his personal journal entries. This showed a side of Roger who didn’t just like writing about his extensive and erudite learning of Western Culture, but was an avid disciple of it fruits. He talks about the ritual of the hunt, something he participated into the last year of his life, and the spiritual element that encompasses a multitude of aspects of British culture into a cohesive whole.

In that world, animals are not the tamed and subservient creatures of the farmyard or the family house; they are our equals, with whom we are joined in a contest that may prove as dangerous to the hunter as it is to his quarry. In the paintings that adorn the caves of Lascaux, we see the beasts of the wilderness portrayed by people who lived in awe of them, who conjured them into their own human dwelling place. The aura that emanates from these images emanates also from our hunting literature, reminding us that we too are animals, and we live with an unpaid debt towards the creatures from whom we have stolen the Earth.

Tally ho! Let the hunt remind us who we are

He talks about listening to a concerto, and its effects long after it concluded.

I travel back from London with the St Matthew Passion filling my head, after the moving performance from the Elysian Singers and Royal Orchestral Society under Sam Laughton at St James’s Piccadilly. Why does that last chord send shivers down the spine? The dark instrumentation, the sense that it is not an ending but a beginning, that this shadow-filled saraband will repeat itself for ever? Or is it just the story — surely one of the greatest narratives in all literature, in which nothing is redundant and yet everything is said? I arrive home with the chord still in my head, C minor with a B natural thrust like a sword into its heart.

Diary – 17 April 2019

His life work showed a deep, intimate relationship with the world he inherited, written in a sincere, erudite manner. The world sees fewer and fewer polymaths like Roger Scruton every generation, leaving our culture emptier with each death of the old guard. While a significant portion is blamed on the left-wing radicalization of the institutions, the fact is the advocates of meritocracy and what they deem “objective standards” would create a society just as bereft of a culture as its left-wing counterparts, creating a brutal cacophony of mindless efficiency mixed with the banal platitudes and empty rituals of a dead tradition.

My wife is a piano instructor, and there are several clear categories of kids who take lessons from her. An unfortunately large contingent are what I deem “check-box kids”. These are the ones who take lessons for the extensive list of extra-curriculars necessary to get into an elite university. These are the students either don’t practice much or only know how to grind, failing to penetrate the deeper dynamics of the instruments. Their parents also have no care for their children actually understanding or appreciating the arts. Universally, their music sounds dull and monotone, the student focusing more on hitting the right keys than the emotion behind it.

Vivek Ramaswamy has had a rough month, but I need to pile on more because his rendition of the “Fur Elise” shows everything wrong with the check-box kids. He hits the right notes (mostly) but everything feels off, the entire piece feeling robotic.

Another cohort I would deem the appreciators. These are the ones who have reasonable musicality, an understanding of the material, and the ability to grind to get good. They put the work in, like to play, and can become accomplished. Still, there’s that missing insight, that little intuition that separated the great from the elite, the skilled teachers from the orchestra performers. Still, they live their lives understanding and respecting their heritage, with even those who don’t study music further happily putting their hands on the keys throughout their lives.

The last are the very select few, the ones where if a teacher gets one or two in their life, they consider it a great blessing. These are the truly musically talented, the ones who hear Mozart and immediately “get” what he was going for. The type whose hands seemed melded to the keys from a young age, their entire life enveloped in music. These are the revolutionaries that will perform in crowded concert halls, the visionaries who innovate new styles or music.

Unfortunately, the culture of music education is degenerating more and more to cater to the "check-box kids”. Testing has been drastically simplified, their performances are graded more loosely, where a student starting over after a bad start is no longer penalized. It’s become more and more a paperwork exercise, as there is little difference in grades between the elite and the middling. With the cream of the crop, the competition is as strong as ever, but in the middle levels you have to epically crash and burn to get anything worse than “good”, and off to the college application it goes.

Outside of a small circle of principled instructors, they’re fine with it. As long as the student is paying, they see no problem. Teaching still puts food on the table, and they have to worry less about subpar students burning out and quitting. The fact few of these kids will have an appreciation of their Western heritage is not their concern. Teaching the humanities have become an empty ritual, and most have forgotten what they are even meant to induce outside the nebulous idea of well-roundedness.

