Responding to a rise in the rates of chlamydia, the Boston Schools Committee voted unanimously to expand sexual health “counseling” and access to condoms for middle and high school students. The opening line of a local news article titled “Boston Chlamydia Rates Rise While Sex Education Lags Behind” reads:

At a middle school in Boston, eighth graders are learning about sexual curiosity. A teacher asks them about where they learned about sex. The students’ answers: school, home, their partners, at health clinics, TV.

It’s just a hunch, but I’m not optimistic that “home” means a wholesome chat on love, marriage, and one flesh union with mum and dad, but rather a crude joke by an older brother or an evening tryst with one of those 18+ websites. This effectively means that students learn the meaning of sex from sources that advance no moral education, no sense of restraint, duty, or sacredness; only profit, pleasure, and (protected) empowerment. And for some reason, we’re shocked—shocked!—by rising instances of sexually transmitted diseases.

What’s worse, the response only further encourages this behavior: sex “education” doesn’t seek to limit the amount of information children learn about sex, chart a moral way forward, or protect vulnerable adolescents from the decadence of Epicurean modernity. It instructs them on “how to do things properly,” to make sure the “curious” 14-year-old Jack doesn’t get 13-year-old Jill pregnant or infected, never stopping to wonder what’s causing the young and vulnerable to become curious in the first place.

In short, sex ed is making student “sex ready.”  This from the vaunted educational paradise of Massachusetts, where as an 11-year-old I learned all about the intricacies of male and female reproductive organs because somehow it made me “healthy.”commoncore1

Why is this relevant to this article on the Common Core? Because the horrors of sexual education are a case-in-point for what modernity has decided education should be: we are laboring, procreating, industrialized beasts, and we need to be taught how to work (“college-and-career ready”), how to have sex, and how to cause the least amount of physical, psychological, and emotional discomfort to ourselves and to our neighbors. Make money, don’t have children you can’t afford, stop increasing everyone’s health insurance bills, and see the Gross Domestic Product soar! Sex education fills one of those needs, the Common Core fills another.

Good scholars have already done great work here, and I needn’t hash out the importance of a liberal arts education. The work of pointing out the utilitarian nature of Common Core has been done more aptly than I ever could, but I will devote some space to exploring the origins of this phenomenon. For more insight, see these several articles at Crisis Magazine, including contributions from Anthony Esolen, Anne Hendershott, and Gerald V. Bradley. Patrick Deneen delivers his usual cutting analysis and offers a more humane vision of education in a speech delivered at a conference on the Common Core at the University of Notre Dame.

What I aim to show in this piece is simply this: We cannot hope for a meaningful conservation on the topic, especially with those on the left but even to a large extent with those on the right, any more than we should be optimistic for a wholesale, national restoration of the meaning of education. But I am hopeful, because in the modern abyss there is hope for a revival among the “creative minority” who, banding together, can abandon our nihilistic age and unify in pursuit of Truth, starting with education.

Why Our Education Fails


That leaves us in a tough—but in some ways liberating—position. We must first stop pretending that when it comes to education, we even speak the same language as our liberal (broadly speaking) counterparts.

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre makes the compelling case that liberal, pluralistic modernity has made it impossible for communities to have a coherent language of morality. Thus, to understand morality, one must remove himself from the confines of modernity and place himself in the Aristotelian (and, later, Thomistic) tradition of virtue ethics and ethical teleology. Like morality in After Virtue, modernity’s failure to replace Christianity with a coherent moral framework other than tolerance has consequences for education as well. Without any agreement on what we should learn, it’s impossible for communities to actually educate themselves.

What we are left with is a true race to the bottom, a head start to nowhere, as it were. We are left with the common belief that all we share in common is a conception of the summum malum, which we’ve identified as material discomfort, and we can’t agree on anything higher than comfortable self-preservation. This is the essence of the Common Core: we all share in common a materialist conception of human goods, and public education must teach us how to succeed in the pursuit of comfortable happiness.

Education, as defined by Werner Jaeger in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (and here I lean on this article on the topic) is “the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character… The formative influence of the community on its members is most constantly active in its deliberate endeavor to educate each new generation of individuals so as to make them in its own image.” Education not only informs the direction of society, but is perhaps its most honest mirror as well: What we teach is what we as a community agree is most important.

Thus, we reach for the lowest common dominator, as the modern, equalitarian world so often does, and what we are left with is the Common Core, thousands of job-training firms masquerading as schools in neighborhoods across the country, and generations of citizens without a coherent moral education. Perhaps this, more than the unemployment rate, should keep parents up at night.

