A Note On The Education Crisis

Nearly everyone agrees that modern education finds itself in disarray. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, over eighty percent of public K–12 teachers believe that education has gotten worse in the last five years.¹ And while there is no consensus on what the greatest problems facing students today are, the problems that top the list according to teachers are “poverty, chronic absenteeism, and depression.”² While I do not intend to diminish the importance of these problems, it is my view that they are merely symptoms of something much deeper: a crisis of purpose. This crisis is intimately connected to our culture’s understanding of what it means to be human. In order to understand it, we first have to gain clarity on, as C. S. Lewis put it, “the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”³

In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman introduces a helpful distinction between mimesis and poiesis, which illustrates how our culture thinks about being human:

Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.⁴

Broadly speaking, Trueman’s book tells the story of how Western culture transitioned from a mimetic to a poietic view of the world. As a result, we moderns tend to think of ourselves and the world as raw material, void of any innate purpose. In a world without innate purpose, human beings become purpose makers.

Writing in the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis anticipated and warned against the consequences of viewing the world and ourselves as raw material. In the opening chapters of Brave New World, Huxley imagines a future in which poiesis has finally triumphed over mimesis. Huxley frames the early part of the narrative in such a way that the reader follows along with a group of tourists led by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. In Huxley’s World State, we learn that human beings are no longer born but grown in a lab. Moreover, children are trained, not by families, for those have been abolished, but by sinister conditioning practices. As Mr. Foster triumphantly informs the tour group,

[This] brings us at last . . . out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.⁵

Notice Huxley’s careful choice of words here. Not only does this passage nicely parallel Trueman’s contrast between mimesis (imitation) and poiesis (human invention), but by describing imitation as “slavish” he establishes a tone of disdain that the World State has for the kind of stable and static reality with which human beings ought to participate in order to flourish. In such a world, technology has been employed, not to participate with the given moral structure of nature, but rather to exercise control over nature in order to manipulate her into whichever shape the controllers happen to desire. This nightmarish society is consistent with the kind of world that Lewis imagines in the final pages of The Abolition of Man where society would finally be organized into an elite class of controllers and those who would eventually be genetically controlled. These creatures, once blind to humanity’s ethical inheritance, would tragically pass on their moral blindness to the next generation making the abolition complete. As Lewis puts it, this is “the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”⁶ Michael Ward’s commentary on this section of the Abolition of Man also parallels Huxley’s Brave New World and, by extension, our own:

We no longer find the solution to the problems of life in “knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue,” but increasingly in willpower, technological control, and surgical alteration of nature to suit our own convenience.⁷

If we moderns have not yet fulfilled Lewis’s and Huxley’s disturbing prophecies, we are at least eighty years further down the road that leads to “post-humanity,” making their warnings more pressing to the modern ear than ever before.

I have suggested above that the crisis of purpose facing education today is closely tied to how our culture thinks about human nature. At this point it should be clearer that what Lewis calls “post-humanity,” Huxley describes as “human invention,” and Trueman refers to as “poiesis” are all expressions of our culture’s embrace of subjective moral value. But how has this understanding of human nature shaped modern education? To answer this question, we need to consider the ideas of the philosopher and social critic John Dewey (1859–1952). Although Dewey’s writings on education are vast, one of his most influential books on the subject is a thin volume titled, Experience and Education. Having worked as a public high school teacher in the United States for the last six years, it is my view that the ideas Dewey expresses in this book have become the basic intuitions of most K–12 educators and directly contribute to the crisis in education today.⁸

In an important passage of Experience and Education, Dewey defines education as “of, by, and for experience.”⁹ One striking feature of this definition is Dewey’s peculiar choice of words. Aside from the rhetorical benefit of borrowing the phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s description of a government “of, by, and for” the people, Dewey’s choice of prepositions also suggests an answer to three separate questions about education: (1) What does it consist of?, (2) Who is it made by?, and (3) What is it for? His answer to all three questions is summarized by one word: experience.

