By Joseph Woodard 

Saying that Government cannot educate is not some partisan political position, but a simple statement of fact: government cannot educate, because government cannot love. And even more bluntly, government should not even try to take on the responsibilities of love, because, slowly but surely, it perverts them into acts of lust — lust for power or security, on the part of its administrators. All this may not be immediately obvious, so we’ll lay out the facts, one step at a time. First, what is government? Second, what is real or liberal education? Third, why can’t government do it?

What is Government?

A government, or regime, is the organization of visible offices that claims a monopoly over the tools of power — everything from tax audits to police batons — to serve a people or nation’s collective, physical necessities. Its core duties are:

1. External defense;
2. Civic justice;
3. Real public works, like roads and harbours. 

Within these spheres, the capacity for physical coercion is simply necessary. A government that cannot or will not enforce its laws is no government. So all its enterprises are cast in the mold of legal procedures of enforcement: mandatory, categorical, and monetary. 

Everything the government does is coercive — everything.

The government’s ‘iron fist’ has been disguised over the last century by the growth of its ‘velvet glove,’ its oxymoronic ‘social services.’ These family duties are primarily:

1. Educating the young;
2. Nursing the sick, and;
3. Sheltering the homeless.

These are truly relationships of friendship or love, so they must be voluntary, personal, and sacrificial.

It is self-defeating for the government to exert its coercive authority in these services, because such care must discern and nurture the Imago Dei, or Image of God, in each unique human person. Families can and do share these duties with the voluntary associations in a free, Christian society, but if they’re surrendered to the State, they become coercive and protocol-driven: mandatory, categorical, and monetary. 

Government ‘social services’ remain coercive, first because the taxes supporting them are surely not voluntary (as when its programs are positively evil), and second because the government inevitably seeks a monopoly over them, like quack grass, squeezing out more productive efforts. In North America, so far, one barely-tolerated exception is homeschooling (among, say, ten percent of Americans and five percent of Canadians).

Real education, liberal education, is a service of love; liberating youth. Governments can train youth, and throughout the ages, it has. Sparta and the Roman republic trained their youth in the practical skills and moral virtues of warriors. The archaic Egyptian priesthood or Chinese mandarins trained narrow elites for running public projects.  Historically, natural regimes have trained five-to-ten percent of the population, by the regimes, for the regime, like law schools today. 

A liberal education, however, means to free the minds of children, future citizens, from the threats, ambitions, prejudices, and superstitions of the local regime—the autism of politics.

So in Latin, e-ducare means ‘leading out.’ This does not repudiate citizenship, but recognizes the fact that true human flourishing — wisdom and worship or ‘life fully alive’ — transcends our immediate, physical necessities which are ruled by the coercive regime. And very, very often, the wisdom and worship of free citizens is needed to save a regime from itself.

What is Liberal Education?

The only civilization that’s ever embedded a comprehensive culture of liberal education is Western Christianity, with its roots Athens and Jerusalem, Plato’s Republic and the Gospel. The Republic tackles the perennial political problem: how can society tame that excessively spirited ten percent of young men who, left to their own devices, launch themselves into careers of crime or rebellion? This problem bedevils us today: how do we turn young wolf cubs into sheep dogs? (Our cities testify to our failure.)

 

Plato says, give them the right education. His pedagogy comes in two parts: the first is moral and the second is  philosophic. The duties of politics are necessary, he teaches, but they can’t satisfy the most profound, indeed divine, longings of the human soul. So, “unless we can find a better way of life than ruling, for those who rule”—that spirited ten percent—“rival lovers will fight,” either in the halls of government or back alleys.

Plato’s “primary education” (Rep. II-IV) employs “music (poetry) to soften the spirited part of the soul, and gymnastics to harden the philosophic.” His immediate problem: Greece’s then-popular poetry, with gods and heroes like the adulterous Zeus and petulant Achilles, nurtured more wolves than border collies (like today’s ‘gangsta rap’). Their gods and heroes were bad models. The young are taught first by imitation (mimesis), so they need virtuous models or icons.

So, Plato’s first concern is forming what contemporary educator John Senior (The Death of Christian Culture) calls “the moral imagination.” Until modern cinema, Senior says, our moral imaginations were formed by a “thousand good books.” These books range from authors Potter, Milne, and Grahame, to Stevenson, Dickens, and Scott. In Plato’s day, however, the reigning myths are at least as brutal as our current Hollywood poetry — Homer, Hesiod and the Greek tragedies. 

So Plato proposes censoring the malicious and lecherous gods of Olympus. All the popular poets lie about the gods, he argues, simply to titillate their audiences and excuse their vices. True poetic education must describe the God “as he is,”: perfect, unchanging, never lying, and the cause only of good. To live life fully alive, we must open our eyes to the light of beauty in the divine mind.  

