Interest and the Core Curriculum

In discussions of curriculum over the past one hundred or so years, debate has ranged from letting children choose entirely what they want to study, guided only by their interests, to forced memorization of the encyclopedia, usually called the core curriculum. “Memorizing the encyclopedia” might be a harsh characterization, but some die-hard core-curriculum advocates would not object to it.

The question is, when you take the church and state out of education and replace it with a free market, what would the curriculum be? The answer is whatever the market decides, that is, whatever the parents and students decide they want to pay money for. Just like what we find in the automobile market. The parallel question is, what would cars be like if we let the free market decide? Well, we have a (relatively) free market in automobiles today, so we have big cars, small cars, fast ones, expensive ones, cheap ones, etc. We have an enormous variety of cars but most of us do have cars and we manage to get around town and country without much hassle. Actually, with considerable satisfaction. (Those of us who don’t have cars choose other means of transportation, including walking.)

The core curriculum is a one-size-fits-all strategy and assumes that someone—an education czar or panel of education experts—knows what is best for our children. In automobiles, this strategy would give us one design, one engine, one type of tire, interior, color, etc. Maybe a modest variety of styles—two or three at most—but none that the market actually wants, only what the “experts” think they should want. In education, thoughts of letting parents and children choose what they want unleashes panic screams from the core curriculum crowd about how parents will seek out all sorts of weird ideas, or perhaps not educate their children at all, and the children will go for easy A’s and no homework. The assumption guiding the notion of a core curriculum remains that only one institution, the government, can require such a curriculum and that at the point of a gun.

A little history shows that force does not need to be brought into the curriculum debate. Hellenistic Greece is the origin of our current three-part structure broken into primary, secondary, and higher education. Governments in the ancient world rarely interfered with the educational process. Fathers paid teachers to educate their sons. The curriculum? Greeks called it enkyklios paideia or general education. Romans translated it at as artes liberalis or liberal arts. Today, we might also call this an education in western civilization. Higher education in the ancient world split into two factions that we still have to this day: professional education (rhetoric, medicine, law) versus knowledge for its own sake (philosophy). Weird ideas and easy A’s? There were mystery cults but they did not dominate the education system. And there was no grading, examination, or credential system at all. That is a product of the medieval guilds and the rise of modern bureaucracy.

Another assumption of the core curriculum advocates, especially those who would require specific textbooks and lectures on western civilization, is that the students who are coerced to be in those classroom seats would actually read the book and listen to the lectures. It is obvious to anyone who teaches in the present system that many, and sometimes most, do not do this even in elective courses. The coercive, bureaucratic environment of modern education kills interest in all but the strongest, most purpose-driven students.

Let the parents decide. Let the students decide. Summerhill and Sudbury Valley Schools have amply demonstrated how wide-ranging freedom and learning guided by interest can lead to a satisfying education for one’s chosen purpose in life (1, 2, 3, 4). The students’ education in these schools may not match the pristine dictates of the core curriculum advocates, but it does match the students’ needs and wants. That’s what capitalism is all about.

And that brings us to the “weird ideas” that core curriculum advocates fear. The problem is that “weird” depends on who you are talking to. Some fear that atheism might be taught to the young. Others fear that it might be religion. Others fear capitalism and the greedy, selfish profit motive being taught. Still others fear communism will become the core curriculum.

And therein lies the heart of the issue. Core curriculum advocates want to control the minds of the young with their particular ideas. They want their ideas to rule. When enforced by the government, however, there is only one name that can be given to the core curriculum: censorship. It forces out or removes to the margin all other ideas. Students’ and the students’ parents do not get to choose.

Let the market decide.

Why the World Is Not Going to Hell in a Basket

One of the unfortunate diseases of older age is the tendency to pessimism or even cynicism. Nostalgia for the good old days is rampant, with complaints about how the young don’t know what we knew at their age and how they are so ill-mannered and unworldly. When generalized to the political and cultural arenas, Armageddon is said to be imminent. For advocates of capitalism and admirers of Ayn Rand, it sometimes becomes a prediction of a new Dark Age.