Schools have had unprecedented grade inflation, simplified curriculums, and widened the scope of required knowledge to the extent it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. English departments are eschewing reading complete books in favor of short essays and excerpts, with the new cohort of college students who never read an entire novel in High School. Conservatives are aghast at the lowering of standards, the milquetoast assignments, and the lack of rigor. The blame is put on woke teachers, ideological content, and an undisciplined environment. They argue the education establishment cares more about a student’s race than teaching skills. True, and fair enough, but what alternative do they offer?

They would demand that they learn practical skills. They would try to instill a sense of patriotism in the textbooks. They would argue for the fluff to be removed and to focus on the core basics. And the criteria to judge this would be simple, objective, and color-blind.

Standardized Tests.

At first glance this sounds reasonable. You don’t have to worry about schools picking favorites, being selected simply because you are a certain minority, or deal with the dramatic difference in grading between the schools. On the other hand, this focus on objectivity and practicality is destroying the edifice culture is based on. Why read The Iliad if you’re focused on just putting the right multiple-choice selection on a test? Wouldn’t it be better to read essays and excerpts to prepare you for the test? Is it worth getting into the minutiae of mathematical proofs when the test is only going to Algebra I? Is it worth doing a deep dive into Jefferson when only the basic biographical information will be required for you to remember?

Worse yet, what lesson are we teaching these kids? When you implicitly argue with your testing criteria that the only value in understanding knowing the Art Deco movement is to get the right answer, you are telling your students that the reason you are learning this is not because it is good, fruitful, and fulfilling in its own right, but a mechanism get a good score so you can move up the ladder. In other words, you create your own type of “check-box kids”.

As bad as leftist control of schools, when ideal conservative schools are something along the lines of South Korea, everyone is broken. We are starting to see schools that mimic the most soul-destroying corporate structure to “get them ready for the real world”. We are seeing the first schools run entirely by AI teachers. While many people have a (correct) visceral reaction to this, most can’t actually articulate why, outside of it being contrary to traditional practices. After all, isn’t the point of school to transmit useful information to use in the workforce? Isn’t school supposed to support critical thinking? What does it matter whether it’s done by a soulless machine or a teacher? Isn’t it more efficient for students to learn with chatbots? It would cost far less money, that’s for sure.

However, raising a different question makes the problem clear. Do you think Roger Scruton would have the same passion of British culture if it was relayed to him via a chat bot rather than through a flesh and blood instructor dripping with passion every day in the classroom? Would he have the same reverence for those who came before him by reading on a laptop in a sterile room as opposed to walking the footsteps of Britain’s ancient institutions? When you make your learning soulless for the sake of efficiency, is it any wonder no one cares about maintaining such “worthless” cultural artifacts?

Standardized tests, grading systems, and other attempts at objectivity turns one’s heritage into a hoop to go through, an item to memorize to allow your upward mobility.

In terms of utility, most of school is worthless knowledge. That’s a good thing, and it’s always been that way. One aspect the woke is more correct than conservatives is the understanding that education’s primary focus is to inculcate one’s values and ideals into the students. No matter how scientific and objective a committee makes a school, which is an ideology in its own right, there’s no escaping projecting what they deem important.

Understanding and enjoying classical music is not going to make anyone’s stocks go up. Nor is learning a foreign language, especially a dead language, going to allow you to design a bridge. It’s even more impractical now that translation services are easily available. Reading the Canterbury Tales is not going to make rockets take off. Playing guitar might make the ladies like you but will not balance a spreadsheet. Even arguing it creates indirect economic benefits is a losing proposition, subjecting it to the same utilitarian calculus as everything else. Contrary to modern thought, man is not simply Homo Economicus, but built of something far more spiritual.

To be fair, there are several alternative forms of education, the most successful so far being the classical model of the Trivium consisting of the stepping-stones of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. They go through the stages of civilization several times, each level going into more depth and nuance. It creates a sense that the young student is not an atomized component of modernity, but an outgrowth of the great chain of being going back to antiquity. It gives a sense of place and responsibilities delegated to the student, the recipient of countless ancestors who survived and created their civilization. While I don’t consider Classical Education the be-all end-all of proper pedagogy, and there are some modern methods that can be incorporated with good outcomes, it’s far and away superior to the fanatical devotion to relevance.

