Education and Leadership
By Otto Scott
Conformity stifles thought. That may seem obvious in the abstract, but it is not so obvious in the particular. This is especially true when regarding social patterns which are - as we all know - more than social, since they influence every area of life. Nowhere is this more evident than in education, which is not realizing its expectations in our land, and has been the subject of devastating reports, surveys, test results and disappointments.
Education is, obviously, essential to civilization. Teachers cannot be replaced and must be supported in any society. The American nation has been dedicated to education beyond the limits of any of its predecessors at any time in history. The sums spent on schools, administrators, teachers and pupils, their buildings and equipment, their grounds and comforts, their needs and systems, have been so immense that nobody (and no group) has dared to add them up.
If they did, they would discover that education in this nation is one of our greatest and most influential industries. It has interconnections with architecture; art; utilities; the paper, ink and publishing industries; electronics and vehicles; the slate, petroleum and coal industries; with rugs and metal and/or wooden desks and lockers; with sporting equipment; with manufacturers of musical instruments and stationery; with pension funds and stock exchanges and bond issues; with politicians and colleges; with sports and stadiums; with uniform makers and jewelers; with fashion in clothes and with films, tapes and cassettes; with the dance and the theater; with medicine and pharmaceuticals; with pens, pencils and copy machines; with fast food caterers; with computers and virtually every aspect and sector of American commercial life.
The material and commercial connections of this vast industry, however, far overshadow its attention to its fundamental purpose, which is, at root, to train the future leaders of the nation. Education has always been considered essential in the creation of an elite; a governing class.
Ever since the War of Independence, however, Americans have been encouraged to believe that this nation can function without a governing class. Eventually it was argued that schools would provide our leaders for each generation. That led to the idea that everyone had a right to get into school and, in fact, to achieve everything. A nation of all leaders.
This Utopian ideal, suitable only to philosophy and the library, is unsuitable in this uneven world. God does not distribute His gifts equally.
The task of education is not simply to inculcate, but also to cull. This was once well understood, but grades are now widely suspect. Some professors grade according to race, subservience and ethnic descent. (I hope, as a member of University Professors for Academic Order, [though I am not a university professor], that these statements will not lead to charges that I am anti-professors.)
The high purpose of education has been distorted. This is a serious matter. No society can exist without leaders, and if leaders are chosen by corrupt methods, it means that unqualified men rise to positions of authority. Once that occurs, dread consequences ensue.
Schools have expanded by lowering standards of admission. Berkeley and other famed institutions now openly admit unqualified students for political/social reasons. Inflation is at work in the education industry; diplomas have been cheapened and increased. That means that we now have a new problem: officially qualified incompetents in the professions. That is bad, but that is not all. It also means that a person such as Senator Biden, a public liar and a plagiarist, can rise to a position of national leadership.
It means that a man like Michael Dukakis, who remained a buck private in the U.S. Army and later claimed combat experience he did not possess, could attend post-graduate studies at the San Marcos University in Lima, Peru (a school on a par with the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow), a school only open to dedicated Marxists, without being exposed by a national "investigative" press. The Kansas Intelligencer, 5524 Andersen Avenue, Manhattan, Kansas 66502, Vol. 2, No. 10, Oct 88).
It is obvious, of course, that the education industry cannot be blamed for all the ills of the land. But when schools control virtually all upward mobility, they hold too much power. Young people today can seldom hope to advance without completing college. That situation never before existed in this nation; it has given the educational industry the awesome power to screen our leaders.
That such power was achieved at a time when educational standards have steadily declined is nearly irrational. There has been a blurring of the ideals and even the idea of leadership. No society can consist of nobody but chiefs, not long endure the dilution of real chiefs by the introduction of false chiefs.
Recently an elder in the International Presbyterian Church, London, described the results of such a situation to me with admirable succinctness.
"I was a missionary in Nigeria for thirteen years," he said, "and my observations there convinced me that much of history is unrecorded. For instance, the Mohammedan leaders in Nigeria did not send their sons to the schools that we provided, because they did not believe that true education can be obtained from books.
"The top men, therefore, told the men under them to send their sons - if they chose. They did not, because they agreed with their leaders, and the word passed down the line until, in the end, only the sons of slaves went to our schools.
"These sons of slaves," he continued, "graduated from our schools. And when the time came for England to leave Nigeria these were the men at the top, because they spoke in our terms and we had supported their demands for independence.
"But," he concluded, "all they had was book learning. They did not come from families accustomed to the obligations of leadership."
He did not need to add the rest. Nigeria - one of the richest and most advanced of all the black countries of Africa under the English - fell into corruption and tribal strife almost immediately. Its difficulties expanded into a huge civil war, in which a million people were killed, and many more injured. Even the discovery of oil did not help the unhappy nation. Lagos, its capital, is a city of walking nightmares. Its leaders are eloquent, learned, stately in appearance and inept. Schooling, in other words, did not achieve what the English had hoped in Nigeria.
They had hoped, through schools alone, to educate future leaders. They produced, instead, talkers and demagogues.
