The Myth of Neutral Education
Schools cannot avoid teaching values, no matter how strongly they claim to remain morally or ideologically neutral.
Out of the great 19th-century liberal revolutions, there was the aspiration that society could forge a new path with the formation of neutral institutions. This was particularly salient in public education, with the creation of non-sectarian public schools. Historically, according to this view, teachers should not shape the moral life of their students’ interiority, but only transmit the fundamental and pertinent information. As a rule, they should present competing perspectives without sectarian, partisan, or ideological preference, and in doing so, cultivate critical thinking without providing moral direction. The belief was held that this type of education would prepare students to make their own judgments free from the influence of inherited values, as well as facilitate a more pluralist society. The early 20th-century educational reformer, John Dewey, built his pedagogical philosophy on this premise: that education should cultivate democratic habits rather than religious or partisan commitments. While this is no doubt an attractive proposition, it is also fundamentally impossible.
If we look into the earliest annals of civilization, even beyond the classical world of Greece and Rome, into Egypt, Babylonia, and Sumer, we see a recurrent theme. Every civilization has understood that the function of education is part and parcel of the formation of character and the selection of virtue. Elements of knowledge are undoubtedly attached to this, but the value, directive, and proper use of that knowledge are part of the educational process. The ancient Greeks spoke of paideia, that is, the cultivation of character through the study of the humanities: through literature, rhetoric, philosophy, and civics. They believed that the study of humanities gave formation to the human soul and informed its constitution. Just the same, the Romans regarded formal education as preparation for comprehensive participation in republican citizenship. Good citizens were informed on matters in the body politic and were able to demonstrate how those issues should be properly considered using their own natural reasoning. While a departure from the classical world, the high civilization of medieval Europe also understood the task of learning as an apprenticeship in “God’s sciences.” They sought to expand the body of knowledge of the world through empirical observation, develop a rightly ordered state of wisdom, and temper knowledge toward the practical concerns of civilizational continuity.