I would go as far as to reject the core claim of educating for relevance, the notion that training students for real world skills from a very young age will create graduates better suited for the workforce. We currently live in a society of Eustace Scrubbs, an elite trained in the most relevant practices, the most cutting-edge theories, and the most universal values, and all we gained was being ruled by the most insufferable dullards the world has ever seen. For all the mockery of the old guard of tweedy professors forever stuck in the old ways, what has replaced them is far, far worse. We now have an insular class of mid-wits who pat themselves on the back for their open-mindedness. An elite class that can’t even fathom anything they don’t understand.

The overarching philosophy of education with regards to utility has to be overhauled, and it starts with the parents. Yes, you should encourage your son to be an artist. Yes, you should tell your daughter to study Archaeology. If your child really likes an ultra- niche STEM field, that’s fantastic too. The idea of learning for practical skills has been an albatross around the neck of conservatives for generations. While it is based on an idea of responsibility and being able to support oneself, it has stifled the creativity and innovation necessary to be a dynamic culture, letting their enemies run amuck and hollow it every part of our heritage out. It’s also a misnomer, since a dynamic student who can translate Greek can learn to program. A student who can follow the archaeological trails of Mesopotamia can be a police detective. There’s a person close to where I live who spent six years studying theology, then started a bricklaying company and is now a multimillionaire. If you’re worried about ensuring your child has the income to raise a family, that’s a noble goal, but one needs faith it can happen outside the stifling walls of modern striverism.

And if colleges no longer teach fruitful ways of gaining this knowledge, they can forge their own path. It’s irrelevant whether four years of your life culminates in a bachelor’s degree, something in less and less demand, than it is ensuring you had adventures and intellectual pursuits that truly disciplined and broadened your outlook. These can still be found in the University system for those willing to look, but countless other avenues have also formed.

I’ve been blessed being able to send my children to a Classical Homeschool co-op that has been able to fill the gaps in my own education. Founded by an eccentric but passionate professor with a handful of students showing up at his family’s house, it has extended to multiple locations boasting hundreds of students. They have a full Shakespeare production every year, and two Schola concerts where they hire a tough- as-nails Italian lady as conductor to ruthlessly prime them into shape. The best of the school then tour the ruins of the Old World, singing in the now largely empty Churches and Concert Halls for anyone who wishes to keep the flame alive.

Like Scruton, the old professor would hum along with the choir as they practiced while he worked in his office next door, his cheerful countenance contagious amongst the students who understand what it means to truly love these traditions. At 75 and suffering from cancer, he’s also reaching the twilight of his life, handing off more of the enterprise to his younger wife and children.

Few graduates enter music or theatre, though a couple of notable alumni have passed through the co-op’s doors, including a notable opera singer. There was a graduate who immediately took up farming, marrying his sweetheart at 19 years of age. Others went into trades, and another portion went into Law, Engineering, and other academic pursuits. By modern metrics, the old professor taught them useless information. Maybe the lawyer might have some use of the Latin she learned, but was it worth all those hours of practice? Was it worth honing one’s voice when there’s no chancde at being a professional musician? What a waste, right?

Yet that farmer does not see it that way, nor the engineer. Most of all, the old professor who created the co-op as a labor of love would not see it as a failure that he taught the fruits of Western Civilizations to students from tradesmen to doctors. His goal was not to cultivate workers, but full human beings. He helped form a sense of place, a sense of identity and rootedness building off those who came before. They go to mass in a rural church poor farmers built over a century ago. Instead of worrying about cost and utility, those farmers build it of expensive red brick and gorgeous stain glass windows, its steeple pointing to the heavens. To them, building that church was far more than a checkbox to be filled.

Such ideals are relegated to the wilderness now, a desperate struggle to escape the decay all around us, a seemingly pointless and futile endeavor. However, the future will belong to the stubbornly impractical.

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