Elite Education

My own has not been elite, but public state school, except for two years. In the early 1990s I attended the Paideia School in Atlanta for my last two years of high school, and that is very much a feeder school for elite education (although my family could not afford to send me to such). The youth I encountered there were completely different from anyone I had ever known before; the education included exposure to the progenitors of Critical Race Theory, and Critical Theory in general, to alternative religions including Wicca (then a tiny minority, now bigger than Presbyterianism), and of course to intense forms of feminism. 

So I read this essay from Swarthmore with a kind of interest. He is arguing that elite education is, on its own terms, despicable and impermissible. 

Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

Well, indeed: this is what the Marxists (or Hegelians) would call an internal contradiction, the sort that will ultimately force you to evolve to a new plane of understanding. But all of reality is supposed to be like that, if you read Hegel.

He's read Marx, anyway.

On my first day of teaching at Swarthmore I was asked if I would serve as faculty adviser for the Conservative Society. This came as a surprise. I was just about to publish a book called Plato as Critical Theorist, my job talk had been about the ideal of socialism and I had recently voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Did the students know something I didn’t? The answer was yes. They knew that student societies can only exist if they have a faculty adviser, for one thing, but they also knew there was no one else they could ask. The fact that I had written an article called “Why Conservatives Should Read Marx” was sufficient to demonstrate my interest in engaging with conservative ideas and, given the political climate at Swarthmore, that was all they felt they could ask for. “You could give us a critical eye on our activities,” the society’s president wrote, “and help us come up with hard questions for our guest speakers and for ourselves.” I worried about my reputation on campus but decided I couldn’t let the students down.

Good for you. It's a start. 

It's a hard question, though. There really aren't any schools for ordinary people that are even capable of aspiring to the level of education you'd want in whomever you put in charge. There should be; Catholic schools should teach Aquinas and Aristotle, and even Avicenna and Maimonides. They should be able to train you in the modern and Enlightenment theories without committing to them, showing you where they are strong and where they might be weak. 

Ultimately the goal has to be training those few of the ordinary people's children who have both the interest and the aptitude, that they might be raised to the Guardians (as Plato put it -- and in no way endorsing Plato's totalitarian model). The governing system needs to be voluntary, so that no one makes money off of command of others. You have to make your money off of service to others. That's the only moral way, the only way to avoid the corruption that Weber points out is a necessary feature of constant government (see the archives on Weber). 

This is also Aristotle's insight, re: his decision that only the middle class can be trusted with political power because they'll want to politics to the bare minimum so they can get back to earning their living on their private economic activity.

Yet someone ultimately must exercise political power, even if as a volunteer; and they need to be virtuous, and they need to be educated. The elite generally are not virtuous because, for reasons of their class, they live in luxury and ease. Virtue requires practice, and practicing in circumstances of hardship. It cannot be cultivated to a great deal in luxury.

But education requires ease, as Plato and Aristotle note: you cannot sit and study if you must work all the time. The elite thus easily build a surplus of education, but a deficit of virtue as compared to ordinary people.

A strenuous education was Plato's response: put them to hard training, military training, so that they cannot avoid developing the difficult virtues. Yet they will also be subject to education, and provided just enough ease for that. Theodore Roosevelt argues for the strenuous life on similar terms, although he was himself too much an elite to understand how his beloved cowboys were unlikely to have the leisure to grasp Plato at length.

It is a very difficult matter. Some combination of hardship -- war, ideally, if Aristotle is right; training for war at least, if Plato is right -- and leisure has to be made available, and for everyone who shows the potential to understand. Yet the hard work also has to be done; firewood has to be cut, or pipelines run; water must be carried from the river or the well, or plumbing maintained.

We have not reached any kind of ideal. Rule by the educated is enervating because they lack virtue. It is what is killing our society right now. Rule by the virtuous is right and proper, but they also need not to be ignorant of the knowledge that the wise of endless generations have produced. That requires education, of some kind and to some degree.

Pause and reflect on this.