The purpose of “education” has not remained the same over the course of roughly four centuries. By the early 20th century, “education” for Protestantization and Americanization began to give way to something called progressive “education.” Not surprisingly, it is progressive “education” that Richard Weaver targets.
Published in 1964, Richard Weaver’s Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time is less a book than a collection of essays. What follows is less a very belated book review than a commentary on the continuing relevance and importance of Weaver’s vision. Subtitled “The Cultural Crisis of Our Time,” that vision goes a long way toward explaining the cultural crisis of our time.
Sixty years ago it likely would not have been too late to resolve the crisis of that time. And today? Today it might well be too late to resolve both crises, meaning the crisis of then and the crisis of now. But that’s no reason to surrender. Russell Kirk surely would not have thought so. In his foreword to this collection, Kirk concluded by expressing his hope that Weaver’s intellectual “heirs” would be “many and stalwart.” My hope is that these few words might serve to increase their number, as well as their sense of purpose and dedication.
Order, Kirk tells us, was Weaver’s “austere passion.” That would be “order” in not just one, but two senses of the word: “the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of society.”
While the pursuit of both was of crucial importance to Weaver, let’s begin with a measure of disorder. In other words, let’s begin near the end. Chapter seven (of eight) is titled “Gnostics of Education.” It’s worth the price of the entire book, especially for the potential reader who has been persuaded that our educational crisis is a) of fairly recent vintage; or b) still readily fixable; or c) not a crisis at all. Thanks to this fine paperback edition, Richard Weaver remains on hand to tell us otherwise on all three counts.
The opening sentence of the essay sets the stage for what’s to follow: “More than any other nation the United States has chosen to look upon its schools at all levels as a means of education rather than mere instruction.” That was true in Puritan New England well before the American Revolution. It was true for Horace Mann and the birth of state-supported public education in the 19th century. It was true for John Dewey and the progressive educators of the early 20th century. It was true when Richard Weaver of the University of Chicago was composing this essay sometime in the late 1950s. And it remains true today.
What’s also true is that the purpose of “education” has not remained the same over the course of roughly four centuries. For the better part of three centuries it was “education” in the name of Protestantization, with “education” for Americanization gradually being added to the mix during much of the 19th century and into a good share of the 20th century as well. Nonetheless, by the early 20th century “education” for Protestantization and Americanization began to shoulder aside and eventually give way to something called progressive “education.”
Not surprisingly, it is progressive “education” that Weaver targets in this essay. But it is not his only target. He begins target practice by conceding the obvious: “Education,” as he defines it, also “comprises instruction.” But true education for Weaver is much more than that, since it is “intimately related to the preservation of a culture.” At least that should be the case when what Weaver refers to as “normal conditions” prevail. After all, under such conditions “the points of view that an educator instills are the points of view of the culture,” which was certainly the case when the imposition of Protestantism and Americanism was the “normal condition.”
Fair enough, accurate enough, and sensible enough. But Richard Weaver is far from finished with his self-assigned task of making sense. If an educator does not do this sort of instilling, “nothing else is possible as a settled thing.” Why? Because then “education and culture are working at “cross purposes.” The result could only be a “conflict which has to be resolved.”
The conflict that Weaver had in mind had already reached “serious proportions,” courtesy of the “progressive theory of education.” Chief among the “tenets” of this theory are the following: 1) There is no such thing as a body of knowledge that students need to learn; 2) Since the essence of the world is change, there is no final knowledge about anything; 3) Therefore, the object of education is not to teach knowledge, but to “teach students”; 4) The student should be encouraged to follow his own desires in deciding what to study; 5) The teacher should spurn the role of authority figure and instead serve as a “leader” whose only duty is to coordinate the work of the students; 6) Students should never have fear, especially of grades or competitions.
Let me pause here to interject a current note that connects his culture—and concerns—with our culture and one of my concerns. Having taken a break from working on this essay, I decided to check in on the annual Minnesota state high school hockey tournament. During a break in the action on the ice an advertisement for Education Minnesota (as opposed to something called “Instruction Minnesota?) appeared. That would be the powerful Minnesota state teachers’ union. Their piece featured a handful of teachers (“leaders?) cheering on their students to follow their passions and dreams. The concluding line went something like this: “We learn so much from you.” Really? Who knows, maybe they fear them as well.
Now back to Weaver’s tenets. By the way, if the reader might detect a conflict between these tenets and the “principal teachings of the Judeo-Christian-classical heritage,” Weaver would not be at all surprised, since such a conflict should be “readily apparent.” Number seven: “The mind is not to be exalted over the senses,” followed by 8) “activist” learning” is equal to intellectual learning. (Today the latter would likely rank below the former.) Lastly, “the general aim is to train the student so that he will adjust himself not simply to the existing society… but to society conceived as social democracy.”
Lest anyone think that Weaver might have been understating his case and concerns, he openly states that for the “past fifty years” public education in the United States has been “in the hands of revolutionaries.” In fact, a ‘virtual educational coup d’etat” had been staged by a “specially inclined minority,” which essentially amounted to a “cabal.” And the result? The country had been left with a public “educational system” that was “not only intrinsically bad but increasingly at war with the aims of the community which authorizes it.”
Having detailed his tenets, Weaver summarizes his case by declaring that the human mind is now viewed as a “tyrant.” As such, that tyrant had been about the revolutionary business of “denying the rights of the body as a whole.” In all likelihood, Richard Weaver did not have our current transgender movement in mind when he wrote those words, but could there be a better example of the mind as a “tyrant” in action than the slicing and dicing that accompanies, nay defines, that movement?