No one could doubt that this definition is concise. But is it clear? To help explain what Dewey means by this definition and why he places such an emphasis on experience in his philosophy it is important to observe that he describes himself as an empiricist which places him in a tradition going back to Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and David Hume.¹⁰ To understand how Dewey has shaped modern education, we have to understand him in the context of that tradition. Here a digression on the history of Western philosophy is in order.

The central question that empiricists of the Enlightenment were trying to answer is: Where do our ideas come from? John Locke’s approach to this question is that people are not born with any “innate ideas.” Rather, the human mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate), and all that we know begins with experience. When we have experiences through our five senses, these sensations create impressions in our minds; we reflect on these impressions and begin to form ideas. Now this may sound like the pointless ramblings of philosophers. Why does it matter where ideas come from? On the contrary, the empiricist approach to knowledge has profound consequences which continue to impact our world and our understanding of education today. Although Locke was a theist and a member of the Church of England, one of the consequences of his ideas was that it became plausible to believe in a materialist picture of the world—that is, all there is in the world, including human beings, consists only of matter.

But some thinkers of the time saw a problem with this view. Materialism offers an account of the world that leaves out two essential truths: (1) that things have innate natures, and (2) that things have innate purposes. This may seem complex, but an example will help bring clarity. Imagine walking in a city park and finding an acorn under a tree. You decide to put the acorn in your pocket, bring it back home, and plant it in your garden. Provided the conditions are suitable for growth, the acorn will germinate and grow into a tree. When you planted the acorn you probably never wondered what kind of tree was going to grow in your garden. You would likely have a nasty shock to discover that an elm or a spruce had begun to grow instead of an oak. Why would you have been surprised? It is because things have innate natures and innate purposes and you have known these facts most of your life. It is not in the nature of an acorn to become an elm or a pine, but only an oak. And an acorn is only an excellent acorn if it fulfills its innate acorny purpose. We might even say that the acorn was an unnatural and villainous acorn if he decided to transcend his nature by becoming a skyscraper instead.

These basic assumptions about the nature and purpose of acorns and oak trees are part of a wider way of looking at the world that has been known since the time of Aristotle as “the four causes.”¹¹ But what are these causes, and what wider way of looking at the world do they suggest? In The Lost Seeds of Learning, literary scholar Phillip Donnelly offers an account of the causes that is helpful and concise:

In very basic terms, the causes include (1) the material cause, or the matter of which something consists; (2) the final cause, or the purpose of a thing; (3) the efficient cause(s), or the agent(s) that bring it into being; and (4) the formal cause, or the order given to the matter.¹²

While the technical names of these causes can sound daunting, the realities they signify are simple and intuitive. The four causes are simply ways to give an account of something. In order to provide an account using the four causes, Donnelly suggests asking the following four questions: (1) What is it made into? (formal cause), (2) What is it made of? (material cause), (3) Who is it made by? (efficient cause), and (4) What is it made for? (final cause).¹³ To illustrate how this works, we can use the four causes to give an account of a tennis ball. To begin, what is it made into? Formal cause refers to the order or essence of a thing. In the case of a physical object like a tennis ball, we could say that the order or shape of the ball is spherical. Now, what is it made of? The answer is of course, rubber and yellow felt. Next, who is it made by? Who gave order to the material? Maybe if this was a medieval (real) tennis ball it would have been handcrafted by an enthusiastic priest or university student; or, in the case of the tennis balls scattered around my house, the Penn Racquet Sports, Inc. assembly line. Lastly, what is it made for? One answer is obviously, to play; that is, to enjoy the game of tennis.

