The Polemics of Education

Abstract

In his book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Wendell Berry describes two poles of how one understands “economy”: (a) “the kind of economy that exists to protect the ‘right’ of profit” and (b) “the kind of economy exists for the protection of gifts.” In this essay I describe a similar polemic in how one understands “education.” I suggest that, correspondingly, there are two kinds of education. There is (a) the education of commodity—the kind of education that seeks to produce persons who will maintain and increase the economy of profit. And there is (b) the education of community—the kind that seeks to foster persons who will maintain and preserve the essential characteristics ofcommunity. From the description of these two polemical views of education, it is clear which of them is the more favorable and sensible.

Introduction

In his marvelously lucid and nobly passionate essay, “Sex,

Economy, Freedom, and Community” Wendell Berry writes,

There are two kinds of human economy. There is the kind

of economy that exists to protect the ‘right’ of profit,

as does our present public economy; this sort of economy

will inevitably gravitate toward protection of the

‘rights’ of those who profit most. Our present public

economy is really a political system that safeguards the

private exploitation of the public wealth and health. The

other kind of economy exists for the protection of gifts,

beginning with the ‘giving in marriage,’ and this is the

economy of community, which now has been nearly destroyed

by the public economy. (Berry, 1993: 138)

What Berry describes in this passage are two poles of how one

understands “economy.” The effect of the description is to expose

which pole a person is drawn to and to thereby align the opposing

forces for battle, just as a magnet will expose and align the

opposing forces in a collection of iron filings. Any given

individual may have some attraction to both poles, but the effect

of being placed within the magnetic field is to show which pole

the individual is most attracted to, and therefore which pole he

will eventually get to. Thus, even for a person who finds himself

in sympathy with both of the economies described, the polemical

description serves to expose the strongest force within him; the

one that will, when faced with a situation that demands a show of

allegiance to one side or the other, expose his true bent.

In this essay, I want to describe a similar polemic, a polemic

of education that shadows—or perhaps foreshadows—Berry’s polemic

of economy. I will investigate the idea that, corresponding to

these two kinds of human economy, there are two kinds of

education. There is the education of commodity, the kind of

education that seeks to produce persons who will maintain and

increase the economy of profit. And then there is the education

of community, the kind that seeks to foster persons who will

maintain and preserve the essential characteristics of community.

Let’s look at each of these kinds of education more closely.

The Education of Commodity

The former sort of education—the kind that seeks to produce

persons who will maintain and increase the economy of profit—will

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inevitably gravitate toward the transmission and dissemination of

information, since information will be seen as a means to profit

and power. Information is the commodity an education provides in

exchange for tuition and taxes collected for the support of

public education. The education of commodity sees the student as

a consumer or a customer, the faculty member as a producer or a

distributor, and the various administrators as salesmen,

advertisers, accountants, retailers, inventory-takers, stockers,

transporters, customer-servicers, quality-controllers, and all

sundry ‘managers,’ including CEO’s. The product is “knowledge”

(i.e., information), and the market is all those who desire power

(“knowledge is power”) and/or profit (“it pays to think”). In

this sort of education—commodious education—it is natural to

speak of the educated as “productive members of society,” and to

measure the success of an educational institution by means of

“outcomes,” “exit interviews,” “placement,” “endowments,” and

“alumni support.” The guiding factor for educational institutions

under this kind of economy—an economy of profit—will be what

prospective consumers or customers (or their so-called parents)

want, rather than what they may need. Indeed, such an economy

maintains that there is no distinction between what is wanted and

what is needed: what was previously a want is now a need, and

what was previously needed is now a mere (and often an esoteric)

want. A primary tenet of this economy is that any commodity, no

matter how unnecessary, can (with persuasive advertisement,

constant repetition, and sex appeal) be made into, first, a want,

and then a need.

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In other words, fashion. Either by setting it or by following

it, the successful commodious educational institution must be in

fashion. It must have “the latest,” which is, so the assumption

goes, also necessarily “the best.” It must also seek to

entertain, for that is how you retain and attract new customers.

Consequently, there must be a continuous effort (and continuous

funding) for new programs, new projects, new innovations, new

equipment, new facilities, new ideas, new methods, and—above all—

new positions, filled with new people. This newness must be

maintained, even when things are the same. An old idea, for

example, must be newly “packaged”; a traditional method must be

“incorporated” into a new methodology; an old building must be

“renovated” (or, at the very least, renamed); there must be a new

“Center for _______ Studies” or a new “Institute for _______

Research” or a new “Center of _______ Excellence.” Implying, of

course, that this is the first or the most excellent time and

place that such studying or researching has happened. We must

have new positions for the same old jobs, and new names and faces

of people in those positions—who nevertheless turn out to be the

same ones we had before. Fashions, of course, often return, but

they return as “new” fashions.

