By PAUL KRAUSE
The battles over schools and education are back in public attention. Not since the 1960s has the American public been so concerned over what is going on in America’s classrooms. As a graduate of Yale, I can say from experience that what you read in the news is worse on campus. Amid the battles over Critical Race Theory and anti-Americanism proliferating through schools, the real crisis of education is between the ideal of education as a training in virtue and love versus the spirit of cynicism and hate which aims at destruction.
CRT is just the face of the manifestation of the spirit of cynicism and hate that now governs American education from kindergarten to university. Education was once seen as a place for virtuous learning and soulful ascent and transformation. The creation of modern universities, dating back to the Middle Ages of medieval Christendom, aimed at shaping intellects to the highest good: God, primarily through the study of philosophy and theology.
During the Renaissance, education subsequently aimed at excellence in the arts and language which served the basis for humanist education which was formalized in England at Cambridge and Oxford. Thus began the study of the classics and languages.
When the Puritans heroically sailed to the New World and brought this tradition of intellectual and spiritual excellence to America, founding once proud Christian institutions like Harvard and Yale, virtue and love through education was the mantra. Still adorning buildings at Yale reads the old motto: “For God, For Country, and For Yale.” (We’ll see how much longer they remain part of the campus fabric.)
An educational culture that values love and virtue as its aim, to achieve excellence in the human spirit through work and improvement, passes on all that is good in the past to the present to build forward into the future. The unbroken thread of goodness, truth, and beauty from our ancestors stays with us and inspires us to loftier heights. It is precisely this spirit of education that is targeted for destruction by the new vandals and philistines who run our schools, teach our children, and proclaim themselves guardians of culture (they are really desecrators of culture).
The assault against excellence and love in education comes from two different forces. First is the pragmatic (or progressive) education of John Dewey. This force is, admittedly, somewhat banal. Dewey’s educational outlook was that humans are machines to be built for what the state needs. Pragmatic education valued the basic and technical skills citizens would need in the modern world. Readings in metaphysics and theology, consideration of the good life, and excellence in language need not apply. Social relevance is the ultimate governing spirit of Dewey’s ideas.
The more vicious assault against excellence and love in education comes from the disciples of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, an Italian post-Marxist thinker who influenced the origins of postmodernism, argued in his “Prison Notebooks” that the proletariat revolution failed in bourgeois Christian societies (England and America especially, given that they were the most industrialized nations and the prime candidates for revolution according to Marxist doctrine) because the proletariat didn’t have control of the institutions of culture which shaped cultural attitudes and consciousness.
According to Gramsci, for the revolution to be successful it was not economic conditions that would lead to revolution but intellectual and cultural conditions that would cause the great conflagration to manifest. Gramsci advocated a seizure of the institutions of cultural authority and capital: schools and the media most especially. In the late 1960s, student radicals influenced by Gramsci’s theories in Europe spread to America.
Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony asserts that cultural institutions propagate values to benefit a particular group of people through their influence in education (and the media). Destroying this cultural hegemony is necessary for the remaking of society. The 1960s postmodernists like Michel Foucault, building on Gramsci, asserted that institutions acted like a prison, trapping people inside and oppressing them with their cultural values disseminated through ideals of education. Foucault argued that it wasn’t virtue or love that education instilled but class oppression and elitism.
This is the real intellectual origin of CRT and other cynical hate theories that now dominate our educational institutions. Their goals are to deconstruct, or expose, curricula for being white supremacy, sexist, and bourgeois (in the tradition of Foucault and other postmodernists). Upon achieving this destructive blow, the next goal is to form the minds of students to revolution: outlining the blueprint for changing the system (in the tradition of Gramsci and Lenin). The goal of education is the destruction of the culture of love and excellence through cynicism and hate which will spur the revolution and the remaking of the society along whatever leftwing fad is currently in vogue.
What Gramsci got right, however, is the role cultural institutions play in shaping attitudes and values. This is why it is imperative for Christians, conservatives, and any patriotic American to defend their institutions from corruption and to use their institutions to inculcate that spirit of love and excellence to the current generation who should be stewards of culture and to the next generation which represents the future of the Western tradition of love and excellence in culture.
The battle over education is more than about critical race theory, anti-racism, and desire for greater inclusivity and diversity. These are merely the surface battles. The real battle is between critical hate theory and cynicism which seeks a complete destruction of the existing social order and the defense of all that is good, true, and beautiful in two and half millennia of Western culture and civilization which inspire love and excellence to the next generation. This is a battle we can ill afford to lose.
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