Avoiding Educational Complacency

Roger Scruton was a remarkable man, and I was reminded of that in Jessica Douglas-Home’s recent article entitled, “The Secret University.” I had heard this story before, but the article tells how Scruton organized an underground university in Czechoslovakia before the Berlin Wall fell. They raised funds to send British scholars to Prague to help teach people the truths that had been suppressed in their communistic educational system. Lectures were primarily focused on the humanities, and they continued right up until the Soviet bloc collapsed. Scruton himself was often detained. Before scholars would attempt to travel to Czechoslovakia, they were briefed on what to do and how to answer the government employees who would attempt to uncover the true purposes of their trips.

I am always tempted to place these kinds of events in the distant past. For reference, I was born in 1991. Scruton founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in 1983 with his wife and three other Oxford scholars. This nonprofit was the funding mechanism for all of their activities. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. The necessity of an underground university is not a ghost from the antiquated past; it was necessary just a few years before I was born.

Complacency is one of our greatest vices. For those of us who live in the United States right now, we thankfully do not need underground universities. People can choose educational alternatives if they do not like the state system, but private schools or even homeschooling are far from underground. You do not need to hide your educational choices from the state in the United States right now. Nobody is busting down the door of your local homeschool co-op.

We all should first be grateful that those things do not happen here. We should also be very aware that education is a very precious thing worth defending. I am very confident that that motivated Scruton to put himself and others in danger when they went behind the Iron Curtain. It was not that he was a thrill-seeker who just wanted to see if he could make something happen. Rather, from what I have read of him in other books, it is clear that he genuinely loved education, and he felt that the Czechoslovakian government had failed in its attempt to educate its citizens. He saw himself as a defender of something good.

We need to be motivated by a similar love of education and not grow complacent. If our institutions fail in their duty to educate future generations, we need to be prepared to call them out. Consider the tragedy of grade inflation at Ivy League universities. In prior generations, in order to earn higher grades, students had to demonstrate that they had mastered the material. Given the higher median grades that we see in many Ivy League institutions, one of two things has happened. Students have gotten an awful lot better at learning, or teachers are hesitant to issue lower grades. Of course, students are students; some are smarter than others. It is hard to imagine that they have all gotten collectively smarter, even in the Ivy League. However, it is not hard to believe that issuing lower grades in our participation trophy culture has become something that professors hesitate to do. A lower grade almost guarantees an email from an upset student asking why they did not earn a higher mark and an argument many professors may not want to multiple times a semester.

If grade inflation exists, students do not need to study as hard to earn their desired higher marks. As they do not study harder, they do not learn the material as well. Because they have not learned the material as well, they are not as prepared for whatever field they will be entering after graduation. This lack of mastery has implications for all fields of study. We now have people who have studied Plato successfully by earning high grades but do not know Plato as well as people who earned the same grades in decades past. Earning that higher grade became easier that ultimately required less learning to achieve.

I am sure that the immediate pushback to this contention is that I am generalizing. There are plenty of brilliant young scholars. That is true. I do not mean to say that every young scholar is unprepared to contribute in his or her field of study. As a young scholar myself, I hope I have something valuable to say sometimes.

However, grade inflation is just one manifestation of a culture that does not value education. Instead, the culture values other things above education.

Consider what happened in Czechoslovakia. The government did not value teaching the liberal arts tradition; they presented an alternative history, ignoring things that challenged the hegemony of communism. I am the product of a few programs that some may believe are similarly sheltered. I studied apologetics. We were concerned with the defense of the Christian faith. Critics might say that that kind of study is exactly what I am criticizing. However, I am proud to say that we did not just read Christian sources. We read David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. We did not hide away from difficult challenges; we engaged with them.

In my doctorate program, I did read Karl Marx, connecting back to Czechoslovakia. We did not just read those who would resonate with our worldview. I am not a communist, to be clear, but that does not mean that I should necessarily run away from Marx. If I want to talk about economic or political theory in any way, I should be informed about conversations taking place in the field, and Marxism is certainly significant.

The underground university in Czechoslovakia was necessary because the government avoided the conversations that needed to happen in a true educational system. They did not value education in and of itself; they valued political power, and the way to maintain political power was to educate the populace in a certain way. Ironically, that kind of education was the denial of true education.

Let us always be vigilant to make sure that our educational system is doing what is good. As I said, we have a great deal of educational freedom in the United States right now. We have alternatives that we can choose from, and we do not have to go underground. You do not have to whisper about sending your child to a private school if it better aligns with your values. That being said, Scruton provides a stark reminder that these kinds of things happened almost within my lifetime. If we think that they are some relic of the distant past, we will grow complacent. If we grow complacent and do not continually defend the importance of a true education based in a liberal arts tradition, future generations will suffer. Even if there is never the necessity to go underground, as shown by Ivy League grade inflation, quality will suffer, and if quality suffers, scholarship will suffer. We have the privilege to pursue knowledge, and we should not let that go lightly.

Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter below!