The defense "cuts," of course, are not really cuts at all, just reductions in the rate of spending increases of the bloated defense budget.

So, who is this Christian warmonger that is so upset about defense budget "cuts" that he thinks they are a deeply disturbing, draconian, recklessly dangerous, self-destructive absurdity.

He is not a member, with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Hal Lindsey, Cal Thomas, and Pat Boone, of the Christian axis of evil, although he should be. He is not a Christian killer par excellence, like Doug Giles. He is not a Christian warmonger on steroids, like Bryan Fischer. And neither is he the greatest Christian warmonger of all time. That designation goes to Ellis Washington.

He is Michael Milton, the newly elected chancellor/CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Milton holds a B.A. from Mid-America Nazarene University, an M.Div. from Knox Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is the former pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in addition to founding two other churches and a Christian school. Milton is the host and speaker on Faith for Living, which can be seen on television and heard on radio. He has also released three music CDs and is the author of several books.

But perhaps I should also note that Dr. Milton has a diploma from the Defense Language Institute, holds a commission in the U.S. Army Reserves as a chaplain, and was elected in 2010 by the Chief of Chaplains to the College of Military Preachers and appointed an instructor at the Armed Forces Chaplain School. He is also the founding director of the Chaplain Ministries Institute in Charlotte. I also note that on October 14, 2001, it was announced that Reformed Theological Seminary had "been approved by the NC SAA Program to receive the GI Bill under the provisions of Title 38 and 10, United States Code!"

Milton is a theological schizophrenic. Schizophrenia has been described as a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness that most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking.

I know of no other way to describe Milton after reading his latest post on the Faith for Living blog hosted by his seminary:

The failure of the bipartisan super committee to take decisive action to reverse the 15 trillion-dollar debt crisis this country needs from becoming another Greece has, predictably, failed. Now the Washington blame game begins. However, the greatest losers are the American people and, specifically, those Americans who courageously and proudly wear the uniform of the armed services.

As threats of cuts are made to their very mission, our brave troops are on the ground, in the air, and on the seas fighting, defending, and protecting this nation from the continuing threats to our very existence as a people. The absurd decision to tie massive cuts to the US military as an "incentive" to force action by the super committee was one of the biggest mistakes ever made by Washington DC, and they have made a few recently. Of all the things that the government does, providing a military to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" just happens to be one of the clearest.

Scripture teaches that God has ordained government for the good of man. Civil authority, according to St. Paul, has been granted the power of the sword to punish evil, thereby protecting the innocent: "For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil" (The Epistle to the Romans 13:4 KJV). The present talk of defense cuts flies in the face of our nation’s duty and our proud heritage.

We have had draw downs before – after WWII, after Vietnam, and after the Gulf War, but we have never had to think about draconian reductions while we were in the middle of a war! It is this very point that is deeply disturbing, and recklessly dangerous. The consequences of even the talk of such tinkering with our defenders, even if reasonable heads prevail to stop this absurdity, will have their consequences.

Have we not learned our lesson? Reagan’s military build-up in the 1980s reversed the ill-advised draw downs after Vietnam (just one front in a larger, trans-generational Cold War) and, according to scholars like Paul Kengor of Grove City College and the American Center for Vision and Values, "All of these ventures [the strengthening of defense] had the effect of demonstrating a stronger, resurgent America, not only economically but also militarily. Suddenly, the country that had left Vietnam no longer appeared to lack resolve" (The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism by Dr. Paul Kengor, HarperCollins, 2007, 82).

Kengor went on to demonstrate that President Reagan understood that America was still at war. According to this preeminent Reagan scholar, his action in strengthening the military greatly contributed to bringing down the Soviet Union. Why now, when our sacred military members are risking their lives to fight "over there" so we don’t fight "over here," would the president and other congressional leaders think that it is any different? To reduce military strength or even to talk about it as an option is to demoralize our troops while they are literally in the midst of a battle for our way of life.

Some may call it treason. I would call it self-destructive. As a minister of the gospel I would also call it irresponsible and immoral, given that God has called our civil authorities to protect our people against evil. May God have mercy and bless the troops who bravely carry on their mission to defend this nation, even while others who have taken the same oath are allegedly using the military as pawns in a Washington election year. There are times when the Church should speak up. Because our life and liberty is at stake, I think that time is now.

Milton holds to every armchair warrior, red-state fascist, reich-wing nationalist, imperial Christian fallacy known to man.

As I mentioned above, cutting the bloated defense budget is to Milton a deeply disturbing, draconian, recklessly dangerous, self-destructive absurdity. The "cuts" fly "in the face of our nation’s duty and our proud heritage." Never mind that the real defense budget is $1 trillion, that the United States spends more than the rest of the world combined, and that most defense spending is really spending on offense.

Milton idolizes members of the military. They are our "brave troops." They "courageously and proudly wear the uniform of the armed services." God should "bless the troops." U.S. soldiers are never Christian killers, murders, accomplices to murder, criminals, dupes, mercenaries, or part of the president’s personal attack force willing to obey his latest command to bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise bring death and destruction to any country he deems necessary. They are "our sacred military members."