Instead, Weaver’s stated concerns were very old-fashioned. The progressive revolutionaries may have left the body alone, but they had left too much else alone as well. The student had been left unprepared to “save his soul,” not to mention without the “wisdom and usages of past civilizations.” That same bereft student would not even be prepared to “get ahead in life,” but at least he would be ready to become a “member of a utopia,” albeit one resting on a “false view of nature and man.”
On the off-chance that you’re wondering what I was wondering somewhere in the early going of this essay, Weaver is now prepared to clear things up–and zero in on even larger targets. The progressives, you see, were not just mere revolutionaries who had carried out a successful cabal. They were modern “gnostics” operating on the basis of their own “false view of nature and man.”
The original gnostics saw the creation as something other than the work of an “omnipotent and benevolent creator.” Instead, their creator was a “Demiurge of limited power.” The result was at best an incomplete creation and at worst at least a partially evil creation and certainly a potentially evil creation. What followed from this was the gnostics’ ”false view of nature and man,” namely that man was somehow superior to the created universe. Therefore the first gnostics had no difficulty setting themselves above creation, a creation for which they were not responsible, not to mention a creation that was the ultimate source of evil.
Why the lack of difficulty? Because the gnostic, original or modern, had no difficulty believing that man was “divine” rather than sinful. Therefore, what man wants to do, he should do.
G.K. Chesterton had his own difficulties with the progressive gnostics of his day. It was their judgment that this was a bad universe, but one that could surely be made better, even perfect. Chesterton, the anti-gnostic, disagreed. For him, this was a good universe, even if it got worse, even much worse, instead of better.
Well, Richard Weaver was convinced that the modern gnostics were well on their way to making things worse, very much worse. In fact, worse than that, the “doctrines of the new educationists” (were) at least as menacing to the survival of our culture as were the Gnostic heresies of the first and second centuries.“ After all, for Weaver the essence of Gnosticism, then and now, was a “kind of irresponsibility,” actually a dual irresponsibility in that it would prove costly to both a proper understanding of “the past and to the structure of reality in the present.”
In sum, as far as Richard Weaver was concerned, it could be “safely” stated that “progressive educational theory” offered nothing more and nothing less than a “gnostic version of the image of man.” That version left out nothing more and nothing less than original sin. How could it be otherwise, since “no external moral absolute exist(ed) by which degrees of rightness and wrongness” could be determined. Furthermore, since man was unburdened by original sin, man had no need of salvation because he was already in a permanent “state of blessedness.”
Weaver could not have known of the lengths to which progressive woke gnostics would go to expand and deepen the conflict between education and culture, a conflict once again of forces working at cross purposes, a conflict that also still remains to be resolved. Nonetheless, he suggests that gnosticism at mid-century “seemed to carry concealed a Marxist hope that the state may be utilized to gain their ends.”
Of course, Weaver also could not have known of the seepage of Marxist notions into progressivism, let alone into progressive theories–and practices–of education. His focus was on the progressive aim of enabling the student “to grow through experience.” After all, for the progressive gnostic the purpose of education was “alleged to be growth.”
But growth toward what? Once again Mr. Chesterton is useful here. For him, true progress presumed that one had a specific goal in mind, perhaps even an ideal in mind, and certainly a goal/ideal larger than oneself. Not so for the progressive gnostic–at least insofar as Richard Weaver could detect. For him, as well as for the progressive, growth was simply a matter of the “natural unfolding of the individual.”
It was not a growth toward or away from anything, because, well, unlike Chesterton’s understanding of progress, the progressive gnostic had “no ideal standards in mind.” Instead, it was all simply a matter of the individual increasing the “divinity” that is in him by some amorphous “process of growth.”
This process and its accompanying theory were at the heart of progressive “child-centered” education. The “upshot” of this theory was to “divinize” the child. Where the progressives “worship the child as child and make concessions to him… traditional education makes demands upon him.”
Weaver is not quite finished. Nor is he quite finished taking a very hard line. Here he is near the end of the essay: ”This belief in the natural goodness of the child… leads to the progressivists’ assault upon virtually all forms of authority and discipline in the classroom.”
If child-centeredness were the sole goal of modern progressive education, that would be problematic, nay, bad enough. But it is not. In fact, none other than one Richard Weaver was quite aware of the double whammy of child-centeredness accompanied by “conditioning the young for political purposes.”
And what might those purposes be? Once again Weaver does not mince words. By turning attention toward “transient externals and away from the central problem of man,” the progressive gnostic has “no equal as an agency of subversion.” Instead such progressives were about the business of producing “citizens for the secular communist state.” Citizens? Clients or subjects would have been more accurate.
Years ago when I was a young instructor—and that’s what we were called at our local community college—I thought of myself as an educator instead. The error was mine. In any case, my goal was to educate rather than instruct. My self-defined goal was to give my students the real story of American history. That would be the post-1960s progressive story. Gradually, it became apparent to me that that was the story that my college students already knew, nay the story that they had already imbibed and accepted. Just as gradually it began to dawn on me that I ought to take a different approach. Yes, Washington and Jefferson were slaveowners, but…. Yes, Lincoln assumed near dictatorial powers, but…. And so on.
And then I began to read Mr. Chesterton before eventually, for a good many of my younger years, performing as Chesterton. Richard Weaver came later, much too much later. Here’s hoping that I now qualify as a Weaver “heir.” And while I’m at it, here’s also hoping that his writings will continue to produce a steady supply of intellectual heirs in the years to come.
I know. This was slated to be a review of an entire book of Weaver essays. Let this essay stand as it is. And let me hold out the possibility that at least one—or maybe more than one—essay on the basis of this important book will follow.
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