Traveling for long periods isn’t always easy, especially when homesickness sets in and family and friends seem so far away. We have now been on the road for two months. Some of the thrills of travel are starting to wear off, and what we miss becomes more apparent.
My girls are missing their friends, and when they are sad, they spend a lot of time on social media, which only exacerbates the problem. And while I am intoxicated by all the beautiful architecture and want to go for long walks every day, it doesn’t seem to excite them in the same way. Imagine that.
So how do we as parents keep them excited about learning, about taking advantage of all that travel has to offer, and not waste a minute of this wonderful opportunity? Well, I do think we need to be sensitive to the emotional needs of our children. It does take time to get adjusted. So it’s essential to be patient, ask lots of questions, and find things that connect with them. And we are trying to do all this. But it’s also vital that we don’t give up or ultimately give in to their lack of enthusiasm at times.
But I also know something else. While I may get tired of the uphill battle to motivate my children to grow and learn, the culture around them never grows weary. It never takes a day off from its attempt to shape them, forcing them into the mold of materialism, consumerism, and posthumanism.
So obviously, we parents need to continue inspiring them to learn, appreciate truth, beauty, and goodness, and resist being shaped by the world (Romans 12:1-2). But how? How do we renew our vision for the true end of education when we get tired?
This morning, just when I was losing some of my enthusiasm for being here, and losing sight of the grand privilege of educating my children, a fantastic essay by University of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen — “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture”— came across my Facebook feed.
According to Deneen, our educational establishment is committing “civilizational suicide.” While Daneen teaches some of the brightest students in the county, his assessment of them is not encouraging for the future of our nation:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
Deneen disabuses the notion that more money or better teachers can fix our educational system.
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.
Sadly, this seems to be the goal of education in our country. The end of education is not to pass on the best of what we have inherited from the Western tradition—belief in God, the foundations of law and morality, the natural law, the long practice of constitutional republicanism, and the true nature of happiness. Instead, the goal of our educational establishment, argues Deneen, is “cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like ‘critical thinking,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘ways of knowing,’ ‘social justice,’ and ‘cultural competence.’”
In the end, concludes Deneen,
Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.
His students “are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.” And they are living in this world because the educational establishment wants them to live there, just as the larger culture around them wants them to find meaning in constant entertainment, perpetual shopping, and staying home alone, living lives of quiet desperation.
If Deneen’s article did anything for me, it awakened me to danger that my kids could become “know-nothings” who live in their own Truman Show, incapable of knowing much about truth, beauty, and goodness. Without the right education, they will easily become adults who know nothing about the best of Western civilization—Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Dante, Milton, Luther and Calvin, Shakespeare, Mozart, the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, to name some highlights. And what is even scarier is that people who cut themselves off from the best of the past have little hope for the future and have little to inspire them to care about the common good. I don’t know anyone who wants this for their children. But according to Deneen, this is what our educational establishment is doing to them. If this isn’t enough to motivate me, I don’t know what is.
A Vision for Education
Yet while Deneen points out the sad end of our educational establishment, one that should shock and warn all parents, he doesn’t spend any time explaining how to fix it. He doesn’t spell out how parents can cultivate children who love knowledge and wisdom, pursuing lives of depth and meaning and life-long learning. Most likely, he assumes his readers know the true end of education. Thus, the goal of this essay is more warning than prescription. But sometimes, we need warning signs, which can be a solid motivator for action.
And we need motivation. Education is hard work, requiring constant inspiration. We need reminders that our calling as parent educators is noble; that introducing our children to the best of the West’s tradition —great music, literature, architecture, and the liberal arts—is essential; that teaching them to love the Bible, love others, and find their identities in Christ is vital to their education; and finally, that reminding them of their true telos, knowing their true eternal destination, engenders hope and courage to live each day for something greater than themselves.
While Deneen’s essay is mostly a negative project, warning us of the dangers of the current educational establisment, it is in the end deeply inspiring. It’s so simple, really. If we don’t stay motiveated and inspired to educate our children, they will become“know-nothings” and the “civilizational suicide” of our nation will be complete. If we don’t want this to happen, we need to get busy. There is work to be done.
Note: Photos are from a recent stroll around Split, Croatia.
Also, don’t forget to check out my new book, Cold Civil War.
So much truth! (Thank you for the lovely photos of beautiful Split- a place we love.)