David Hicks, Part IV of the Prologue

In one of Miss Mason's six volumes on education, she discusses the books her students read, and then says something about how the list is suggestive, indicating the fashion in which one good book full of ideas makes one think of others, which will only lead to others. In the same way, David Hicks' work gets me ruminating about ideas I've picked up from other writers, which led me to other writers, which led me to others (I have no original thoughts, my brain is simply a grab bag of eclectic shiny objects I picked up, magpie like, from my scattered, unorganized lifetime reading list).
What I love about Cindy's comments on this book, and any topic really, is how tight they are, how cogent and coherent. She drops her bucket in the deepest section of the well and brings up cold, refreshing drafts full of nourishing minerals. For this reason, I have chosen to read section IV of the prologue first, and then write about it before I go read Cindy's cooler, more focused, and no doubt deeper thoughts.

Me, I skim the top in a skiff with a net and periodically get distracted by the damsel flies and other shiny objects flittering about the air, and you have to sift through a seemingly unrelated collection of thoughts. But here I go with my butterfly net:

 Wikipedia offers this working definition of the word normative: "In philosophy, normative statements affirm how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, which actions are right or wrong."

The normative, says David Hicks, is about the *ought to* of life, and it leads to a self-transforming ideal by way of hard work.

Our current mode of education favors what Hicks calls the operational, a utilitarian approach which stops with the question of what 'can' be done and never gets to the ought to.  Indeed, it largely rejects such high standards and the serious personal introspection of the sort calculated to develop that sense of 'ought to.'


 I think this utilitarianism is so widespread and so much a part of our culture- in the air we breathe, even-  that it is difficult for all of us  to recognize it in the first place, or to see the wider implications if we do manage to spot it.

Consider Hicks' example of declining verbal test scores, which we would all agree is a bad thing.  But in most cases, the 'remedies' proposed for this would involve workbook pages and exercises, increased time on the nebulously named 'communication skills'- which might improve the test scores, but do not address the real problem, which Hicks reveals for us.  Declining verbal scores:

not only indicate a failing in communication skills, but a growing inability and unwillingness to think reasonably and to carry on an intelligent dialogue with the past.

Think about that a minute, and see if you get the same sickening sensation I do.  Because do you realize that this means our 'solutions' not only really do not help, but  further entrench the problem and cripple our children?  It's like cutting off the hydra's head, two more grow back for every one you whack off.

 Hercules found the way to defeat the hydra was to cauterize. 

Hicks says our modern schools give the impression that the primary purpose of good communication skills is utilitarian- as a tool for high test scores, and for a good job.

He doesn't point this out explicitly, but one of the flaws in this utilitarian approach is that it may well lead a perspicacious child to conclude that it's a waste of his time- if he has no desire to get good test scores and believes that he is going into a vocation where merely adequate communication skills are  more than good enough, why should he waste his time on these studies?  I have heard adults make similar arguments, after all.

Hicks points out that there is a transcendant value to speaking and writing clearly:

To what extent can man be a sentient, moral creature without the ability to communicate clearly with others and with his culural past?  Can there be true independence of thought without masteryof language?  In what way is man's verbal ineptitude a barrier to his knowledge of himself and of the world and of what lies beyond the reach of his five senses?

Charlotte Mason wrote on this topic as well.  She pointed out that even that most seemingly utilitarian of disciplines, science should not be merely utilitarian, as

"The utility of scientific discoveries does not appeal to the best that is in us, though it makes pretty urgent and general appeal to our lower avidities. But the fault is not in science...- But in our presentation of it by means of facts and figures and demonstrations that mean no more to the general audience than the point demonstrated, never showing the wonder and magnificent reach of the law unfolded."

And in one of her Parents' Review letters to the editor (from 1874), Sir Arthur Quiller Couch is quoted thusly:

A distinguished pedagogue once observed that boys are usually amenable to reason, masters sometimes, parents never. I take it, he had his eye on the modern parent, who imagines technical instruction to be an excellent substitute for education, and that the study of the humanities can be profitably replaced by Sir. Isaac Pitman's Shorthand. Education, which converts 'the small apple-eating urchin, whom we know' into an orderly citizen, respecting himself and his neighbour, is a gradual process not easily tested by examination papers. Technical instruction is far brisker, is quite easily tested, and produces the pleasantest immediate results in the shape of hard cash. The parent fascinated by these cheap advantages, is generally ill to deal with...

This focus on technical instruction over education has been the case for so long that we don't even recognize what it is we have been steeped in or all the other areas where  utilitarianism has seeped through.

David McCullough (author of the wonderful book John Adams) said in his excellent speech on history:

An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers. We’re raising a lot of cut flowers and trying to plant them...

My reading of Hicks here also made me think of Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red, by Harry Kemelman, which I posted about here. Learning, says the Rabbi, is not a spade to dig with, and if he were devising exams, "devise an examination that would indicate interest rather than just information."  As Charlotte Mason said the question to ask in determining the quality of an education is not just how much does the child know, but how much does he care?

And of course, you cannot read Hicks without being reminded of Richard Mitchell, or wishing that other people had read enough of him to be reminded of him, particularly his book The Gift of Fire.  As I wrote here:

One of Mitchell's concern about education as we have it is that it's not really education anymore. It's glorified vocational training. That's the direct fruit of a utilitarian approach to education, and what it produces isn't an education, but schooling. This is the source of the short-sighted, side-stepping question, "When will we ever have to know this stuff?" What we mean is generally, 'Do I need to know this to have a job or to pay my bills?' Schooling is important, and there are many vocational type skills that it is useful to have (keyboarding, arithmetic, basic literacy). But Mitchell suggests there is something more to education:

It is power over the inner world, the ability to know and judge the self and to do something about it. It is not, therefore, the same as whatever it is that gives us power over the outer world, the stubborn public world of Nature and Necessity. The two powers neither preclude each other nor include each other. In any mind, either may exist alone, both may exist, and, of course, in any mind, both may be absent.

The two powers are not exactly equal counterparts, however, for the power over the inner world can make judgment of the power over the outer world. By the latter, we can do something; by the former, we can decide whether we should do what we can do.

And while we seem to have come circle and come back up with can versus ought again, in actuality, we never left.  We have been picking it up and turning it over, examining it from different angles.

And, luckily for y'all, I had a lot more to say, but this post has been cut short (believe it or not), by a biggish grass fire Granny Tea accidentally started next door, and by the news fifteen minutes prior to that, that the Little Boys will be here shortly.=)

For further study, see A Month With Charlotte Mason at Dewey's Treehouse.

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