Delphic Maxim 44: Educate your sons (and daughters)
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
44. Educate your sons (and daughters)
What is the point of education? It has to be more than learning the technical skills necessary to get through life. That sounds a bit broad of a call, so let me explain.
I often see a lot of people post online saying “I wish school had taught me how to apply for a home loan, or write a resume, or manage my bills more effectively”. While these are definitely important skills, they are skills that come from a particular set of ideological choices (in this case, capitalist/consumer choices that equip people for lives as workers). Nothing wrong with that necessarily, except that we spend so much time in school, and there are many more things for us to learn.
‘Schooling’ is a little different to ‘education’ as well. Schooling is the formalised system of education that we are used to — where we rock up to a building, with a curriculum set usually by the state, and we get instruction from teachers (I’m a little careless with language here — I think what goes on in schools is much, much richer than the picture I’m painting, but more on that soon). There are some educational theorists — Ivan Illych is one who comes to mind — who advocate ‘deschooling’. Because the choices about curriculum — and pedagogy (the ‘art and science of teaching’) — are political ones.
That’s why for a century the History we were taught skimmed over state-sponsored violence towards Aboriginal Australians, or silenced the ingenuity, technology and civilisation of the first people of this continent. It’s why teaching ‘postmodern, critical gobbledygook’ — as John Howard once described it — in the English curriculum get sledged in newspapers all the time. It’s why the United States has a bizarre live debate every so often about whether creationism should be taught in science classrooms. And it’s why more recently we have had a debate about general capabilities and what constitutes excellence in schooling.
Education, though, is richer and more vital than ‘schooling’ — it’s a natural process, something to which we are all entitled and we are all capable. It’s something that happens through the course of our lives, an inalienable right as it were. And I think it’s something that should stand apart from what we might think as a kind of ‘indoctrination’, or at least social reproduction of particular ideas, that can be associated with ‘schooling’.
How do we build our moral characters? How do we get a sense of justice, mercy, or right and wrong? How do we learn to relate to other people, to carry ourselves in the world, to have a curiosity about each other and about the universe, and also to have a critical capability to interrogate the information we encounter? This are dispositions and capabilities that go deep into our grey matter — they’re something learned not by ‘schooling’, but as a process of education.
If we think back to Aristotle’s triad of episteme (scientific, abstract knowledge), techne (craft, art, applied skills), and phronesis (practical wisdom), then the kind of education we want to guide children towards is the third of those. We can be ‘schooled’ in the sciences, and history, and english. We can be ‘schooled’ in how to do the practical things we need to do to live. But practical wisdom? That’s not a schooled thing, that something that we learn through life and experience. Hopefully schools are able to put in place the kinds of moral education that help facilitate this, but we all have a responsibility to create a community — a polis, to borrow from the writers of these maxims — that builds our moral virtue.
