What Education Asks of Us

A recent op-ed by David Brooks, "What Life Asks of Us", offers the opportunity to ask the related question, what does education ask of us? Is education a form of "institutional thinking" to be respected and followed, or a vehicle to enable independent people to break free of institutions? Or, perhaps, is there a useful middle ground to be found somewhere in between?

The NYT op-ed piece by David Brooks (available on the NYT online if you have a subscription; also currently available in the International Herald Tribune online if you don't) was thought-provoking in this context mainly as it relates to a particular way of viewing education: as a form of "institutional thinking" to be respected and followed. The article's intent is to juxtapose one approach to education, typified by a Harvard report which the article describes as follows:

"'The aim of a liberal education,' the report declared, 'is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.'

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values."

In Brooks's view, this is bad. Instead, he proposes an alternative approach: "there is another, older way of living" as described in a recent and "neglected book" by political scientist Hugh Heclo called "On Thinking Institutionally." What typifies this way of living is that "we are defined by what life asks of us" rather than by what we ask of life, and that life is a journey "through institutions - first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft." The rest of the article basically argues why institutions and institutional thinking are good and why ignoring them is bad. His views are clearly intended to reject the "liberal education" approach he describes at the beginning of the article.

These days, ideological commentators like Brooks and their one-eyed lack of perspective just plain annoy me. Maybe it's the form itself with its (yes, institutional) rule about representing a single point of view instead of multiple ones. So this article is useless as an expression of the appropriate focal point.

Unfortunately, Brooks's lack of balance obscures the very thing worth valuing about his perspective: that there are things about institutional thinking worth preserving. Applied to education, one of the great ongoing issues is finding the blend between old and new -- what to keep, what to throw away, what to build anew? This is where the focal point should be, not on some fuzzy rejection of individuals thinking for themselves and other evil spawn of "liberal education."

Letting institutional thinking do our thinking for us is regressive and the easy way out. (Memo to Mr. Brooks: your reading assignment -- Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm -- he had this figured out 50 years ago.) The real task -- constantly negotiating the blend between old and new -- is a lot more difficult and complicated than that. But it's the only way forward.