What a student learns from a commodious education, besides the

information it provides, is to erase from his mind the

possibility that there is any other kind of human economy except

an economy of profit. A student learns this by having the lesson

reinforced by the very system or institution he is in—a system or

institution where those who are paid most are taken to be the

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most important; where success is measured solely in quantitative

terms (e.g., how much outside funding did so-and-so raise for the

university, how many and how big were the grants he was awarded,

how many publications does he have, etc.); where honors and

public recognition are given to those who campaign for it, either

openly or by subtler, “friendlier” means; where a positive image

and favorable customer comments are more important than any tried

and true standard. Standards—especially academic ones, which are

less interesting and harder to define in quantitative terms—are

only as valuable as the profit they might bring. (In fact, if you

can convincingly say you’ve got standards without actually having

any, that would be the most profitable.) If a student sees these

things happening in the workings of the very educational system

or institution he is a part of, he will inevitably think less of

the possibility of there being any other kind of human economy.

The habits that he might have formed with a different sort of

education—habits such as thinking through and deliberating about

the possibility of other kinds of human economies, formulating

and clarifying to himself ideals of thought and conduct, making

distinctions between what is and what ought to be, asking whether

and to what extent he is responsible for the way things are:

habits that, when they become second nature, constitute the very

goal of a liberal education—these habits are mercilessly

squelched, if they were ever started to begin with.

In short, commodious education attempts to reduce all judgments

to judgments of quantity; to render students incapable of

qualitative judgment. And it does so both in its form—persons

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incapable of qualitative judgment are most often found in

positions of authority (they have actually been promoted there by

others incapable of qualitative judgment)—and in its content—the

more information, the better. And “the latest” information too;

after all, we live in a fast-paced, ever-changing world. The

“cutting edge” is the best edge—never mind anything away from the

edges. To the commodious, the old, simply because it is old, is

dull and boring.

The worst and most dangerous implication of this kind of

education is that, as in an economy of profit, human beings are

devalued. In commodious education teachers are, in principle,

dispensable, just as factory workers are in an economy of profit.

The most important people are the managers, those who

‘administer’ the business of education. As in any business, these

administers are supposed to do all they can to maintain and

increase as much as possible the profit margin. This entails such

ignoble tasks as advertising (i.e., finding the lowest common

appetite of your prospective customers—children and teenagers, in

the case of education—and tweaking it for all it’s worth),

recruiting (i.e., flattering), fund-raising (begging), finding

tax loopholes (cheating wherever you can get away with it),

haggling for bargains (including bargains in hiring), keeping the

customers happy (lying to them in order to insure that “the

customer is always right”), and, if things start to go bad,

getting out with as much as you can for yourself. Above all,

these people make it clear that administrative positions,

especially their own, are an absolute necessity (which is why

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they—the positions, not the manikins that commonly fill them—are

deserving of categorically higher salaries). These kind of

inhuman administrators will be more numerous and more prominent

in a commodious education.

As for teachers, the administrators of commodious education

know that, practically speaking, the time has not yet come to be

able to do without them, but they—the teachers—are thought to be

inefficient, compared to many of the more technologically

advanced tools we are now employing to transmit information. And

to the extent that teachers are still needed, the administrators

of commodious education will seek to use them in such a way as to

increase profits. In many commodious educational institutions

this means larger classes (e.g., lecture sections with perhaps

several hundred students), lots of low-paid part-time teachers

and graduate student teaching assistants, “distance learning”

(courses offered via satellite, cable, internet, etc.), extensive

use of multi-media, standardized textbooks and curricula, and a

constant mantra of one or more of the following expressions: “You

are not a teacher, you are a facilitator,” “Technology—computers,

the internet, videotapes, television—is just a tool,” “The times

are changing more rapidly than ever before and we must change

with them,” “A paradigm shift is taking place in education,” “The

virtual university is the university of the future.”

These expressions, and the frequency with which they are

bandied about, are indicators of a philosophy of education that

places education’s end squarely in the commode. Such an education

produces neither health nor wealth, only waste, even though it

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may be profitable—to those who promote it. The cost of this

profit to the few is the loss of humanity for all. Just as an

economy of profit inevitably looks upon other persons as mere

means to an end—thereby eliminating the virtues of generosity,

respect, gift-giving, and treating persons as ends in themselves—

commodious education teaches students that persons, too, are mere

tools to be used and managed for profit. This dehumanization is

implicit in the very language of educational administration:

personnel offices are now offices of “Human Resources”;

departments are now “educational units”; students are no longer

taught by teachers, they “access their own learning experiences”

with the help of “facilitators.” Mere tools. No matter the

euphemistic abstractions, they still reduce people to tools.

At many public Universities in the United States, including the

University where I teach, commodious education is the philosophy

of education held to by most of its administrators. Many Deans of

Colleges traditionally antithetical to the idea of commodious

education—Colleges of Arts, Humanities, or Fine Arts—have

swallowed the bait that would, if their faculty follows them,

spell the end of these Colleges. These Deans do not seem to

understand that there is no use for the humanities or for the

arts in a commodious education. Such studies serve no practical

end in a world of profit—they can be flushed. If they can be

salvaged at all, it will only be by turning them into social

sciences (for sciences can be used for profit) or businesses. The

study of literature, for example, could be transformed into a

branch of sociology or political science; the study of art could

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be shaped by its use as a means of advertising; the study of

music might be transformed into a preparation for entering the

entertainment business. These transformations are a reality at

the University and in the College where I teach. So it is not

surprising to find a local Dean of a College of Fine Arts and

Humanities saying,

If we are to succeed in attracting more and better

students this college has to be more entrepreneurial

collectively . . . There is a paradigm shift which is

occurring with increasing speed. This is the shift from

an emphasis from [sic] superior teaching to superior

learning. With the advent of the computer and other

technological milestones, the way we teach students is

changing. We can no longer teach them everything they

need to know. There is simply too much information at

their fingertips. We have to teach them how to access

their own learning experience to be successful teachers.