Having imagined a healthy popular culture, Plato’s “secondary education” then faces the challenge of offering “a better way of life than politics,” for that spirited ten percent. Truly noble humans never scramble after power, he argued. Competing for pre-eminence in politics or ‘the ‘hood’ is like fighting over the shadows in a cave. Truly noble humans seek the good in a philosophic life. 

To lead the young from the political cave, into the natural sun, he proposes (Rep. VI-VII) an education that ascends from arithmetic to geometry, astronomy, and harmony, to dialectics — contemplation of the good. This prescription, a pedagogy of the Divine Mind, was the seed of Western liberal education. So one ancient commentator described life in his Academy as “pursuing the elusive Good and happiness in geometry,” free at least from the lust for power.  

Plato provided a perfect diagnosis of the problem of liberal education: freeing youth, not from their civic duties, but from the seductive ambitions and anxieties of politics. Yet he offered only a pantomime solution. The cultural zenith of his legacy was found in Roman Stoicism, an abstract deism and morality of apathia, dispassion and fatalism. 

Stoicism could nurture truly noble characters like Cato (a political suicide) or Emperor Marcus Aurelius, but it lacked real cultural traction.  Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, Commodus, for example was notably vile and sadistic, even by Roman standards. Stoicism’s abstract intellectualism might provide solace amid the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” but it provided no reason for enduring them: no accountability, no fraternal purpose or love, and no obligation to renew the world.  

The problem with Stoic education was its failure to provide a real, personal loyalty outranking the regime of political necessity and lust for dominion. Families might provide loving service, teaching, nursing, and sheltering, for those lucky to have a family. But in a universe of ‘powers and principalities,’ what alternative was there but competing powers? The real solution for Plato’s problem, the cure of the political obsession, depended on a new revelation of the real Cosmos. This Cosmos was not an impersonal Mind, floating above a world of violent necessity, but a providential creation by a loving Father. 

By celebrating the triumph of the cross, the dominion of love over death, Christianity liberated free societies of love from their death-dealing local regimes. By celebrating the Imago Dei, Image of God, in every human being, Christian society freely offered services of love: educating, nursing, and sheltering. 

By celebrating each soul, lovingly educated, Christianity unleashed true hope, free human association, science, enterprise and innovation: the promise of education in the escape from the shadows of Plato’s Cave.

The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

The first truly liberal education arose spontaneously in scattered, free societies — rag-tag monasteries and ruined cathedral schools — in the anarchy of the fall of the Western Empire. Plato’s secondary education (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and harmony) was ‘baptized’ as the Quadrivium by the philosopher Boethius (executed by the barbarian Theodoric in 525), with the place of dialectic or philosophy taken by Christian worship. 

The later Trivium’s language arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) evolved spontaneously given the necessity of transmitting Latin learning in a sea of German dialectics. The Seven Liberal Arts were then formalized and broadcast to thousands of monastery schools by Charlemagne’s schoolmaster, Alcuin, in the ninth century. This was just in time for the Vikings to shatter the fragile Carolingian political crystal into a thousand shards.

However uncomfortable at the time, Tenth Century’s desolate anarchy nurtured the universal culture of liberal education amid tribal ignorance and brutality. Its monks were mostly celibate, so, despite holding a monopoly on the ancient learning, they never developed a hereditary ruling caste like India. Thus they recruited clever farmer’s and merchant’s sons into a true meritocracy, history’s first ‘social mobility.’ 

They also offered a supply of useful clerks (clerics) to their local warrior princes. Eventually, this voluntary, spontaneous, decentralized liberal culture seeded the historically unprecedented, independent universities in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Only with the growth of revenue, communications and authority among both kings and bishops did inevitable tensions develop between secular and sacred authorities.

Burgeoning trade and communications eventually grew an independent ‘middle class,’ hungry for learning but free of the Church’s purposes and constraints. So secular learning took off with the Italian Quattrocento or 1400s, once called the Renaissance, but truly the West’s third, after the Carolingian and High Gothic. Petrarch’s studia humanitatis popularized the literature of the Greco-Roman world, appreciative of its natural wisdom, but cheerfully blind to its pagan superstitions, cruelty and despair. 

Renaissance humanism assumed the Christian axiom of the Imago Dei, or Image of God, in each unique (and inventive) human being but barely acknowledged its debt and largely ignored the reality of sin. So Castiglione’s Art of the Courtier established courtesy as a secular, social virtue. This seeded the uniquely Western social categories of the lady and gentleman, people worthy of respect for their learning and civility, regardless (or even contemptuous) of political office. So, until recently, enduring Western culture provided an answer to Plato’s problem: finding “a better way of life than ruling, for those who rule,” thus forestalling “rival lovers from fighting.”

For two millennia, Christian liberal education shaped the ‘moral imagination,’ nurturing virtue and contemplation in the next generation, almost unaware that it was freeing them from the oppressive pragmatism of their local chieftains. Young Billy Shakespeare — “the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school” — read Plutarch’s Lives, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Cicero’s de Officiis, and the Bible, and then wrote plays subtly scolding his patron Queen Elizabeth. 