Having discussed the four causes at some length, we need to understand that it was part of the Enlightenment project to abolish formal and final causality leaving only efficient and material causes to give an account of the world.¹⁴ While the history of this abolition of two of the four causes is fascinating, for the scope of the present essay we need only observe that one motivation for doing away with formal and final causes is that the Baconian/materialist view of the world requires it.¹⁵ If you believe that the universe is only material, then the discovery that things exhibited innate purposes would shatter your entire world view and you would have to adopt something like the Aristotelian/metaphysical picture of the world. Nonetheless, once the Enlightenment project banished these two causes, it became plausible to believe that all that remained in the world was raw material and human beings who could manipulate it into whatever shape they happened to desire by means of the scientific method and technology. Is this not the dystopian world described by Lewis, Huxley, and Trueman? Is this not our world?

Now that we have gained clarity on the Enlightenment’s project, we can return to Dewey’s peculiar definition of education as “of, by, and for experience.” When considering Dewey’s definition, one question that comes to mind is: If the purpose of education is that the learners have experiences, then what kind of experiences should they be having? What if one of our children wants to be a professional bank robber or car thief? Those are experiences just as much as it is an experience to be a branch manager or mechanic, and I could conceivably argue that my experiences of bank robbery thrill me and encourage me to continue my career by becoming a glamorous grifter like George Clooney in the Ocean’s films. According to Dewey’s definition, this would be a legitimately educational experience because it would promote and not discourage my having further experiences.¹⁶ As Jean-Paul Sartre provocatively put it: “Since God does not exist and we all must die, everything is permissible. One experience is as good as another, so what matters is simply to acquire as many of them as possible.”¹⁷

At this point, the crisis of purpose facing education that I alluded to above should now be clear. Given our culture’s morally subjective and materialist view of human nature, education is left without innate purpose. The only purposes that remain education are whatever teachers and learners happen to desire. Our children have been taught implicitly through popular entertainment and explicitly in school that they have to become, as Nietzsche put it, “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”¹⁸ If this crisis does not help explain poverty, it at least offers one account for why so many students are depressed and chronically absent from school as the Pew Research Center has reported.

If this account is correct, as I believe it is, then the problems facing education today are far worse than most people tend to imagine. But I have not written this note merely to indulge in despair. Although my perspective is possibly more pessimistic than most, I am not convinced that our situation is hopeless. If we are to find our way again, then we must begin to consider the past, not as a cave of darkness, but as a well of wisdom. We find ourselves in the paradoxical position in which the only way forward is to look backwards. Just as in the time of the Reformation, ad fontes [back to the source!] must once again be our guiding star. But which source should we draw from to regain our health? One that suggests itself is the Christian liberal arts tradition. At the heart of this tradition is a view of the world which recognizes and embraces all of the four causes rather than just two of them. This tradition is the source from which we ought to draw deeply if education is to be anything more than mere conditioning in the years that lie ahead. To this end, I want to conclude by offering a brief account of the Christian liberal arts tradition by answering Donnelly’s questions on the four causes.

What is it made into?

In the Christian liberal arts tradition, education begins in the home when parents faithfully train the hearts of their children to love what is truly beautiful. When children behold wisdom, virtue, and beauty from their earliest days, they will recognize and embrace these realities as they grow. After this critical training of the affections to love what they ought, children are able to begin studying the seven classical liberal arts. These arts consist of the three verbal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the four mathematical arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). To teach students these arts is not the same as teaching them subjects; but rather, as Dorothy Sayers argued, students are taught “the art of learning” itself.¹⁹ Once students have learned the art of learning, they are prepared to learn particular subjects. What are these subjects? This brings us to the next question.

What is it made of?

What kind of things should we be studying in school? The Christian liberal arts tradition prepares students to study universal knowledge of all subjects, but it also distinguishes between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge based inquiry can teach students how to discover facts about particular domains of knowledge like history, math, and science. But wisdom is concerned with how all the things we know fit together in a way that illumines the innate purpose of human life. Therefore, after gaining mastery of the seven liberal arts, the study of philosophy and theology are central to a classical Christian education. Although the Christian liberal arts tradition embraces a university of knowledge, it also recognizes a canon of worthy content. This is not to say that the canon is closed like the canon of Scripture—rather, as Robert Maynard Hutchens (1899–1977) argued, “In the course of history, from epoch to epoch, new books have been written that have won their place in the list . . . and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write.”²⁰

Who is it made by?