Milton is likewise deceived about the real mission of the military. He thinks they are "our defenders" who "defend this nation" and protect "this nation from the continuing threats to our very existence as a people." The government provides a military to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." U.S. troops "fight ‘over there’ so we don’t fight ‘over here.’" They are "in the midst of a battle for our way of life." But is this what the U.S. military actually does? Unfortunately, most of what the military does is more offense than defense, more foreign than domestic, and more civilian than martial. I think Milton needs a course in DOD 101.

Milton says that we are "in the middle of a war." The United States is actually in the middle of several wars. But rather than saying we should not cut defense because we are fighting wars, why not examine the wars we are fighting to see if they are just, right, and necessary? Since the undeclared, unconstitutional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Yemen, Pakistan, and everywhere else, are clearly – except to Christian warmongers and imperial Christians – unjust, immoral, and unnecessary, the only sensible solution is to end the wars, not increase the defense budget.

Like other Christian apologists for the state, its military, and its wars that I have written about who appeal to Romans 13 to justify their blind nationalism, their cheerleading for the Republican Party, their childish devotion to the military, their acceptance of national-security state, and their support for perpetual war, Milton seeks to justify a large defense budget by doing the same thing. This, of course, is ludicrous, since the passage has nothing to do with the government providing national defense. But let’s assume for a moment that it does. Fine. How does that justify bloated military budgets, foreign wars, militarism, imperialism, and policing the world? When it comes to the military budget, conservatives adopt the same fallacy as liberals do when it comes to education. To liberals more spending on education means better education; to conservatives more spending on defense means better defense.

And finally, why do conservatives always invoke the name of the criminal, warmongering, budget-busting, deficit-increasing, liberty-destroying, government-expanding, economic and foreign interventionist St. Reagan? Anyone remotely familiar with the Reagan record would not be impressed with Milton’s name-dropping. For the complete and utter evisceration of Reagan, see Murray Rothbard’s "The Reagan Phenomenon," "Ronald Reagan, Warmonger," and "Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy."

What is so bad about theological schizophrenics like Michael Milton is that they have a position of influence over many young people. We can only hope and pray that this is one college administrator that students never get to know.

Originally posted on LewRockwell.com on December 9, 2011.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Theological Schizophrenia

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Austrian Economics and Pedagogy

Dilbert author Scott Adams finally explains how to get a real education.

ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog tells the truth about government restrictions on oil supplies.

It’s ridiculous that Barry Bonds can catch the attention of congress by being dishonest about steroid-use and have the government spend nearly $100 million trying to prosecute him, but dishonesty about war by presidents gets zero consideration. This country is off its rocker.

That being said, there are a few interesting presidential candidates now in the field. Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has officially announced, as has Lee Wrights in the Libertarian Party. Note Lee’s campaign slogan: “Stop All War!”

Some books I have read this past month:

The Devil Reads Derrida, by James K.A. Smith – When I saw this title at the bookstore, I had to buy it. It is an interesting set of essays on a variety of topics ranging from art to politics. Smith is not a libertarian, but he is anti-war and definitely has an aversion to power in general. I think he may at times be confusing political libertarians with the philosophical position of libertarian free-will; such a mistake is forgivable even though I do not really agree with him on free-will either. Still, it is good reading.

Accompany Them With Singing, by Thomas Long – This book compiles Long’s research into Christian funerals. Considering how bizarre the modern funeral has become (at least to me) this was refreshing. Definitely recommended for the ministers out there.

Art for God’s Sake, by Philip Graham – This short work gives a good perspective on the use of art in society from a Christian perspective. Thankfully, the author does not make the mistake of saying all art must be religious to be valuable. However, I have some minor quibbles with some of his definitions. It is well worth the time to read it, which is only about 90 minutes anyway since it has less than 100 pages.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell – How do successful people become successful? I am fascinated by people who are at the top of their game, doing the biggest and best things in the marketplace, and I like to hear their stories. That is not exactly what Gladwell’s book covers, but it is thought-provoking nonetheless. Essentially, Gladwell tells the reader that success is due to a multitude of factors, many of which are not in anyone’s control whatsoever. In his estimation, there is no such thing as a “self-made man.” I would tend to agree, but you can always push certain factors toward falling in your favor.

The Dawkins Delusion, by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath – The so-called “New Atheists” are exceedingly vocal (not to mention insulting) these days, and there is a growing body of literature where theologians, philosophers, and scientists respond to their work. The Dawkins Delusion is a fairly short response directly to Richard Dawkins’s latest book The God Delusion.

UPDATE: Apparently, Ron Paul is going to announce on Tuesday that he is running!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

News of the Week: Potpourri of Sorts

I love Cal Newport’s Study Hacks blog. He is an incredibly insightful writer on education and personal productivity. Check out his latest article: Zen and the Art of Investment Banking.

