Your professors told you what?

• Author: Arnn, Larry P.
• Position: Education

THERE IS a PROPER WAY to educate and govern, and they both are known. Today we do these things in a different way, which presents a serious and perhaps fatal problem for our country.

The word "education" comes from a Latin word meaning "to lead forth." If you think about it, "forth" is a value-laden term. Which way is forth? The Bible tells us to "raise up a child in the way he should go," but which way should he go? How does one come to know the answer to that? After almost 14 years as a college president, I am an expert on people between 18 and 22, and I can tell you that if you ask a young person today which way is the right way to go, more often than not he or she will answer: "It depends on which way you want to go." Young people today give that answer because they have been taught to give that answer, but it is the wrong answer, and the activity of getting from there to the right answer--the activity of coming to know which way is the right way--is education. Thus "to lead forth."

At Hillsdale College, students read a lot of old books, including Plato's Republic. In The Republic, they read the story of Gyges' ring--a ring that makes the wearer of it invisible. One of Socrates' interlocutors in The Republic, a young man named Glaucon, raises the question: why would a man in possession of such a ring not use it to do and obtain whatever he wishes? Why would he not use the ring's powers, for instance, to become a tyrant? In response, Socrates turns the discussion to another question: what is the right way for a man to live? What is just by nature and what is unjust? These Socratic questions once were at the center or core of education but, as a whole, these questions have been abandoned by American education.

Let me give you two examples of how the new way of education differs from the old. One concerns the use of the word I just used--"core." A core curriculum--a thing most American colleges and universities have watered down or done away with--is a core group of courses that all students, regardless of their major, are required to take. A true core, as I have described, has a unifying principle, such as the idea that there is a right way to live that one can come to know. Compare that to the use of the same word in describing the latest bright idea of the education establishment--the so-called Common Core--which is an attempt by bureaucrats and politicians to impose national standards on American schools. When one looks into Common...