The agents of education are the teachers, the learners, and the relationship they share. One of the best images of this relationship is found in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It will be especially important for those in the classical Christian renewal to engage with this poem today since it is also the perfect allegory of education. The poem begins: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” (Inf. 1.1–2). Anthony Esolen renders these lines: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wilderness.”²¹ There are two important things to notice here. Dante has called our life “a journey” which implies a destination. Thus, embedded within the first line of what is probably the truest poem ever written is the idea of the innate purpose of human life. Secondly, the “selva oscura” [dark wilderness] is a fitting image of the moral climate in which K–12 students find themselves today: impoverished, vacant, and hauntingly depressed, having lost their way. Into this terrifying place steps the ancient poet Virgil. In Virgil, we see the ideal example of the loving and wise teacher who says to Dante: “A te convien tenere altro vïaggio” [It is another journey you must take].²² Unlike most modern educators, Virgil knows where his student needs to go in order to flourish and he will not fail to lead him to his journey’s proper end. As he says to Dante:

And so I judge it would be best for you
to follow me, and I will be your guide,
leading you out through an eternal place²³

What is it made for?

So what is the proper end of human life? As we have been exploring, we have to affirm that it is discovered and not created by us. The purpose of human life is, as Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 1 puts it, “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” To restore education, we must rediscover this truth of what it means to be human beings created in God’s image and an education that participates with God’s design.

Notes

Luona Lin, Kim Parker, and Juliana M. Horowitz, “What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?”, Pew Research Center, April 4, 2024.
Lin, Parker, and Horowitz, “What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?”
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (repr., HarperOne, 2001), 18.
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020), 39.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (HarperCollins, 2006), 13.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperOne, 2015), 75.
Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 16.
It is beyond the scope of the present essay to offer an account of how the ideas of elite philosophers become the common assumptions of people like you and me. For a helpful treatment of this question, see Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), 26–29.
John Dewey, Experience and Education (repr., Free Press, 2015), 29.
Dewey, Experience and Education, 31.
Phillip Donnelly observes: “Although these four causes are traditionally called ‘Aristotelian,’ they are called by that name only because Aristotle most famously arranged, clarified, and formulated them. He was not the first to articulate them. . . . However, while they do not originate with Aristotle, his discussion of the causes in the Physics and the Metaphysics extends and clarifies earlier reflection on the topic.” Phillip J. Donnelly, The Lost Seeds of Learning: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric as Life-giving Arts (Classical Academic Press, 2021), 67.
Donnelly, The Lost Seeds of Learning, 43.
Donnelly, The Lost Seeds of Learning, 68–73.
For a robust and highly readable analysis of this history, I would direct the reader to the work of the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2010).
Charles Taylor argues that one of the things that motivated Locke was his rejection of “innateness”: “In rejecting innateness, Locke is also giving vent to his profoundly anti-teleological view of human nature, of both knowledge and morality.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), 164–65.
Dewey, Experience and Education, 37–38.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Commentary on The Stranger,” in Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (Yale University Press, 2007), 78.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1974), 266. First published in German in 1887.
Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (Methuen, 1948), 7.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation, vol. 1, Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952). xi. To discover this canon, the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopedia Britannica, is a good place to start.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Anthony Esolen (Modern Library, 2002), 1.1–2.
Alighieri, Inferno, 1.91.
Alighieri, Inferno, 1.112–14.

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Post authored by:

Joseph DeChristopher
Joseph DeChristopher is a high school English teacher. He lives in Oregon with his wife Elsa and their children Carlo and Maria. They are members of the United Reformed Churches in North America.
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