Early liberals, though deeply flawed, fought heroically for freedom of thought and morality. Now these liberties stand under attack and our greatest shortcoming in defense is the very place that should be our security against such a strafe: schools. We are likely under these circumstances because pioneer liberals didn’t consider that social control is just as important as legal institutions in the regulation of our economy and values. I’ve said before that our cultural values increasingly revolve around materialistic economics but what I’d like to add now is that it can be fixed by teaching morality in school.
We don’t understand what it means to be intelligent yet we allot an entire school day in blind pursuit of this socially constructed ambiguity. In fact, the nature and value of intelligence has been misunderstood throughout history by early liberals and scientists alike; we only know that it is a poor driver for a society. Intelligence cannot effectively guide social action the way a moral and free thinking society can. Peter Tait, a British preparatory school headmaster said in a recent article on the topic, “Laudable as it may be to promote the values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, faced with an endemic focus on self and the self-made, both in our society and in our schools, there is an urgent need to dig deeper, to ensure that children first grow up with a proper understanding of right and wrong through a study of morals and ethics.” Evidence of the endemic he describes is found in our parasitic mania for material possessions like iphones and fitbits. If we made a uniform effort to instill in our future ethical values, empathy, and morality, our society might grow to celebrate generosity over wealth.
A compassionate society would drive itself in obvious ways as well as unexpected ones. External pressure guides everything about the way people live: the way people vote, the way they write laws, and the way people of one generation raise their youth who will then repeat the cycle. Imagine a society whose pressures were driven by a sincere and well-examined conscious and who improved with every generation. But students are rarely invited to challenge their values and as such general schooling can be thought of just as in crisis as liberalism.
Only with an education reform can we truly be a society with freedom of thought and action. Introducing a morality class in the general education curriculum will not single handedly free our society, but it is a valuable first step. If only we were all genuinely interested in the greater good of our society, then we could have a conversation about the way to achieve a universally satisfying and mentally stimulating existence.