As if we—Arts and Humanities faculty—could ever teach the

students everything they needed to know: as if what they need to

know is “information”: as if the “success” of both teaching and

learning consists in producing androids that can “access their

own learning experience.” (Can anyone tell me what this means? Is

a computer—or any other ‘technological milestone’—like a bank

account, or a filing cabinet, full of ‘learning experiences’

which we simply have to help students learn how to ‘access’? Does

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it mean we can all quit teaching literature, philosophy, music,

dance, painting, etc. and become equipment operators, perhaps

‘specializing’ in ‘accessing’ websites and video catalogues

devoted to what we used to teach?) If this counts as “successful”

education, then the degrees conferred by this University—and in

the College of Fine Arts and Humanities—are really degrees in

Diddling for Profit and Pleasure. This is apparently how some

commodious educators think we will humanize and cultivate

students.

Nor is it surprising to find the Dean of Continuing Education

at the same local University speaking the same language. In an

article in the local newspaper she writes,

We are in the middle of a paradigm shift. Directly and

indirectly, technology has influenced education for the

better, and all indications are that the trend will

continue. . . .

. . . the ease of access to all sorts of information is

phenomenal. But is it “good” information or “bad”? A new

skill—or really a revised skill—we all need in this age

is the ability to evaluate what we find on the Internet

and determine whether we should believe what we read or

even act on it.1

1 This quote is from the local newspaper where this University is located. Theidentity of the University and its two Deans will remain anonymous, but they actually exist, and the quotations are accurate.

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She does not go on in the article to say anything more about

what this new (or revised) skill that we will all need consists

in, nor how such a skill will be taught. The assumption is that

this skill is currently being taught at her University (and

elsewhere). Clearly, such a skill will be the most important

skill of all in an age where any and all kinds of information is—

almost literally—at our fingertips. But just as clearly,

commodious education is, in principle, opposed to the acquisition

and development of such a skill. Such an evaluative skill

requires standards by which to make proper judgments. If, for

example, we are to judge whether or not the news report we are

reading over the internet is factual or not, we would have to

know what counts as a fact, and also what counts as reliable

reporting. We then are in a position to ask whether or not this

particular report is accurate. This seems to be the primary kind

of evaluation that this Dean of Continuing Education has in mind,

because the rest of the article takes education to consist

mostly, if not completely, in the acquisition of information. But

even this kind of discernment—knowing what to take as factual and

what not—is not advantageous to commodious education, because the

facts might show how unnecessary, costly, and extravagant are

many of the programs, courses, building projects, and

administrative positions that we currently have. In fact, facts

can hurt profits—tarnish images, lower self-esteem, expose

inefficiencies, lead to the elimination of certain positions,

etc. As you might expect, then, this Dean of Continuing

Education, being a proponent of commodious education,

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conspicuously avoids giving any sort of factual accounting for

her claims that “We are in the middle of a paradigm shift” and

that “technology has influenced education for the better.” What

‘facts’ could she give to support such sweeping claims? What

information has she been accessing? And how has she evaluated

this information for its facticity? Having some familiarity with

Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift, I am amazed that she is

able to escape the historical situation she and the rest of us

are in and say with such confidence that we are, indeed, “in the

middle” of such a paradigm shift in education. Either that, or

she’s just repeating the latest buzz. I’ll bet it’s the buzz.

But the evaluation skill must be more than just being able to

tell whether the information ‘accessed’ is factually accurate or

not. A more fundamental ‘skill’ is being able to distinguish

between information and a sales pitch. So called information can

be ‘given’ for a whole host of reasons, very few of which are

simply for the benefit of the one to whom it is given. A

salesman, for example, can give you perfectly accurate

information, but his purpose is to sell you something, usually

something you don’t need. Producing indiscriminate spenders is,

of course, the goal of a commodious education, so the development

of this evaluative skill—distinguishing between good and bad

information on the basis of its intended purpose—is not to be

encouraged. The development of such a ‘skill’ would require that

we ask students to consider questions like “What is the measure

of a good life?”; “Is there an order or a purpose to this life

that would constitute its true fulfillment?”; “What is the value

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of money, possessions, and time compared to the value of a fine

or virtuous soul?” and to seek the answers to such questions with

the fervor that is their proper due. Clearly, the development of

this kind of evaluative skill would be counterproductive to an

economy of profit, and would not be included in the curricula of

commodious education. Thus, as we find in the article written by

the Dean of Commodious Education, she manifests the symptoms of

this unused evaluative skill:

Practically every advertisement, TV commercial or piece

of information about anything has an Internet site where

you can get more information or, for that matter, buy

something. Think of the uses of the Internet for

learning. As a college student in apparel merchandizing,

my daughter went onto the Internet and visited the sites

of the French and Italian couturier houses. It would have

been months before she got access to those collections in

traditional print form.