Guess what? I just published a new article in Polymer Journal. Basically, we are telling the polymer membrane world that everything they know is wrong. Okay, not really, but we sure are being disruptive… Kudos to anybody who can get the abstract.

With due respect to the Oscars tonight, here’s my favorite comic of the week.

Have a great week everyone!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

News of the Week: On Productivity and Science

Once again, the TSA debacle has dominated the news this week as we lead up to the biggest traveling season of the year (i.e. Thanksgiving).

Art Carden from the Mises Institute had an article in Forbes this week on the TSA. The title is awesome: Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer.

The heroic Bill Grigg shares his thoughts on the TSA issues of the day.

Representative Ron Paul addressed Congress on the issue this week as well.

Steven and Debra Wallace even have a parody song about the TSA: Take Your Planes and Shove ‘em.

In other news…

Hollywood is apparently just another one of the thugs. No surprise there.

Shouldn’t we privatize college football already?

I’ve been interested for some time in how college students cheat on homework and papers (it’s a long story, and has to do with how I caught a cheater in a graduate student class). This story surfaced this week regarding a massive cheating ring in a business school. Moreover, it dovetails nicely against a big reveal this week in The Chronicle where a “shadow writer” explains his business of writing all kinds of research papers for students willing to pay. The article itself is fascinating and I highly recommend it.

And finally, my favorite comic of the week.

Cheers!

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

News of the Week: November 14-20

How public education cripples our kids, and why

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight – simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable.”

It was from James Bryant Conant – president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century – that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing.

Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard – had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author of The Underground History of American Public Education, Dumbing Us Down, and most recently Weapons of Mass Instruction. Visit his website here.

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Classic Essay: Against School

Far from being environments conducive to learning, schools across the world coerce students to conform to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Billed as bastions of free expression, intellectual honesty and rigor, administrators have turned schools into prisons for the mind, where one-size-fits-all policies are forced upon youth and where independent thoughts are discarded. It’s a world in which the government will tell a student what they can and can’t think, wear, say, or do. It’s a world that crushes the individual for the benefit of those in power — a practice we’ve dubbed “Teensploitation.”

Teensploitation is intellectual slavery. Government schools, while alleging to perpetuate diversity, are centers of statist thought. Today, in virtually every class, students are taught to turn to the government when confronted with a problem, rather than to think for themselves, take their own initiative and bear the accompanying responsibility. Students are told that it is their duty to pay their taxes, to vote, and to accept regulations as good things, and that government is needed to protect the less-fortunate from the onslaught of capitalism. Students are rewarded not for documenting how entrepreneurs and voluntary transactions create wealth and thus lift people from poverty, but for proposing ever-more-invasive government programs under vague notions of “social justice.” Teachers parrot socialist ideas: that market failure rather than government policies caused and exacerbated the Great Depression; that redistribution is “just”; that students should listen to them and others in government because they “know what is good for them.” And like socialism, this one-size-fits-all education means that all students are treated the same — at the lowest common denominator so that none are left behind. Ever wonder why the brightest students are often bored? As H.L. Mencken stated, “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

Government schools elevate the good of the collective at the expense of the individual. Teachers tell students that the good of society, or a whole race or ethnicity ranks above that of an individual. That minority rights must be protected at the expense of individual rights. But isn’t the smallest minority the individual? Further, forcing diversity on students through programs such as affirmative action only reinforces prejudices that categorize people based on a factor outside of their control (i.e. their race/ethnicity). Using race to sort people is racist by definition. To escape the epidemic of racial conflict students need only grasp that civil society and free markets are the great equalizers, not the state, as is preached in government schools. For example, a business owner does not need the government to tell her who to hire. If she wants to stay competitive she’ll hire the most qualified person, regardless of their skin color or gender. If she doesn’t, her competitor will, placing her at a disadvantage. The same is true of whom they choose to sell to. If a business owner is racist and he refuses to sell to a certain group of people, he’ll lose business while his competitor, who sees the money to be gained, readily sells to them. But, are students taught this in school? That the market is the great equalizer? That the market, not any government program or mandate, creates the most opportunities? No? And why is that? So bureaucrats can keep their jobs?

Mandatory community service is slavery. Through programs such as Zero Tolerance and mandatory community service, government schools teach individuals to be subservient to the State, to surrender their rights without protest. Government schools are merely a bureaucratic tool—controlling what students learn, blocking diversity of thought, transforming youth into unquestioning supporters of an invasive government that controls their personal and economic decisions. As Benjamin Disraeli stated in 1874, “Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.”

Mandatory attendance violates individual rights. Though it varies by jurisdiction, governments decree by law that youth must attend school when they reach a specific age for a certain number of years, akin to a prison sentence. Failure to do so can result in fines (for their parents, whose money is already being stolen to pay for government schools) and if continued, jail. As the great hero of human rights Joseph Stalin once wrote, “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” Any wonder why it’s mandatory?

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Teensploitation

Sooooooo, one more milestone down, about 250 experiments more to go. Better get cracking. Anyway, yay for me, blah blah blah. I’m excited.

