You are aware, if you read my blog often, that I believe education has been taken over, consumed, and destroyed by anxiety. Anxiety has become institutionalized in every element of American education. Anxiety tries to cure itself by taking control, only to find that it is attempting to control things that aren't meant to be controlled.
Anxiety trusts nobody's judgment. It insists on universal standards and reproducible processes. It is obsessed with predictable outcomes. But because it never achieves the outcomes it predicts, it creates more anxiety.
My mission this year is to free as many schools and teachers from the bondage of anxiety as I can. But I carry no illusions: anxiety is a formidable demon. It has achieved the unspeakable: it has converted the ultimate leisure activity, the very purpose for leisure, into yet another form of servile labour. We are obsessed with productivity because if we can produce something we can prove that we have done something. But that isn't what education is about. It is about thinking about ideas - not making things. It is about pursuing wisdom and virtue, not a job or a degree. It is about seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not material worries. It is not measurable and cannot be assessed by productivity.
The main weapons Anxiety has used have been the colleges, the teachers' colleges, and the government. Colleges decide who will get past their doors. Having once served a noble function, the colleges have convinced us that it is better to go to college than not - indeed that we cannot make a living without them. Many large corporations, involved in the same scam, say the same thing. But the colleges have changed their function. Now, rather than preparing us to be free they prepare us for anxiety driven, servile labour. But if we don't go to college, we are told, we can't get a high paying servile job. And so we attend college for four years to learn what we could have learned in two months so we can do a job for which everybody knows the best training is on-the-job.
Yet we die to get into these colleges because we believe the lie - a lie that is buried in the system, rather than stated in the marketing brochures. And since we think we need to get in so we can get a servile job, we let the colleges dictate the terms of admission. Sometimes we let the "best colleges" do it, by which we mean the one's with the highest standardized standards of admission, where the best and brightest go to have their minds molded by the most skilled manipulators. But we still let them put us on the defensive, because we are anxious.
We ought to do what the home schoolers have done. Dictate the terms to the colleges. Nurture the most independent thinking, learned students, and then tell the colleges what they can do. The best colleges will take the best students if they are the best colleges. That's how they became the best colleges. There are enough good colleges that will accept students who were educated instead of prepared to manipulate the system - who were not trained to become obsequious. But we are anxious.
Of course, the government perpetuates this anxiety because a government, in the Enlightenment model under which we are suffering, needs everything to be measureable and controllable. A free school is a serious problem for a modern government. The outcome is unpredictable. The measures are unstandardized. The graduate might not fit one of the jobs the government says need to be filled. So the government supports an educational system that makes the process more predictable.
At least that is the illusion they create. What they really do is dehumanize children through their agents and their processes. But they require that people go through these processes to become -
you guessed it: certified.
And here is where the teachers' colleges come in, and where the vileness of what American schooling has done to education is most clearly evident (except of course for the schools themselves). Let me put it simply: we have replaced apprenticeship with certification. Nobody who understands the art of teaching can read that sentence without some sort of reaction that plants itself in the negative - something between a shock of recognition with the accompanying dismay and a sad, knowing shaking of the head.
Our anxieties have caused us to take the human element out of education because we simply don't trust the judgment of the teacher in the classroom. The result is that we now produce teachers whose judgment cannot be trusted in the classroom.
There is no solution within the presently established system. God save the classical Christian movement from the same anxiety driven death by administration.