The connection here between “getting information” and “buying

something” is telling, as is the unquestioned assumption that

apparel merchandizing is an academic subject. (Like many other so

called areas of study, it cannot be found in the university

before about 1950. That is, it only appears in less than two

percent of the history of higher learning since the Greeks. The

figure goes down if you include oriental cultures.) There is

little doubt in anyone’s mind that by far the most common use of

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the internet is not simply to “get information”—not for the sake

of the learner as a human being who by nature (as Aristotle says)

desires to know—but, rather, it is to buy and sell. Everything

from batteries to bombs to babes. The most common internet suffix

is .com. The sites with the most hits invariably have something

to do with sports, or sex, or both. The internet is primarily a

marketplace, not a school. Unless, of course, you think of school

as a kind of marketplace too—a place where we instill the

practices and the ‘skills’ of buying and selling. Commodious

educators serve their cause by making this false identity between

school and marketplace, and making it in such a way as to present

it as something we ought to be cheerful about.

Of a piece with the devaluing of human beings by seeing them as

both users of commodities and as commodities themselves, is the

commodious educator’s speaking of them as objects in general—

complex objects, to be sure, but objects nonetheless. Not only

does this remove all moral and ethical questions from the commode

of education, it also removes the mystery and wonder of what it

means to be human and the joy that can come from contemplating

the beauty of Creation. By considering the human organism an

object, we make it both explainable and usable—explainable by

modern neuro-psychology (or some other variant of the sciences),

and usable by the politically powerful (both within the microcosm

of an educational institution and within the macrocosm of the

public economy). For the commodious educator, this is a source of

optimism: the more science tells us about the human organism, the

quicker and more effectively “we”—those select few who are in the

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know—can use it to complete the educational goal of turning out

“productive citizens” to serve the economy of profit. Once again,

the Dean shows her commodious colors:

Indirectly, technology has helped us understand better

how humans learn. Through technology that scans the brain

in action and other research that is being reported with

greater frequency, scientists have learned how the brain

receives information and then processes it. Using this

information, teachers can more effectively and

efficiently facilitate learning for all sorts and kinds

of students.

Noticeably absent from this effervescent passage are any

specifics that might help us understand it. Any (noncommodiously)

educated reader will want to have certain expressions clarified,

such as “how humans learn.” How they learn what? Which humans

does she have in mind? Another puzzling expression is “the brain

in action.” Is the brain ever inactive? And what, precisely, is the

connection between brain activity and learning? I can think of

many examples of someone whose brain activity might be very high,

but who fail to learn much at all. What do these scientists—the

ones who have “learned how the brain receives information and

then processes it”—what do they take to be the “information” that

the brain receives? And what makes them think that the “brain

processes” they observe constitute “learning”? (Wouldn’t you

already have to know what learning is in order to associate or

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identify a brain process with it?) When they “learned” that this

is what the brain does when someone learns, what “information”

did their brains receive and what “processes” did their brains go

through in order to determine that they were discovering the

secret machinations of “learning”? (Did they learn this, or did

their brains learn it? Or was it cooperative learning? And was it

“brain friendly” learning?) It is hard to imagine a more stunning

piece of nonsense than this passage. Or a clearer indication of

how commodious education wastes the intellect.

As in our current public economy where we have a political

system that safeguards the private exploitation of the public

wealth and health, a commodious education exists to safeguard the

private exploitation of our nation’s greatest wealth and future

health: our youth.

The Education of Community

I now want to move to the other pole: the education of community.

To clarify the coordinates of this pole, it’s perhaps best to

begin with a practical and particular case. At the University

where I teach, as well as in the schools where my children

attend, one of the recent changes in the curriculum has been the

elimination of what we used to call Home Economics, and the

introduction of a new “science”: Family and Consumer Science.

Now, this may seem to be merely a change in nomenclature, but the

truth is that Home Economics has been eliminated from the

curriculum. It is true that many of the same skills that used to

be taught in Home Economics—sewing, cooking, money management,

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child care, and so on—are now taught in Family and Consumer

Science, but what is missing from the “science,” because it is

now a science, are the underlying but invisible attributes that

once made these skills valuable to the home. (The same attributes

that have been eliminated in making sex education a matter of

merely “informing the public” so that we all can practice “safe

sex.”) By teaching these skills as part of learning a “science,”

we necessarily leave out any question or discussion about the

humanizing (or dehumanizing) effect in the practice of these

skills. There is a sense in which they are quite different from

other skills, such as accessing the web or learning to program

your VCR. For the skills associated with home economics have

always been learned and practiced with the aim of serving others

rather than one’s self alone. To view these skills as part of the

practice of a “science” is to ignore or misunderstand their

uniquely human purpose, and to leave out of one’s economy those

invisibles that make it an economy of the home.