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One more step toward a PhD…

The recent movie called Out of Africa has acquainted millions of Americans with the name of a Danish Baroness Blixen, whose pen name was Isak Dinesen. The movie is based on Dinesen’s 1938 book, a semi-autobiographical work called Out of Africa. Four years earlier, in 1934, Isak Dinesen had published a work entitled Seven Gothic Tales, really seven short novels within the covers of a single book. One of these Gothic tales was set in the Paris of several generations ago and consisted mainly of the reminiscences of an old gentleman. There is a story within this larger story involving an Armenian organ grinder and his pet monkey. Some of you may recall seeing this type of street musician who would wander through city neighborhoods carrying, slung over his shoulder, a kind of music box the size of an accordion, a crank on its side. This contraption was set atop a pole, which supported the weight of the music machine when the man stopped to perform. The man would be dressed in a sort of gypsy costume, and as the entertainer cranked out his tunes his little capuchin monkey would pass through the crowd collecting coins, which he’d turn over to his master. This in itself was quite a stunt; but this little monkey was cleverer than most of his kind, because his master had taught him to perform a great variety of crowd-pleasing tricks, each one triggered by a word of command—in Armenian.

The Armenian died, and the little animal came into the possession of a kindly French couple who housed the monkey and fed him well. Time passed, and although the animal was properly cared for, he languished; he seemed to know that he had talents lying dormant which no one knew how to bring out. There was no one to voice the magic Armenian words. Lots of potential talent was trapped inside the little beast, but no one knew how to release it; the key had been lost.

It is my guess that Isak Dinesen intended this little story to be a parable of the human condition. Translate the parable and it suggests that individual men and women are loaded with potential talents of all sorts—talents unlimited—but these potentialities are locked up inside us and become actual only when touched by a magic wand from without—the magic wand called “education.”

The scholastic curriculum labeled “liberal arts education” emerged, developed, and grew—in the course of centuries—in order to give the young people of each successive generation the tools of learning, tools which they could then use to free themselves from the hindrances and obstructions, the ignorance and taboos which prevented them from becoming the kind of persons they had it in them to be. The “liberal arts,” in other words, were the “liberating arts”; they freed the individual person from all that prevented him from realizing his full potential. The ultimate goal of liberal education is wisdom and understanding—a broader and deeper understanding of human nature and the human condition, and a few clues as to the purposes of our earthly pilgrimage. Education deals with the goals of life; it is “ends oriented,” and its primary tools are language, literature, philosophy, history, and mathematics.

Education and Training

Education is not the same as training. Training has to do with “how-to” knowledge, with practical instruction; training is what might be called “instrumental” knowledge. Training deals with means rather than with ends—ends being the province of education. The world could not continue on its course without the help it gets from the millions of trained men and women who accomplish the world’s work—the scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and technologists; the doctors, dentists, nurses, manufacturers, managers, and so on. If asked to name an American exemplar of the trained man, most of us would mention someone like Thomas Alva Edison. Edison’s kind of genius has given us inventions which have transformed life in modern societies in many beneficial ways; our life is cleaner, brighter, healthier, more convenient—and noisier—because people like Edison have lived and worked. We have many more things; sometimes it seems that gadgetry almost overwhelms us!

Virtually everyone acknowledges the important contributions of trained people; they keep our society going, and they make it better. They have enormously increased the number and potency of our means; enormous power is now at our disposal. But what about the people who are schooled merely in the liberating arts; what role might they aspire to play in our culture? If students have been exposed to the best that has been thought and said about man, the human species, so that they have some understanding of what it means to be a person, some understanding of the nature, destiny, and proper end of a human being, then—if such people are heeded by those with know-how and power—we might yet scrape together sufficient wisdom to save our society from being fragmented by the detonation of its newly released energies. It seems to be our fate to live at a time in history when enormous power is in our hands but barely under our control. Ideas still role in human affairs and we won’t know what to do with our recently acquired powers until we have decided what to do with our lives. And that is where the liberating arts come in, for it is a main function of a liberal educa-6on to help us face up to the question of how to make our lives count for the things that really matter.

Education and Schooling

I have briefly drawn a distinction between education and training and I shall now draw an equally important distinction between education and schooling. No society before our own has ever put so much faith in schooling, which we usually mislabel “education.” Virtually no child in America lives beyond the reach of his local public school and every child’s exposure to public schooling is compulsory. A few generations ago schooling at the college level was deemed a rare privilege; but now there are as many local community colleges as there once were high schools; the college population in this nation has exploded during the past generations while the curriculum has been downgraded. We proudly point to our vast network of schools and colleges as our “educational establishment,” when it is no such thing. Education does occasionally occur in our schools and colleges, but it is rare to find a student who is really educable. In one of Will Durant’s early books, written in 1929, he mentions a foreign student who came to this country to get a graduate degree at one of our great universities. Shortly before he returned to his native land the young student summed up his experience by declaring: “American universities are really athletic institutions, with opportunities for study for the feeble bodied.”