Young Abe Lincoln, living a day’s hike from any school, read Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s plays, and the Bible, taught himself Kent’s American Law, and then re-founded the American republic. 

Canada’s founding Prime Minister John A. Macdonald studied grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, geography and the Bible at a parish school, articled in law at age 15, and then later united the Canadian Confederation and built its Canadian Pacific Railway.

As homeschoolers know, children who are led and allowed to study — to cultivate freely their own studium, zeal or dedication to a purpose — have the character to acquire later for themselves any needed skills.

When children are trained only in skills, however, they lose their natural wonder at the meaning and purpose of life and they end up the servants of other people’s purposes. An example of this would be government clerks collating mountains of meaningless data in beehive offices. 

Aristotle stressed the difference between contemplative versus the productive intellects: the big-picture, What or Why questions of a free citizen on the one hand, versus the stove-pipe How to or With what questions of mere slaves or servants on the other.

Why Government Cannot Educate

Now, the atheists of the scientific Enlightenment (like Francis Bacon and David Hume) were too clever to attack Christianity openly. They argued instead that the Why questions were irrational and irrelevant. If ‘man is the measure of all things,’ the Why is simply whatever we want. Only the How questions of materialistic science are truly rational, they insisted, and the Why answers of religion are all very nice, but keep your private opinions to yourself.  

Yet, as Aristotle says, the love of wisdom begins in wonder, Why? We can answer, what should we do, or How should we live, once we begin to answer, Why do we live: what does it mean to live ‘Life Fully Alive?’ Free citizens must wonder, Why, What is our purpose? Clerks and laborers need to be trained only in How, and orders. So, ironically, the Bacons and Humes of the “Enlightenment” sought to free us from ‘bondage of religion,’ but by suppressing our deep awareness of the Imago Dei in each of us, they prepared us for the shackles of our local bosses and their purposes.  

This brings us back to our original axiom: the government can train in skills, but cannot educate in true freedom or virtue, because the government cannot love. Government is the coercive rule over the non-negotiable necessities of life: defense, justice and (truly) public works, in ways that are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary.

 In contrast, it has always been families and clans that nurture the next generation in love: teaching, nursing, and sheltering, in ways voluntary, personal, and sacrificial.

As with Plato’s education in geometry, harmony, and philosophy, a truly liberal education draws the soul beyond the cave of immediate political crises and demands.

The Progressive movement brought education under bureaucratic rule in the early 1900s, selling them as ‘public works,’ for which the government had greater resources and expertise. But, under the necessities of government, the tyranny of protocols, education became first skills training and now public ideology. As the ideology of bureaucratic government spread, loving, personal nursing care became first categorical procedures and now impersonal herd control (like euthanasia culling). Likewise, loving shelter (in families, monasteries or charitable shelters) became first welfare ghettos and now domestic tribal alliances, occupying dying city centres. 

The Family Springs Eternal

This diagnosis may seem depressing, but as pediatrician-philosopher Herbert W. Ratner said, about the Marxist efforts to eradicate the family, “The traditional family has a habit of burying its undertakers,” meaning states are destroying themselves in the attempt to substitute for families. “Nature has a vested interest in the traditional or monogamous family, the reproductive mode of her highest creature, man,” Ratner says. So we’re already seeing families – cheerfully paying the costs of declaring their natural, loving autonomy in teaching, nursing, and sheltering –  foregoing the illusory security and economy in ‘state social services.’

The current cultural confusion is simply back-handed proof once again that families are the primary educators of their children.

The fact is, however, we all need remedial education. We all need a deliberate effort to recover the treasures of Western Civilization, robbed by arrogant academics and bureaucratic schools. A free society needs healthy families, and healthy families need free and confident parents, committed to the goodness of life. With their kids, homeschool parents are cheerfully rediscovering Homer’s Odyssey, Herodotus’ History, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Plato’s Euthyphro, Augustine’s Confessions, Bede’s History of the English, bizarre Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Austen’s hilarious Emma,  Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Cather’s My Antonia, and of course, Shakespeare. When we scan an online Great Books list, we may need some courage to begin, but we still have the native wisdom to read what our grandparents treasured. We must simply develop the patience. These books will give us the wisdom of the millennia, and this will allow us to see the mischief of the past few decades as just that, mischief.

Joseph K. Woodard earned a BA at University of Alberta (Pol Phil), MA’s at Dalhousie and St. John’s (Great Books), Greek and Latin diplomas at Berkeley, and a PhD at Claremont. He invested fifteen years as an academic (Bethany, Brock), fifteen as a journalist (Alberta Report, Calgary Herald), and eleven as a tribunal judge (Citizenship Canada). He has helped his wife, Kathy, raise ten children with homeschooling and parent-run school start-ups, and always taught adjunct at independent high schools and colleges. He writes for websites like The Imaginative Conservative and Public Discourse, serves as director of research for the Canadian Centre for Home Education, and moderates Great Books seminars online with Angelicum Academy.