But an economy of community—and the home is a community—by

definition includes these invisibles and gives to them their

proper place in the hierarchy of goods. It can easily be seen

that if these invisibles—i.e., the virtues of trust, mutual

respect, diligence, patience, thrift, discipline, forgiveness,

and so on—are included in an economy, they will occupy a higher

place than the material goods with whose management they are

concerned. For example, in an economy that includes thrift, how

money and material goods are managed will be far more important

than how much there is to manage. The spirit of gift-giving will

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be far more important than the gifts themselves. To give an

example of pertinence to those who teach the humanities,

developing a student’s ability to read literature will be more

important than the particular works of literature you read with

them. This is not to say that material possessions, gifts,

certain works of literature, etc. are unimportant, nor that some

are not better than others, but only that their importance as

objects is less than the moral and intellectual virtues by which

they are judged and used.

And there is another aspect to the logic of invisibles that

justifies their high place in any economy that includes them. It

is in the peculiar nature of these invisibles that they can only

increase by their being expended, not by being saved or hoarded.

Aristotle perhaps says it best: the virtues are acquired through

practice. A man becomes courageous by practicing acts of courage.

He becomes just by practicing just actions; kind by practicing

acts of kindness. Aristotle admits that he does not know the

causal connection between the practicing of these virtuous acts

and the acquisition of these virtues—it is not a science of

material or efficient causes—but he does know that there is a

connection, and that it is in the person’s power to choose to

perform these acts. This is why it is possible for us to fail to

become virtuous, and why we are also culpable in this failure.2

The important thing to see here is the way in which these

invisibles grow: they increase by being expended. The more they

are distributed, the more numerous they become and the stronger

they become. They are not “commodities,” for there is no limit to

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them. And if they were commodities, it would make no sense to

compete for them; they would destroy the commodity market by

making it irrelevant. Thus, a commodious education, like an

economy of profit, necessarily excludes these invisibles from its

curriculum. But an education (and an economy) of community

includes in its curriculum both the visibles and the invisibles;

both wisdom and knowledge. It exists to both form and inform. It

is, in a word, humane. This “home economy” is the economy of

community Berry has in mind.

It is ironic—but not unexpected—that the term “community” has

become the political byword of the very people it was intended to

separate out. Commodious educators are, of course, aware of the

rhetorical power of the language of community, and, like full-

blooded profiteers, trumpet their allegiance. I see no way to

prevent this. But it does point out the need for clarification of

the concept of community, so that we can have some way of

distinguishing the Sophists of Education from the philosophers of

education (i.e., those who merely talk about it versus those

whose talk is mimetic of what they also do).

As that last sentence implies, the right place to start is with

Plato’s Socrates. And, since I have also made use of Wendell

Berry’s distinction between two kinds of economy, it is natural

to first look at the different constitutions Socrates discusses

in the Republic. I will start with Socrates’ discussion of the

oligarchy, for it provides a point of departure for the

clarification of “community” and “an education of community.”

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In Book 8 of Republic, Socrates says of the oligarchic

constitution, that “it is the first to admit the greatest of all

evils.” “Which one is that?” asks Adeimantus. And Socrates

replies:

Allowing someone to sell all his possessions and someone

else to buy them and then allowing the one who has sold

them to go on living in the city, while belonging to none

of its parts, for he’s neither a money-maker, a

craftsman, a member of the cavalry, or a hoplite, but a

poor person without any means. . . . this sort of thing

2 See Aristotle (1962), Bk.2, ch.1; Bk.2, ch.4; Bk.3, ch.5.

References

Aristotle (1962) Nicomachean Ethics, Martin Ostwald (trans.). New York: Macmillan.Berry, W. (1993) ‘Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community,’ in Sex, Economy, Freedom &

Community, pp. 117-173. New York: Pantheon Books.Cowper, H.S. (1899) Hawkshead: Its History, Archaeology, Industries, Dialect, Etc.

London: Bemrose and Sons.Lewis, C.S. (1996) The Abolition of Man. New York: Touchstone.Plato (1992) Republic, G.M.A. Grube (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.Plato (1989) Symposium, Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (trans.). Indianapolis:

Hackett.

David RozemaDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Nebraska at KearneyKearney, NE, 68849, USA

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is not forbidden in oligarchies. If it were, some of

their citizens wouldn’t be excessively rich, while others

are totally impoverished. (Plato, 1992: 552a-b)

The context of this passage is a discussion Socrates has with

his young companions about the various types of unjust

constitutions and the various types of unjust souls that

correspond to these constitutions. These unjust constitutions are

discussed in descending order, from the least unjust,

aristocracy, to the most unjust, tyranny. The oligarchic

constitution lies halfway in between, and it is significant that

the oligarchic constitution is the first constitution to be

completely materialistic, for it holds wealth to be the highest

good and the measure of worth for all other things. It is

identical with an economy of profit, and its manifestation in

education is what I have been calling “commodious education.” But

the oligarchic constitution is also “the first to admit” this

“greatest of all evils”: allowing someone to “go on living in the

city, while belonging to none of its parts.”