My remark a moment ago that only the occasional college student is really educable may sound arrogant and elitist. But it wouldn’t have sounded at all elitist if I had referred to the occasional educable student as a bookworm! It’s a fact; liberal arts education is primarily for bookworms—a bookworm being defined as a kid who’s mesmerized by the printed page. The liberal arts scholar frequents the library, not the laboratory; he gets his education by studying the books and papers written by other scholars. And a liberal arts scholar is the kind of person who does quite well in the typical IQ test, the Stanford-Binet test, for example. I would point out to you that what is measured by the typical IQ test is not the only kind of intelligence human beings possess; but it is one kind. The results of an IQ test predict reasonably well how the individual would fare in a typical liberal arts curriculum. But that’s it!

Many years ago when I was studying in Berkeley at the Pacific School of Religion our psychology teacher was the head of the psychology department at the University of California. Of course he had to expose the theological students to an IQ test. As it turned out we did reasonably well, having an average IQ score of over 130 compared to the average of the graduate students at the University next door of about 120. Does that mean that we were smarter than the students at U Cal? Not at all. It simply means that we had a different kind of smartness than the graduate students in physics, or chemistry, or geology, or astronomy; our forte was book learning, their intelligence was of another species. The modern world has suffered unduly from its failure to understand important distinctions in this area of schooling. We exhibit a weak understanding of the role of the liberal arts program—it’s not for everyone—and we extravagantly over-value the figures obtained by IQ testing.

We began about a hundred and fifty years ago to set up a vast system of compulsory public instruction in this country. With the centuries-old liberal arts tradition in mind we geared our school system into the three R’s—Readin’, ‘Ritin’, ‘n’ ‘Rithmetic. This was a system well adapted to bookworms; it prepared them to enter one of our liberal arts colleges. But it was not adapted to the youngsters whose intelligence ran in the direction of vocational and technical training. School, for them, tended to be a frustrating experience.

Come down to the period after World War II when someone decided that everyone ought to have a college education. There was a vast expansion of the student population. Teachers in great numbers were needed and hired, but only a few men and women in each generation have a true vocation to teach, and only a few students have a vocation for a liberal arts education. There was bound to be trouble. Trouble came, and it turned many campuses into what resembled battlefields. Our first mistake was to set up a system of compulsory public instruction, and then we compounded this error by refusing to recognize the important distinction between education and training.

Needed: Talents

A complex modern society needs a great diversity of talents, and not all talented people, by any means, are good material for a liberal arts education. As a matter of fact, no society can absorb more than a tiny percentage of people with a liberal arts Ph.D.—too many liberal arts doctors will rain any society! But no society can have too many honest craftsmen and artisans . . . butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and all the rest. The head is important; the hands are important. More important is the proper balance between them. Listen to John Gardner on this point: “The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

This lack of balance was perceived by an astute French critic, Ernest Renan, more than a century ago, but we did not heed his warning: “. . . . countries which, like the United States, have set up considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will long have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.”

Every one of us has encountered persons of enormous energy and enthusiasm; bursting with ideas which sound plausible but whose projects fizzle out without getting anywhere. I once knew such a man. He had written a widely noticed book during the thirties, and since that time had started numerous organizations to save the world. The world persistently refused the offer. Discussing the matter with a friend some years ago I wondered aloud why so-and-so had never gotten himself off the ground. “The trouble with him,” said my friend, “is that he got his drive shaft installed before his steering wheel.”

It is a prime function of a liberal education to provide us with the moral equivalent of a steering wheel, and perhaps a map, as well. A bishop of the early church said much the same thing when he declared that society needs three kinds of men: those who work, those who fight, and those who pray. Society needs someone to grow the wheat and bake the bread. it needs someone to stand guard and protect the producer against marauders. But in addition, every society needs those who continually remind the rest of us that there is more to life than taking care of our creaturely needs. Man has a spiritual and intellectual nature with needs just as real as our physical hungers. Human life has meanings which transcend material comfort or even physical survival, and we will not resolve our material and social problems until we absorb those meanings and live by them.

Scholarship, therefore, has a significance beyond mere scholarship. The tradition of Western learning goes back to Socrates—or to Plato. These men laid down the lines along which most serious thought has moved until our own time. This body of thought, which goes back nearly two and a half millennia, comprises “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum” of our ancestors. It is like the Gulf Stream, coursing through the Atlantic as it comes down to us through the generations, touching, at any given time, only a handful of persons. There is only a little exaggeration in Emerson’s observation that “There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato—never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these [works] come duly down for the sake of these few persons . . . .”

