Saturday’s Wall Street Journal is always a treat: great features and bizarre opinions. Last Saturday, Peggy Noonan departed from her weekly diatribes against President Obama to make the new discovery that it was not enough for Republicans to attack the Democrats. The Republicans had to stand for something. Incredibly, she stopped there leaving me with the impression that she has no clue what positive message could unify the divided Republicans. On the other hand, Donald Kagan put forward an education policy that could unify Republicans, but that policy is indefensible.
It is not all wrong, however. Kagan argues that an education should be designed not just for instrumental purposes, but to produce a virtuous people and good citizens. He rejects the idea of a value free education. In my view, as I have argued in prior writing, the notion of a value free education was always bankrupt, if not oxymoronic. Teachers are always role models; they model behavior; and in enforcing classroom rules, they instill views of how people with good character behave. Think also of sports coaches in schools across the country. There is nothing value free about what they do.
Kagan also rightly agrees with Jefferson who thought the purpose of education was to communicate the special virtues of republican representative democracy (including equality), the dangers that threatened it, and the responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. Although Kagan does not mention it, Jefferson thought that it was the responsibility of citizens to criticize the country if it did not live up to the virtues of representative democracy even to the point of revolution.
This failure allows Kagan to take some firm steps into outer darkness. He argues that it is the responsibility of education to teach its student to be patriotic, meaning to love, support, and defend the country. Obviously there is a difference between cultivating an appreciation for a sense of justice, and insisting on loving and defending a country – even if it becomes unjust. Of course, American will have deep ties to their country regardless of what is taught in the schools. The tendency already is for Americans to be deeply chauvinistic. But citizens should be taught to love justice and that their love of country needs to be earned by a polity that strives to live up to the virtues of a representative democracy. There is no moral responsibility to support injustice.
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