They had confused leadership with certain English schools and thought that schools produce leaders. But the great schools of England (when they were great) were not great because of what they taught, so much as great because of whom they taught. They taught boys from families already connected to authority. And alongside these aristocratic sprigs, they taught boys who had excelled in stern competition in towns and villages. That mixture, impure as people are always, produced many leaders.
But not all the leaders. The Scots, Welsh and Irish contributed a very high percentage - ranging from Adam Smith and Lloyd George to Wellington and others. Some leaders came from obscure schools and, in some instances, from virtually no schools.
Then English education changed. The public schools stopped allowing the boys to manage their own associations outside the classrooms and set up the controls of Dr. Thomas Arnold and other Victorian worthies.
This ceiling of super-control in a period of declining faith altered the nature of English leadership and, some say, led to the end of the Empire.
On a lesser but equally interesting scale, one might compare that changed treatment of English boys with the introduction of the Little League, which ended the freedom of American boys to choose and manage their own baseball games, free of adult supervision.
More examples could be cited, but the main point is that schooling has moved progressively farther and deeper into the lives of students, while the authority and influence of families has progressively receded.
One result is that our leadership cadres have been infiltrated by counterfeits. We have created a vast and highly commercialized educational industry that validates all professionals in all areas. This has led to an expanded mediocrity in the professions with a visible concomitant decline in professional ethics.
This decline is now visible in the quality of national leadership in Congress, the courts and the White House. We are, as a nation, in decline.
These are some of the reasons that Christian families are opting out of the educational industry, setting up small Christian schools and tutoring their children themselves. Because governmental statistics are dishonest, we have no means of knowing the actual number of Christian children being so educated. Estimates vary from the high to the modest, but when it comes to people, numbers are outranked by quality.
These Christian families are educating future leaders. They are, as yet, modest in numbers. But each child is emerging with a true, instead of a false, education. The Christian community is on the verge of creating new schools of higher education and, for that matter, post-graduate institutions for Christian adults confronted with the myriad challenges of modern society.
These are schools of leadership, though these dedicated families would not claim such a title. But it is inescapable that those knowledgeable in the Word of God from childhood onward will be able to use Biblical standards as a lens through which to review and assess behavior on all levels, to set goals and to devise methods, to endure and to advance.
There is, therefore, a quiet, nationwide, invisible race underway between the false and the true; the unprincipled and the dedicated. God will decide whether the Christians will develop enough new leaders in time to save this nation from the abyss, or whether these new leaders will emerge only after the debacle that (everyone agrees) lies ahead.
In either event, Christianity will not only endure, but will inherit the future, and real leaders with a true education will replace the credentialed frauds of today.
Conformity stifles thought. That may seem obvious in the abstract, but it is not so obvious in the particular. This is especially true when regarding social patterns which are - as we all know - more than social, since they influence every area of life. Nowhere is this more evident than in education, which is not realizing its expectations in our land, and has been the subject of devastating reports, surveys, test results and disappointments.
Education is, obviously, essential to civilization. Teachers cannot be replaced and must be supported in any society. The American nation has been dedicated to education beyond the limits of any of its predecessors at any time in history. The sums spent on schools, administrators, teachers and pupils, their buildings and equipment, their grounds and comforts, their needs and systems, have been so immense that nobody (and no group) has dared to add them up.
If they did, they would discover that education in this nation is one of our greatest and most influential industries. It has interconnections with architecture; art; utilities; the paper, ink and publishing industries; electronics and vehicles; the slate, petroleum and coal industries; with rugs and metal and/or wooden desks and lockers; with sporting equipment; with manufacturers of musical instruments and stationery; with pension funds and stock exchanges and bond issues; with politicians and colleges; with sports and stadiums; with uniform makers and jewelers; with fashion in clothes and with films, tapes and cassettes; with the dance and the theater; with medicine and pharmaceuticals; with pens, pencils and copy machines; with fast food caterers; with computers and virtually every aspect and sector of American commercial life.
The material and commercial connections of this vast industry, however, far overshadow its attention to its fundamental purpose, which is, at root, to train the future leaders of the nation. Education has always been considered essential in the creation of an elite; a governing class.
Ever since the War of Independence, however, Americans have been encouraged to believe that this nation can function without a governing class. Eventually it was argued that schools would provide our leaders for each generation. That led to the idea that everyone had a right to get into school and, in fact, to achieve everything. A nation of all leaders.
This Utopian ideal, suitable only to philosophy and the library, is unsuitable in this uneven world. God does not distribute His gifts equally.
The task of education is not simply to inculcate, but also to cull. This was once well understood, but grades are now widely suspect. Some professors grade according to race, subservience and ethnic descent. (I hope, as a member of University Professors for Academic Order, [though I am not a university professor], that these statements will not lead to charges that I am anti-professors.)
The high purpose of education has been distorted. This is a serious matter. No society can exist without leaders, and if leaders are chosen by corrupt methods, it means that unqualified men rise to positions of authority. Once that occurs, dread consequences ensue.