Now why would Socrates call this “the greatest of all evils”?

First, note that the evil is a composite: it isn’t just that the

oligarchy allows someone to sell all his possessions, nor is it

just that someone else is allowed to buy all these possessions,

and neither is it only that this person without means is then

allowed to go on living in the city. The evil is all of these

things put together. Second, remember that this is the evil of

the oligarchic city, not just a person in the city. This means

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that it is the city as a whole that will suffer from the evil,

not just certain parts of it. Obviously, there will be many

individuals in the city who will have no objection to this

practice: nobody else is forcing them to buy or sell all their

possessions, so they must desire to be either excessively rich

(the buyers) or totally impoverished (the sellers, who then feed

off the public coffers). The question is whether or not the

allowance of such a thing is good for the city as a whole.

Now we can answer this last question in two ways: by

investigating the consequences of allowing this buying, selling,

and then accommodating, or by investigating what a whole (or

wholesome) city is. The former investigation takes it as a

premise that there could be a city in which such a thing is

allowed, and then asks whether or not it would be good to allow it.

The latter investigation premises that such a thing might be

good, but then asks whether or not it would be good for a city. In

either case, the investigation reveals a resounding ‘No!’

Berry gives several examples that illustrate the detrimental

consequences of an oligarchic view of economy. He cites the

destruction of the local wool economy of the parish of Hawkshead

in the Lake District of England, where, due to the introduction

of machinery for looms and for spinning by the large corporate

manufacturers,

idleness took the place of thrift and industry among a

naturally industrious class, for the sons and daughters

of the estatesmen, often too proud to go out to service,

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became useless encumbrances on the estates. . . . The

estates became mortgaged and were sold, and the rich

manufacturers, whose villas are on the margins of

Windermere, have often enough among their servants the

actual descendants of the old estatesmen, whose

manufactures they first usurped and whose estates they

afterwards absorbed. (Cowper, 1899: 209)

This pattern has been duplicated in countless other settings,

from the displacement of laborers in 19th century England that

precipitated the Luddite rebellion, to the economic destruction

of the high-altitude barley fields and grazing pastures of

Ladakh, to the rapid disappearance of family farms in the

midwestern United States. Of the Luddites, Berry says,

These were people who dared to assert that there were

needs and values that justly took precedence over

industrialization; they were people who rejected the

determinism of technological innovation and economic

exploitation. In them, the community attempted to speak

for itself and defend itself. . . The Luddites did, in

fact, revolt not only against their own economic

oppression but also against the poor quality of the

machine that replaced had them. (Berry, 1993: 130)

But let us be clear here. In speaking of the “poor quality of

the machine,” Berry does not mean that a machine might not be

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efficient, accurate, reliable, fast, or powerful. What a machine

lacks is something that lies outside the rhetoric of an economy

of profit: it lacks the care, the deliberation, and the aim that

lies behind the work of a workman. A machine can ponder neither

the value of any product, service, or endeavor, nor the best,

most beneficial means to those ends. And a machine cannot find

joy or fulfillment in excellent and significant work. But an

economy of community places these strictly human values and

abilities at the top of the economic scale. An oligarchic

constitution—i.e., one that follows an economy of profit—does not

even recognize these elements, and thereby prevents the city from

even its own kind of “success”: it is a city divided with itself

and will eventually lead to a war over wealth and possessions.

This might lead us to ask whether or not the allowance of

idling is something we’d find in a true city. That is, would it

truly be a city if it allows such idling? Of course, we can easily

imagine a place where such idling is allowed, and we can see that

such a place would have the appearance of a city. There would be

houses, businesses, hospitals, parks, shopping centers, roads,

schools, governmental offices, a library, and so on. Would this

be enough to make it a city? Geographically, politically,

sociologically, forensically, and nominally, yes. But if a city

is an idea—or, perhaps better, an ideal—what then? Socrates’ words

give us a clue: in a true, ideal city, its citizens recognize

each other as human beings, not as objects to be used for

material gain. In a true city, no one would be allowed to sell

all his possessions, for this would mean depriving another person

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of his right and obligation to become virtuous, and his vocation

and joy in becoming human. Likewise, in a true city no one would

be allowed to buy all the possessions of another because it

tacitly legitimizes treating others as a means to one’s own ends,

and spoiling—literally spoiling—those who are allowed to be idle.

We can at least begin to see, then, that the consequences of

allowing the complete buying and selling of a person’s

possessions will not be good for the city, but will only fill the

coffers of a few at the expense of dehumanizing others. We can

also begin to see that, even if we were to admit that this

allowance might be good for some, it is not good for the whole—

i.e., the city. Such an allowance would disallow us calling the

oligarchy a community, for a person in such a constitution will

not be a subject to be communed with, but rather an object to be

used.

