Education as a Social Problem: Why It Can’t Cure Our Ills

Abstract

THERE IS NOTHING NOVEL ABOUT THE IDEA THAT EDUCATION CULTIVATES citizens. Theorists from Aristotle to Montesquieu have argued that good citizens are made, not born, and that the making of good citizens involves the cultivation of virtue. For the latter, such education for virtue took place, at least in monarchies, not through schools but through accepted codes of social behavior: models of behavior that elevate others who witness them, and codes or mores, unspoken and unwritten, which stir the strings of action. The social promotion of desirable action is accomplished through paradigmatic imitation, the formation of social roles that determine only if individuals play them well, not whether these individuals have been “authentic” or sufficiently self-willing. The aristocracy, with the monarchy at its pinnacle, re-presents to the public a set of virtues that ennoble the public simply through such presentation, regally cloaking their highest aspirations.