The custodian of this intellectual treasure of ancient learning is the university. Every college in the American colonies consciously partook of this heritage, and likewise most of the colleges founded during the nineteenth century. The first of our colleges, Harvard, was founded in 1636. John Harvard, an eminent English divine, came to the new world in 1637 and was immediately involved in supporting the college. He donated half his estate, nearly 800 pounds, plus his 320-book library, and a grateful citizenry named the college after him. William Bradford, of Plymouth Plantation fame, traces Harvard’s line of descent: “A light was kindled in Newtown [that is, Cambridge] in the Bay Colony in 1636. But the spark that touched it off came from a lamp of learning first lighted by the ancient Greeks, tended by the Church through the Dark Ages, blown white and high in the medieval universities, and handed down to us in direct line through Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.” Harvard College was largely a duplicate of Emmanuel College, the most Puritan of the Cambridge (England) colleges, and the one where John Harvard earned his Master of Arts degree. The Harvard curriculum was the classical liberal arts educational scheme unique to Western Civilization.

Western Civilization

A hundred and thirty years ago, Cardinal Newman paid an eloquent tribute to Western Civilization, the historic culture within which most of us were reared. Its nature is such, he argues, that, to all intents and purposes, Western Civilization and Civilization are equivalent terms. This idea is under deadly attack these days, so let me allow Cardinal Newman to say what he has in mind, in his own words: “. . . though there are other civilizations in the world, as there are other societies, yet this civilization, together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to itself the rifle of ‘human society,’ and its civilization the abstract term ‘civilization.’”

These words of Cardinal Newman are taken from a lecture he gave in Dublin in 1858. England was at the height of her powers, prestige, and self-confidence. Britannia ruled the waves; her colonies were on every continent, leading to the proud declaration that the sun never sets on the British flag. The English gentleman was regarded the world over as the model, as the human male par excellence. English was a universal language. “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master,” declared the noted philosopher, George Santayana.

Much has happened since Newman’s day to change that picture. We now know that high levels of civilization were attained in Asia and Africa thousands of years ago, long before Greece and Rome emerged onto the world scene. Civilization can no longer be regarded as simply a European thing. But note that it was through the work of European scholars during the past couple of centuries that the world came to know something of the glories of ancient China, India, and Egypt. The people of India had lost contact with their remote past, and owe it to the work of English scholars that ancient Hindu literature—such as the Vedas and the Upanishads—was discovered, translated from the Sanskrit, and read for the first time—in English—by Hindu students!

The growing awareness of ancient civilizations upset the idea that the culture whose time span stretched from Homer to the Victorian Age was the world’s only civilization, and this new knowledge also caused Europeans to have a keener perception of the defects of their Western world. Besides, the English were weary of bearing the white man’s burden, and, in the colonies, the natives were restless. Herbert Spencer, writing a letter to Grant Allen just before the turn of the century, voiced the opinion that “. . . we are in course of re-barbarization.”

But it was World War I that really stunned the West and proved to the rest of mankind that Western world hegemony was but a shadow and no longer a thing of substance. The statesmen of Western nations played their dangerous games during the early years of this century, completely lacking in the kind of fore sight which wiser statesmen might have employed to anticipate the horrible end results of the trends they had set in motion. A Serbian terrorist assassinated an Archduke and the whole house of cards began to crumble. A man named Francis Neilson resigned from Parliament in 1914 to publish his book, How Diplomats Make War, a piece of foresight that reads like hindsight. But not even Neilson could anticipate that the war would continue its slaughter for four dreadful years. Virtually no one in August of 1914 believed that the war would involve millions of combatants from nations all over the globe. Some did, of course. Viscount Grey of Fallodon, the English Foreign Secretary until 1916, uttered the gloomy prophecy, “The lights are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them come on again in our lifetime.” The opinion of the man in the street I heard from the lips of Max Brauer, the mayor of Hamburg in 1938, who lectured that year in Berkeley: “We all thought we’d be home for Christmas,” that is, in four months.

A youngish German high school teacher spent the last year or so of the war writing a book. Volume I appeared in 1918; volume II in 1922. New York publisher Alfred Knopf brought out an English translation in 1926, entitled The Decline of the West. It was not easy reading and the thesis was dubious. But the pessimism of Oswald Spengler matched the post-war despair and gloom of many people in Europe and America, with the result that The Decline of the West was probably the most talked-about book and the most written-about book of the 1920s and ‘30s. Spengler’s overwrought book seemed to say in exhausting detail what many felt in their bones—that Western Civilization was finished, kaput. Spengler despised the Nazis and had no use for Communism, but his devaluation of the West added fuel to Soviet expansionism by making it appear that some kind of Marxism was the only viable alternative now that the West was sinking below the horizon.

Our Present Situation

Where do we stand today? I think we must admit that Cardinal Newman’s panegyric to Western Civilization was overstated; there were and are, we now know, other civilizations which merit our respect. That’s the first point; and the second is to emphasize that although Western Civilization is not the only civilization, it is our civilization; and only persons firmly rooted in their native habitat can come to a proper appreciation of, say, Hindu culture, or Chinese culture. Those who are alienated from their native soil fall prey to charlatans. We have recently witnessed the spectacle of a grubby turbaned clown, who’d be ridiculed by real Hindu scholars, conning gullible Americans into parting with their money and with whatever wits they possessed in order to grovel at his feet. Genuine Hinduism serves the spiritual needs of millions of Indians, but fake Hinduism is a bad joke; and so, of course, is fake Christianity as other recent events remind us.