But to prevent the argument from inclining too much towards the

metaphysical, the practical problem is this: the oligarchy is the

first constitution whose continued existence depends on its

leaders—whether they are the parents in the home, the political

leaders of the city or country, the CEO’s of the corporation, or

the teachers and administrators in the schools—teaching and

fostering in their children, citizens, employees and students a

way of life that is contrary to their own. For example, on

university campuses across the nation you will find

representatives from VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and many other

credit companies. Class schedules are printed with dollars

contributed by these companies so that they can advertise their

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easily acquired credit cards to university students. It is

concentrated, deliberate marketing aimed at members of an age

group typically lacking in self-control and having both the new

opportunity to satisfy their sensual and consensual pleasures.

These companies know that many of these students will, if given

the means, spend indiscriminately and lavishly. They promote and

encourage such a way of life. But do the owners and CEO’s of

these companies live this way themselves? We might on first sight

think so, but for all the spending they do, it is all done for

profit more than for pleasure—or, their profit is their pleasure.

Such a businessman cannot continue to be a businessman unless he

simultaneously does these two things: (1) encourage, entice,

persuade or program others to spend indiscriminately and lavishly,

and (2) not live like this himself.

Other examples quickly come to mind, from the politician who

loudly and proudly condemns the shameless self-promotion of his

rival, to the thoroughly modern administrator who constantly

speaks of the need for “quality teachers,” “more efficient

spending,” and “academic standards.” It is ironic that, if the

goal in education were to teach students to be wise and prudent

consumers, the surest sign of success would be their refusal to

pay tuition and taxes for most of the education they are getting.

And how does this oligarchic constitution get instantiated in

the context of education? We might imagine Socrates saying:

“Commodious education is the first to admit the greatest of all

evils inflicted upon children.” “Which one is that?” “Allowing a

student to completely give up his will, thought, and character

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into the hands of someone else and allowing that person to

control him, and then allowing the one who has given them up to

go on attending classes, while contributing nothing to the

shaping of his soul or his community, for he’s neither a student,

a teacher, a citizen, a leader, an honest worker, an artist, nor

a guardian, but a poor person without any means of reflection and

thoughtful action . . . this sort of thing is not forbidden in a

commodious education. If it were, some of its members wouldn’t be

excessively vain and selfish, while others are extremely

credulous and apathetic.”

We cannot honestly deny that commodious education has allowed

the continued presence in our schools of both idle students and

idle “educators.” What conscientious teacher has not been

frustrated by the overwhelming flood of forms and other kinds of

paperwork needed for “assessment,” “tracking,” “strategic

planning,” and so on; or by the irrational belief that the

quality of a teacher cannot be determined by simply watching her

teach? We must, it seems, give the idlers some idling to do so

that they do not appear to be idlers. Non-idling students suffer

from this idling, too. With idlers in the classroom, they suffer

by not being challenged and cared for. Is it any wonder that

tensions are so high in our schools today?

And who profits most from the presence of these idlers in the

educational system? As in the oligarchic constitution, it is the

idlers themselves (supported by the public coffers), and those

who can make money off of them by convincing these idlers that no

real progress can be made in education without them, the

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profiteers. This last group includes both businesses and

commodious educators. The oft-heard cry that the public

educational system is a drain on the country is thus not without

some basis. A commodious educator, by seeing students as

customers, and knowledge as a commodity which he can or must

market and sell, is in the position of having to always entice,

persuade, and attract. There is no concern to actually shape and

develop the student’s mind and character (through intellectual

exercise and discipline, and through passional catharsis) so he

can graduate into a reflective, responsible, and right-spirited

human being, for such a result would be the death-blow to the

commodious educator. Not because he would be out of “customers”

(there is always another young generation), but because it would

mean that the graduate would no longer feel the need for the

educator. The graduate may be grateful to the educator, but he

would no longer be beholden. The “deal” would be terminated,

unless the commodious educator can somehow convince the student

that she needs to come back for more of what only he, the

commodious educator, can offer. This convincing takes many forms—

there is “new information” that is essential, or “new techniques”

that are on the cutting edge, and only the educator can provide

it; the educator is an “expert” and will always remain so; more

attractive facilities, and more entertaining programs; etc.—but

it always proves to be contrary to what many of those same

commodious educators pronounce: that an education is liberating

and humanizing. Thus, the long-term consequence of commodious

education is the gradual dissipation of the heart and the mind.

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It is not an education for freedom, but an education for slavery.

It is the mere appearance of education. Properly speaking, this is

no education at all.

Contrast this with an education that primarily aims at the

development of individuals—human beings—who are thoughtful,

cultivated, and independent. An educator with this aim cannot see

the student as an object, but only as a subject. And, as a

subject, someone like himself, possessed of a will, an intellect,

and a heart, and therefore capable of success or failure. Such an

educator will not see his teaching as a business deal, an

exchange of goods or services from which he seeks to benefit

himself or “society,” but as the privileged task of passing on a

gift to another soul. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, describes

the contrast this way:

Where the old [education] initiated, the new [education]

merely “conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as

grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to

fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper

deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for

purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the

old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to

men: the new is merely propaganda. (Lewis, 1996: 34)

Although Lewis is here speaking primarily of the formation and

transmission of proper passions, the principle applies across the

curriculum. For one of the goals in, say, the sciences is to form

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and transmit orderly and critical thought. Both the mind and the

heart are in need of this formation; but in either case, the end

is not to produce well-built machines or even well-informed

decision-makers, but well-formed souls. Education-as-propagation

can therefore take place only if that education is a

manifestation of practical love.