I wish to take exception to these dire prophecies and venture an alternative scenario. One argument for the coming Dark Age is the analogy that is drawn between the twentieth and third centuries. The third century AD in the Roman Empire was a century of inflation (1, 2, 3); so was the twentieth century in the modern world, including the United States. In the Roman Empire, it was a century of war, chaotic leadership by ineffective emperors, and collapse of cultural institutions. Similar statements are made about the twentieth century of wars, chaos, weak leadership, and cultural collapse. The third century AD paved the way for the barbarians and ultimate collapse of ancient civilization. Obviously, the cynics conclude, we are headed in the same direction.

The decline of ancient Rome is a fascinating topic. I see the beginning of its end occurring about 150 BC, when Greek slaves were brought to Rome to educate the children of aristocrats. These Greek slaves were influenced mostly by the philosophy of Stoicism, the notion of turning away from the material world, and the Romans fell in love with the view. With Stoicism tapping into what apparently was an existing sense of life among Romans, the path was then prepared for Christianity and its turning-away view. By the fourth century AD, Paulinus of Nola, a Roman senator of great wealth and property simply renounced the material world and retreated to an austere, monastic life. In symbolic, if not actual, form ancient civilization sought refuge in the monastery. Turning away from material civilization is not a characteristic of contemporary culture or philosophy.

In the title essay of her book For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand said that Descartes reintroduced the Witch Doctor into modern philosophy, thus setting up an opposition between the material and spiritual that exists to this day. This opposition gave rise to Kant’s subjectivism and the resurgence of mysticism, which, Rand says, will lead to a new Dark Age.

I disagree with this interpretation. Based on conversations with my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, I would say that Descartes made a valiant effort to bring consciousness down to earth—God being the metaphor of consciousness—and the entire modern and contemporary periods in philosophy have been an attempt to integrate consciousness into the material world and to naturalize it. There has not been a complete success, but this notion is at the root of my interpretation of John Dewey’s epistemology and the comment in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 70) that the rejection of intrinsicism in philosophy began “if only as a glimmer” in the late nineteenth century. Philosophy, I conclude, has been progressing, albeit not always in a straight line.

And viewing historical progress as requiring a straight line is surely a prescription for pessimism and cynicism. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215, but it was another six centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the American Bill of Rights came into existence. In between there was the Black Death that wiped out as much as half of Europe’s population and the Hundred Years’ War, among other atrocities, yet the spirit to live and better ideas survived throughout that period to give us the world we have today. My notion of optimism derives from taking a very long view of civilization—centuries long. I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the current presidential administration. I do not expect the current (or previous) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. I see the twentieth and maybe even the twenty-first centuries to be a blip in the progress of civilization. My optimism in no small part is also aided by a commitment to avoid condemning someone merely for espousing ideas with which I disagree.

Good—meaning rational—ideas win out in the long run. The ancient Greeks suffered a Dark Age from about 1200 to 800 BC. When they obtained the Phoenician alphabet and learned to write, they immediately recorded their entire oral tradition, paving the way for the golden age of Greco-Roman civilization. When moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century, every extant written work that could be found was, within a hundred years, published in permanent form, making education of the masses possible. The current century is proving to be the age of digitization, the aim of which is to make every written work in existence available in electronic form. The advantages of this cannot begin to be imagined.

The twentieth century produced two enormously destructive wars, but they did not silence either Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. Their ideas now flourish—not on the front pages of leading newspapers or on nightly newscasts, but they are making their way through our culture. As I frequently tell my daughter, patience is a virtue. I may not in my lifetime see any significant intellectual change in our culture, and my daughter may not see much of a change either. But barring a meteor strike that wipes out ninety-five percent of all living species—and that assumes the destruction of all paper and electronic literature—the will to live will win out and civilization will continue.