In any event—to return to our original theme—the liberal arts curriculum has been the educational scheme of Western Civilization, and will be again. A civilization like ours has immense and still untapped powers of recovery and regeneration—as its story is told m several of the books in my bibliography. It has been said that no civilization has ever been murdered, never destroyed from without. Civilizations suffer decay from within, and crumble; that is to say, they commit suicide. But a civilization which responds vigorously to challenges from within and challenges from without may renew itself. It all depends on the kind of people who compose that civilization. In other words, the fate of our society depends on us, and we can work on ourselves.

Reviving the Freedom Philosophy

It was a set of ideas along these lines that inspired Leonard Read to set up The Foundation for Economic Education 42 years ago. The American nation had lapsed into a New Deal type of socialism because this country’s citizens, for several generations, had failed to educate themselves in the freedom philosophy. The beliefs upon which our eighteenth-century ancestors had erected the basic political and economic structures of this society no longer inspired us even to maintain those structures. And during the decades when the freedom philosophy was in remission, the ideologues of socialism carried on an unremitting campaign to persuade people that the government could run things better than we could run them ourselves. The socialists manufactured a new public opinion different from the original and, as a result of the inculcation of bad ideas, we are saddled with numerous bureaucratic interventions into every sector of our lives.

The suggested FEE remedy is two-fold: first, try to arouse an interest in personal liberty and the free society; and second, nourish this new interest in freedom by having on hand books, pamphlets, periodicals, and speeches expounding the freedom philosophy. Thus, gradually, bad ideas will be replaced by better ideas. Right action will follow. The Foundation emphasis is on self-education. And when you come right down to it, self-education is the only kind of education there is. A wise and experienced teacher is one who has been over the route before, so he can tell you where the mine-fields are, which roads are blind alleys and which are dead ends, and which books are worth studying. But there’s one thing no teacher can do: he cannot educate you. You have to educate yourself. “Educate” is not a transitive verb, that is, education is not something that anyone can do to another or for another. But anyone who has the incentive can do it for himself.

I first encountered this approach years ago in a pamphlet by the eminent British novelist, Arnold Bennett; it was entitled “How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day.” You can make your own life more exciting and fulfilling, wrote Bennett in the breezy manner of a novelist, if you resolve to learn some subject, any topic of your own choosing—like political economy—and make a pact with yourself to spend 90 minutes three evenings a week in intense study. This does not mean merely sitting down with a book in front of you, which is all you’ll be able to do at first. You’ll start to read, and after a few pages your mind will be miles away. Grab your mind and drag it back by the scruff of the neck! says Bennett, and gradually your mind will realize that you are in charge and that you mean business. At this point your mind will start to pay attention and do what you demand of it.

Another way to teach your mind that you are in charge of it is to spend a few minutes before retiring rehearsing the events of the day, hour by hour: what you saw, heard and did, whom you met, what you said, and so on. Once your mind realizes that it will be called upon to recite at the day’s end, it will begin to pay attention during the day; you’ll experience things more vividly and thus recall them more readily. Plan to keep a daily journal, as Leonard Read did for years.

The liberating arts require a lot of reading,and reading requires seeing, which is why I recommend The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley. Reading does not come naturally; reading is an acquired skill, like playing the fiddle or walking on your hands.

You can teach yourself to read better with books like Walter B. Pitkin’s The Art of Rapid Reading. Several courses are now available which teach speed reading, but I don’t know how well they live up to their claims. I do know it to be a fact that anyone can train himself to read easier, faster, and with greater pleasure. Better comprehension follows. Use a red pencil to bracket and underline salient points. This is an aid to memory and helpful for later review.

The Art of Thinking

Now that you have awakened a few billion brain cells and pumped some information into them, your mind will begin to churn out ideas and you’ll be thinking lots of new and exciting thoughts. What is it like to think? Let me quote a few lines from Jacques Barzun, a first-rate thinker: “Thinking is inwardly a haphazard, fitful, incoherent activity. If you could peer in and see thinking going on, it would not look like that trimmed and barbered result, A Thought. Thinking is messy, repetitious, silly, obtuse, subject to explosions that shatter the crucible and leave darkness behind. Then comes another flash, a new path is seen, trod, lost, broken off, and blazed anew. It leaves the thinker dizzy as well as doubtful; he does not know what he thinks until he has thought it, or better, until he has written and riddled it with a persistence akin to obsession.”