As Berry points out, practical love begins and is rooted in the

“giving in marriage.” The same kind of trust, commitment, and

mutual care that exists in marriage—or ought to exist in marriage

—is present in any communal relationship. He says:

[T]he fall of community reveals how precious and how

necessary community is. For when community falls, so must

fall all the things that only community life can engender

and protect: the care of the old, the care and education

of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing

down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature

and the lives of wild creatures. . . .And so here, at the

very heart of community life, we find not something to

sell as in the public market, but this momentous giving.

If the community cannot protect this giving, it can

protect nothing—and our time is proving that this is so.

(Berry, 1993: 138)

But

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[M]arriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and

other personal connections do not depend exclusively or

even primarily on justice—though, of course, they all

must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience,

respect, mutual help, forgiveness—in other words, the

practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.

(Berry, 1993: 139)

Included in this list of “personal connections” is also that of

teacher to student. Not that a teacher is to “have feelings” for

all of her students, but rather that teaching is an exercise in

practical love. Commodious education, however, in “liberating”

students and teachers from the principles inherent in community

life (for remember that it allows for deception, conditioning,

propaganda, and indoctrination), has inevitably become a matter

of mere political power. Just as the widespread loss of trust,

patience, respect, and forgiveness has increasingly reduced

marriage to a political institution and made marital disputes

into matters for the courts to decide, we find that public

education has turned down the route of attempting to correct bad

character and low motives by means of pseudo-scientific

“counseling” and simply handing out “information.” We also are

seeing an alarming increase in lawsuits against schools from

parents (and sometimes even from students) claiming that the

schools have not “educated” their children. That this path is no

longer the last, saddest, and least taken resort in trying to

find the fault behind a mean or broken spirit, reveals how far we

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can travel down the wrong path “exploiting and spending the moral

capital built up by centuries of community life.” (Berry, 1993:

142)

So now, with these coordinates clarified, we can better see the

pole we are at. We can see that the second sort of education—the

kind that corresponds to this second kind of economy in seeking

to foster persons who will maintain and preserve the essential

characteristics of community—will inevitably gravitate towards

the practice and personification of proper care: care for one’s

family, friends, neighbors, countrymen—even one’s enemies. In an

education of community, knowledge-as-information will be

subservient to knowledge-as-practice; good character will be even

more important than accurate information; power will be governed

by practical love. What gets taught, and how it gets taught, will

be determined and shaped by the idea that an education—like

friendship, citizenship, or marriage—cannot be bought or sold,

only given and received. Unlike commodities—which have a price,

and are finite and temporary—the elements of an education of

community will be taught and arranged in order of their

universal, infinite, and eternal value; their pricelessness. In

an economy that includes such priceless things, there is no

danger and no fear of these things being inequitably distributed,

because a universally valuable, infinite, and eternal good can

not be diminished by its distribution, even a universal,

infinite, and eternal distribution. And any attempt to make such

priceless goods unavailable to anyone, or to hide them, or to

deny their existence is a confession of the worst sort of

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ignorance: ignorance of even the possibility of love. In an

economy of community, practical love for others is itself the

highest virtue because without it no community is possible, no

matter what other virtues or goods might exist. Thus, in an

education of community, this virtue is the foundation of both the

content and the form of education. Practical love—actions,

principles, and knowledge undertaken, instilled, and taught for

the good of others—is not only the first and foremost idea

taught, it is also the essential form of a true teacher. Unlike

commodious education, an education of community will be one whose

content fits its form: what gets taught will be commensurate with

the character of those who teach it. And it will be those who

care for their students, can ably teach them, and are committed

to doing so—the very ones who would not willingly do anything

else—who will determine what gets taught.

As Socrates says in Plato’s Symposium, love is not itself

divine, but it becomes divine when it is rightly directed and

when it is rightly given: for the good of our fellow man. So it

is in the shaping of this spirit of love—to love what is worthy

of our love and to hate what is worthy of our hate; to desire

what is most desirable and to abhor what is most horrible—that

the humanities and the fine arts can be most affective. (Plato,

1989: 201d-212c) In these arts we are shown the possibilities of

good and evil, even the uneasy mixture of them within an

individual soul or community. But these things are shown in such

a way as to test and to shape our passional responses to them. As

Plato has shown us, the civil war between our reason and our

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appetites will be decided by the disposition of our spirit. The

danger in commodious education, as it is in an economy of profit,

is the shriveling of the spirit. A commodious education produces

spiritless people: “men without chests.” (Lewis, 1996: 35-36)

Only a passionate desire for the good will ensure a victory for

an economy of community. It is that passion, that desire for the

good (and that hatred for evil), that can (and ought to be)

evoked and shaped in the study and practice of the arts and the

humanities. But such practical love can only be taught in an

education of community.

With respect to these two poles, it is time for us to ask

ourselves where we are, and where we ought to be.

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Notes

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