Remedying the Ills of American Education‪.‬

At BEST THE PRESENT STATE of American education is problematic. The rapid emergence and spread of a techno-secular culture exacerbates the situation; and the hard realities of pluralism and multiculturalism make it more complicating to impose uniform educational standards or to sustain a core-curriculum that is allegiant to humane letters. Principled conservative critiques of the educational system by modern men of letters like Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Richard M. Weaver, and Russell Kirk are largely spurned or outrightly dismissed as irrelevant and impractical by a new generation of educational authorities whose gnostic ideas now go dangerously beyond the progressivist education and empiricism advanced in the thirties and forties by John Dewey. Educational superstructures today answer primarily and passionately to a new morality and a new social order disdainful of concepts and canons anchored in the great tradition of classical and Judeo-Christian civilization, and in the Anglo-American heritage. There a re now fewer and fewer traces of reverence for our sacred patrimony, which makes it far more difficult to return to the ideas of the older educations--"restoring the sacred house of education," in the words of Patrick James Danielson's probing introductory essay. What Babbitt, back in the 1920s, saw as the main and guiding aim of American educational philosophy and practices, that of "training for service and training for power," has become transformed with a vengeance into dogma. The following essays, as well as several of the book reviews, examining the current ills of the American educational system at all levels, have the signal value of demonstrating to us that our escalating educational crisis mirrors the terrorism of ideology, with its obsessive abstractions, promises, schemes, and dreams of unending change and progress and, finally, what Eric Voegelin calls self-immortalization "in a period of massive deculturation through the deformation of reason." Education as the common pursuit of intellectual excellence has been turned on its head as Dewey and his even more radicalizing successors have renounced older educational norms and aims, and have triumphantly replaced them with the materialistic works of modern science and technology as the new "Palaces of Discove ry."