Once you get hooked on thinking you’ll be irresistibly drawn into writing, and you’ll quickly discover that almost no author who relies on the contents of his own mind alone ever wrote a readable essay, let alone a book. Every thinker and writer needs to know how to use reference books and conduct research, and the complete guide to this is the book, The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graft. But you cannot stop there; you have to learn to write passable English prose, and there’s no easy way to do that. The most helpful book on writing, in my view, is Barzun’s Simple and Direct. If you’re interested in knowing how the ancient Greeks went about the chore of putting together a persuasive speech, look into Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

The human person is emphatically not the mere accidental end result of the chance interaction of physical and chemical forces, however much it might please certain of our contemporaries to believe this. Nor is man some untidy excrescence appearing on the earth’s surface sometime between the last two ice ages, tossed about by the same natural forces which rust iron and ripen corn. To the contrary, every man and woman is a work of divine art; through our being flow the primordial creative forces of the universe. Coordinate with those forces and we become creators too, some of us in small and others in large measure.

Novelty comes onto the cosmic scene with every thought we think. The future is still in the making, and there’s no action we take that does not alter the future in some degree. The future really is in our hands, and this is a responsibility we cannot avoid. Even if we do nothing, the future inexorably records our inaction, by being a little bit different than it would have been, had we done something.

The center of human creativity is the individual human mind, and the creative process in thought, literature, music, and art is the subject of The Creative Process, a wide-ranging anthology edited by Brewster Ghiselin.

To sum up: I’ve had some things to say about the ages-old liberal arts curriculum as an essential element of Western Civilization. Now that we know something of other great world civilizations we realize that we can learn from them, but only if we retain a firm hold on our own heritage. I have pointed out that education is not at all the same thing as schooling, and I have argued that education and training are not quite the same. All genuine education is self-education. But you must first train yourself, in order to acquire the tools of learning you need to educate yourself with. Education deals with ideas, and ideas rule the human world. The man or woman who thinks is an influence on those who come into contact with him, and by his thoughtful actions he exerts leverage over the future.

Albert Jay Nock was a product of “the grand, old, fortifying classical curriculum,” and it’s fairly safe to refer to Nock as the most exquisitely educated gentleman of the first third of this century. And Nock thought of himself as a superfluous man! It is certainly true that a classical education will not make you the life of the party; it won’t put you among the rich and famous; it might even make you feel superfluous. But “the fun is in the going”; where it gets you is secondary. Self-education is a never-ending series of challenges. Each challenge we surmount only confronts us with a bigger and more complex challenge—and a wider horizon. But that’s what life is all about. And such a life is never dull!

Originally published in The Freeman, December 1988. “The Liberating Arts” was presented as a FEE Seminar lecture in Alderbrook, Washington, in 1988.

Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.

Bibliography

Aristotle — The Rhetoric, Lane Cooper, Editor. 1932.

Barzun, Jacques— Darwin, Marx, Wagner, 1941.

Barzun, Jacques— Teacher in America, 1945.

Barzun. Jacques— Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, rev. ed. 1985.

Barzun and Graff— The Modern Researcher. 4th ed.. 1985.

Bennett, Arnold— How to Live (n.d.).

Chesterton, G. K.— Orthodoxy, 1924.

Chesterton, G. K.— The Everlasting Man, 1925.

Dawson, Christopher The Making of Europe, 1937.

Dawson, Christopher—Religion and the Rise of Western Civilization, 1950.

De Burgh, W. G.—Legacy of the Ancient World, rev. ed., 1947.

DeRougemont, Denis—Man’s Western Quest, 1957.

Hazlitt, Henry—Thinking As A Science, 1916. 1969.

Heard, Gerald—Man the Master, 1941.

Heard, Gerald—The Human Venture, 1955.

Highet, Gilbert—The Classical Tradition, 1949.

Highet, Gilbert—Man’s Unconquerable Mind. 1954.

Huxley, Aldous—The Art of Seeing, 1942.

Joad, C. E. M.—Guide to Philosophy, 1936.

Joad, C. E.M.—The Recovery of Belief, 1952.

Krutch, Joseph Wood—The Modern Temper. 1929.

Krutch, Joseph Wood—The Measure of Man, 1954.

Lewis, C. S.—Abolition of Man, 1947.

Lewis, C. S.—Miracles, 1947.

Lewis. C. S.—God in the Dock, 1970.

Matron, H. I.—Education in Antiquity, 1956.

Newman, J. H.—The Idea of a University, 1852, 1959.

Nock, A. J.—The Theory of Education in the U.S., 1932.

Nock, A. J.—Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943.

Pitkin, Walter B.—The Art of Rapid Reading, 1929.

Polya, G.—How to Solve It, 2nd ed., 1956.

Sayers, Dorothy—The Lost Tools of Learning, 1948 (Reprinted in A Matter of Eternity, R. K. Sprague, editor, 1973).

Whitehead, Alfred North—The Aims of Education, 1929.

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The Liberating Arts

Another great video for today, although I admit it’s a bit long but well worth it. If you’ve been curious about whether or not “restoring” all of the “traditional” aspects of American “governance” is a good idea, then I would challenge you to watch this entire video and consider what Doug Casey and Tom Woods have to say.

The government is a band of thieves writ large, a parasite, and a horrible idea from the get-go. Liberty is the answer.

The great irony of this show? It was broadcast on PBS. LOL. Way to use the system against itself…

Post from: LibertarianChristians.com

Is Limited Government an Oxymoron?