But in our anti-communal age, we’ve developed two strange and destructive habits of mind that, while seemingly irreconcilable, form the basis of modern liberalism and result in the frequent outburst of soft despotism we’ve come to expect from the State. It’s the liberal dream of squashing any type of higher moral claims in the name of complete tolerance, and the inability to accomplish that goal without enforcing a higher moral claim of its own. Drawing from MacIntyre, the author of the aforementioned article explains:

If a community is defined both by its possession of an authentic self-image involving a definitive conception of the good and a willingness to impose this image upon its members, then we can say that liberal democracy is a community only in spite of itself, a community trying its best not to be a community, with all the atrocious educational distortions that attend such social schizophrenia. Secular pluralism, embodied in its pure ideological form without the authentic communal influences and embodiments that spring up in spite of its hegemony, is an anti-community devoted to the anti-education of its members…. Democratic pluralism fails as a community and therefore as an educational agent due to a lack of any substantive, intelligible realities that correspond to these terms in the community.

What results is a political order that sees in political force the only instrument of social change, the older institutions of civil society destroyed and, in any case, antithetical to the ends of conformist modernity. Thus, we have the centralizing efforts not only in education, but in health care, banking, agriculture, and just about every sphere of life.

Community in a Centralized Age


Of course, little of this is possible in America without the force of the federal government. Sure, for well over a century, states and cities have been moving toward centralized bureaucratic education. Take Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann, who, taking office in 1837, was a leader in the common school movement, which sought to establish free public schools throughout the state under the guidance of the state (for a solid introduction to the public school movement in America, check out this article from Carl L. Bankston III, again from the pages of Modern Age).

But in our current time, despite the ceremonial gestures of school boards and superintendents, the power has been stripped from the local and state authorities and now rests in the mandates of the federal government.

It’s hard to miss in our current educational kerkuffle exactly the type of communal destruction observed so brilliantly by conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet. In the soulless pursuit of universal material equality, the local community, once the most effective institutional system of “mutual aid, welfare, education, recreation, and distribution,” is displaced by the omnicompetent State. Naturally, local authority over education is one of the first ceremonial lambs sacrificed on the altar of Nationalism and Progress.

As Bankston observes:

The real birth of the American public school system as we know it today came after the Civil War, and it had close connections to the Progressive movement. Although Progressivism was a complicated phenomenon, its core feature was the goal of reforming society by political direction, especially through the efforts of the federal government. In Robert Nisbet’s terms, Progressivism aimed at the absorption of the social by the political. Born in the late nineteenth century, the Progressive education movement aimed at using schools to socialize students for the emerging national industrial society. By World War I, public education was both universal and compulsory in the United States.

So the problem we deal with presently is this: Morality and thus education itself has been eroded by modernity’s preoccupation with the material self; communities, which serve as the primary incubator of moral education, have lost their significance and authority; and the State, in its schizophrenic conception of community, has thus taken the reigns of education in pursuit of the universal material satisfaction fit for industrialized society.

These efforts have substantial backers in society-forming innovators such as Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promises to offer all children the chance to live a “healthy and productive” life through its substantial influence on public education. No room for teleology here, I’m afraid.

The Failures of Conservatism


To a large extent, the trend toward the Common Core was inevitable. It’s part of a long process of industrialized society toward producing the best workers. On the other hand, it was surely never going to be halted or even slowed by a conservatism so absorbed with industrialization and the pursuit of economic growth. I’m no Marxist, and I do support the market economy. But conservatives have utterly failed to force a dialogue on what truly matters; and not only politicians, but many public intellectuals as well.

Thus, to an extent, we conservatives are to blame. We, operating necessarily within modern liberalism, have failed to point a way out. We have fallen for the Progressive conceit that the political trumps the social, and that the social is the material. We’ve failed to properly explain to our communities that human flourishing is not achieved through comfortable self-preservation and economic success alone. We’ve failed to make the case for beauty in a world of utility. And thus, if it is true that education reflects the community, what we are left with is “sexuality education” and the Common Core.

Did I Say I Was Optimistic?


I mentioned earlier that there are reasons for hope; that out of our current abyss could emerge a revival of education among what Benedict XVI called the creative minority.  Indeed, this is already happening in so many places. Homeschooling is on the rise; charter schools like the Great Hearts Academy are expanding; classical Christian schools are popping up all over the country. Indeed, opportunities to provide your children a true education are greater now than they have been in some time.

But we must continue to grow. We must first continue to strengthen the family and assert its independence by vocally refusing to take part—either by pulling children out of public schools or at least taking more control of the education of our young. Nothing is more vital to a well-ordered society than the family, and family’s most important end is the education of its youth. We work for preservation, but we preserve ourselves so that we may achieve moral virtue, and for Christians, for salvation.

At the same time, we must brace ourselves. If history is a proper judge, our local institutions may very well come under further assault from the State. We may very well follow Germany and Sweden, just two countries who have recently outlawed homeschooling in favor of nationalist secular indoctrination camps. Modern liberal education may pound on our doors, and the Common Core curriculum may try to force itself into our educational safe havens. If that occurs, we must be prepared to resist.