Schools have expanded by lowering standards of admission. Berkeley and other famed institutions now openly admit unqualified students for political/social reasons. Inflation is at work in the education industry; diplomas have been cheapened and increased. That means that we now have a new problem: officially qualified incompetents in the professions. That is bad, but that is not all. It also means that a person such as Senator Biden, a public liar and a plagiarist, can rise to a position of national leadership.
It means that a man like Michael Dukakis, who remained a buck private in the U.S. Army and later claimed combat experience he did not possess, could attend post-graduate studies at the San Marcos University in Lima, Peru (a school on a par with the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow), a school only open to dedicated Marxists, without being exposed by a national "investigative" press. The Kansas Intelligencer, 5524 Andersen Avenue, Manhattan, Kansas 66502, Vol. 2, No. 10, Oct 88).
It is obvious, of course, that the education industry cannot be blamed for all the ills of the land. But when schools control virtually all upward mobility, they hold too much power. Young people today can seldom hope to advance without completing college. That situation never before existed in this nation; it has given the educational industry the awesome power to screen our leaders.
That such power was achieved at a time when educational standards have steadily declined is nearly irrational. There has been a blurring of the ideals and even the idea of leadership. No society can consist of nobody but chiefs, not long endure the dilution of real chiefs by the introduction of false chiefs.
Recently an elder in the International Presbyterian Church, London, described the results of such a situation to me with admirable succinctness.
"I was a missionary in Nigeria for thirteen years," he said, "and my observations there convinced me that much of history is unrecorded. For instance, the Mohammedan leaders in Nigeria did not send their sons to the schools that we provided, because they did not believe that true education can be obtained from books.
"The top men, therefore, told the men under them to send their sons - if they chose. They did not, because they agreed with their leaders, and the word passed down the line until, in the end, only the sons of slaves went to our schools.
"These sons of slaves," he continued, "graduated from our schools. And when the time came for England to leave Nigeria these were the men at the top, because they spoke in our terms and we had supported their demands for independence.
"But," he concluded, "all they had was book learning. They did not come from families accustomed to the obligations of leadership."
He did not need to add the rest. Nigeria - one of the richest and most advanced of all the black countries of Africa under the English - fell into corruption and tribal strife almost immediately. Its difficulties expanded into a huge civil war, in which a million people were killed, and many more injured. Even the discovery of oil did not help the unhappy nation. Lagos, its capital, is a city of walking nightmares. Its leaders are eloquent, learned, stately in appearance and inept. Schooling, in other words, did not achieve what the English had hoped in Nigeria.
They had hoped, through schools alone, to educate future leaders. They produced, instead, talkers and demagogues.
They had confused leadership with certain English schools and thought that schools produce leaders. But the great schools of England (when they were great) were not great because of what they taught, so much as great because of whom they taught. They taught boys from families already connected to authority. And alongside these aristocratic sprigs, they taught boys who had excelled in stern competition in towns and villages. That mixture, impure as people are always, produced many leaders.
But not all the leaders. The Scots, Welsh and Irish contributed a very high percentage - ranging from Adam Smith and Lloyd George to Wellington and others. Some leaders came from obscure schools and, in some instances, from virtually no schools.
Then English education changed. The public schools stopped allowing the boys to manage their own associations outside the classrooms and set up the controls of Dr. Thomas Arnold and other Victorian worthies.
This ceiling of super-control in a period of declining faith altered the nature of English leadership and, some say, led to the end of the Empire.
On a lesser but equally interesting scale, one might compare that changed treatment of English boys with the introduction of the Little League, which ended the freedom of American boys to choose and manage their own baseball games, free of adult supervision.
More examples could be cited, but the main point is that schooling has moved progressively farther and deeper into the lives of students, while the authority and influence of families has progressively receded.
One result is that our leadership cadres have been infiltrated by counterfeits. We have created a vast and highly commercialized educational industry that validates all professionals in all areas. This has led to an expanded mediocrity in the professions with a visible concomitant decline in professional ethics.
This decline is now visible in the quality of national leadership in Congress, the courts and the White House. We are, as a nation, in decline.
These are some of the reasons that Christian families are opting out of the educational industry, setting up small Christian schools and tutoring their children themselves. Because governmental statistics are dishonest, we have no means of knowing the actual number of Christian children being so educated. Estimates vary from the high to the modest, but when it comes to people, numbers are outranked by quality.
These Christian families are educating future leaders. They are, as yet, modest in numbers. But each child is emerging with a true, instead of a false, education. The Christian community is on the verge of creating new schools of higher education and, for that matter, post-graduate institutions for Christian adults confronted with the myriad challenges of modern society.
These are schools of leadership, though these dedicated families would not claim such a title. But it is inescapable that those knowledgeable in the Word of God from childhood onward will be able to use Biblical standards as a lens through which to review and assess behavior on all levels, to set goals and to devise methods, to endure and to advance.
There is, therefore, a quiet, nationwide, invisible race underway between the false and the true; the unprincipled and the dedicated. God will decide whether the Christians will develop enough new leaders in time to save this nation from the abyss, or whether these new leaders will emerge only after the debacle that (everyone agrees) lies ahead.
In either event, Christianity will not only endure, but will inherit the future, and real leaders with a true education will replace the credentialed frauds of today.
