Lasch Unleashed: On Education
The following thoughts were initially prepared after reading [at the prompting of a friend] this article on historian and author Christopher Lasch: Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch, by Jason Peters - August 28, 2020, Front Porch Republic
I subsequently looked for a copy of Lasch’s last book which, I was told, he found the time to finish by deferring urgent cancer therapy. His choice resulted in his death from the cancer soon after his work on the book was finished. I thought I wanted to read a book that was more important to its author than modern science’s latest life-enhancing therapy, and so I looked for it … in vain.
Finally, the local Wichita public library found a loaner copy for me in the White Library at Emporia State University which [according to the “Due Date” slip] was checked out only 4 times … 1995 [the year it was published], 1997 [twice] and 2001. And so, during an October snow storm with green grass on the ground and green leaves in the trees all covered with snow and ice, I settled in to read what few apparently had … Lasch’s last thoughts.
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy [TROTE] was a revised [I think] and edited collection of Lasch’s writings over the years which begins with this line
“Most of my recent work comes back in one way or another to the question of whether democracy has a future.”
… and ends with this one
“But now that we are beginning to grasp the limits of our control over the natural world, [mastery] is an illusion - to invoke Freud once again - the future of which is very much in doubt, an illusion more problematical, certainly, than the future of religion.”
The book is immense in scope but focused [even repetitive] in theme. It is timely and timeless, critical and affirming, repressive and liberating, complex and common. It is worth having for its bibliography alone, even if you never read it. I hope you encounter it soon.
Education is a recurrent theme throughout TROTE. Chap 4 presents a wide-ranging discussion of why Horace Mann's vision [in 1840-1850] for public education [which was generally implemented] has been followed by [if not actually producing] the very sociological curses which Mann feared would fall on American democracy if it failed to implement his vision … including “violence, misrule, licentiousness, debauchery, political profligacy and legalized perfidy [breach of trust].”
“[Horace Mann] would be horrified ... with our educational system as it exists today [1995].
We have professionalized teaching by setting up elaborate requirements for certification, but we have not succeeded in institutionalizing Mann's appreciation of teaching as an honorable calling.
We have set up a far-ranging educational bureaucracy without raising academic standards or improving the quality of teaching. The bureaucratization of education has ... substituted the judgment of administrators for that of teachers ... incidentally discouraging people with a gift for teaching from entering the profession at all.
The periodic rediscovery that intellectual training has been sacrificed to "social skills" has led to a misplaced emphasis on the purely cognitive dimension of education, which lacks even Mann's redeeming awareness of its moral dimension.
If there is one lesson we might have been expected to learn in the 150 years since Mann ... it is that the schools can't save society. ... Meanwhile, our children, even as young adults, don’t know how to read and write. Maybe the time has come - if it hasn't already passed - to start all over again." TROTE, Chap 8: The Common Schools
In the chapter Lasch presents “education” as just another chapter in “life” which, although it occurs in the school instead of on the street, is subject to same tension between:
1. our understanding of ecology [nature] revealed in the interplay of
a. debatable standards of religion/morality/belief which impersonally differentiate and socially segregate us with
b. common dialogue via cognition/intellect/reason which personally equalize and socially integrate us and
2. our practice of economy [the state] revealed in the form of
a. unequal capacities/capabilities for achieving comfort and convenience which personally divide us into classes which
b. common markets nevertheless conjoin complementarily [even if exploitatively] but impersonally.
The controversy is over which approach [1a, 1b, 2a, 2b] prevails when.
The extreme positions are 1a and 2b.
The moderate positions are 1b and 2a.
Mann preferred 1b in schools to achieve the personally equalized social integration [aka democracy] which he believed people need to flourish.
In 2b life generally, the money not the individual is the basis for equality.
In TROTE, Lasch generally argues that
“The elites” abandoned their progenitors’ pursuit of 1b in favor of 2b [what Mann called the replacement of morality with materialism] while simultaneously dismissing 1a as irrelevant/unhelpful and 2a as inevitable.
But that without 1a, 1b stands alone and becomes meaningless and unusable, since “it is debate alone that gives rise to the desire for usable information [which permits us to] master the knowledge that makes us capable citizens”.
This is a Lasch paradox that embracing our differences enhances our strength as people [demos-kratos = people-power].
And finally, the unconditional embrace of 2b causes 2a to become increasingly exaggerated in the form of income and wealth inequality which leads to social collapse in what Mann called “the revenge of poverty.”
For Lasch, we must embrace both 1a and 1b simultaneously … in our schools and in our lives … so that we are collectively willing and able to moderate the inevitably detrimental effects of growing 2a inequality in a will otherwise run solely on 2b.
What Lasch seems to imply is that the failure of Mann’s model of education led the elites to revolt. And although his TROTE chapter on “The Common Schools” is organized as a criticism of Mann and not a coherent statement of his own thoughts on education, we might infer that Lasch would agree that
The institutional “bureaucratization” of education [ie. its formal, monopolistic [1] and public segregation from the rest of life including the family, the street/neighborhood and even the market] disturbed the wider natural “ecology of education” setting in motion multiple causes of deteriorating effects.
The simultaneous pedagogical embrace of 1b AND the exclusion of 1a eventually starved 1b of the very source of its energy and vitality … dooming democracy.
It was the starvation of 1b that led to the revolt of the elites who, still seeking meaning, turned to 2b [as noted above] as the only game in town setting in motion the exaggeration of the destructive 2a forces unabated by either 1a or 1b.
With 2a exaggeration set in motion, Mann’s prophesied “revenge of poverty” became inevitable but would take place in a society without the social stamina or skills of 1a or 1b … leading to civil violence, totalitarian suppression and collapse.
Although there is more that could and should be said … both about Lasch’s view of education and about the forces at work in this sociological tale, I hope this attempt to simplify Lasch’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion of education is helpful in framing some issue for further discussion.
Bob Love