Demodernizing education

What is wrong with education today? It is education designed for people who are deluded about life.

It is possible to make dangerous miss-steps in life. If you do not believe that, you can just stop worrying about needing to know anything, to live safely.

It is possible to be ignorant about essentials. If you do not believe in essentials, there is nothing to worry about.

It is possible to be born and not to live, as what you are. To be born a bird and know nothing about your wings, and drag them around on the ground until they are ruined (Plato). If you are what YOU decide you are, what do you need to learn about your nature? Only YOU know you.

Etc., etc.

Today many people are at risk. You can be at risk as a Christian, if you ignore the message of the Apostles, who said progress requires knowing things (not succumbing to false philosophy but knowing the truth about the world, and how to live in it). Many a Christian imagines that we can skip these issues entirely – thinking pretty much, as it happens, like the liberal – in that (provided you are a believer) your instincts on these questions will serve you perfectly. An education is to get you a job. And so, today, we have disastrous thinking in abundance.

But our tradition tells us that our instincts are not trustworthy: instinct tends to answer with the thinking of the prevailing culture, filtered by a modern outlook that is very relaxed about the concerns that occupied the ancients.