Training Minds and Hearts: Principle-Centered Education Reform

A lecture by Steve Forbes at Hillsdale College (Feb. 1999):

At the heart of the American experiment is the belief that no matter how ordinary we human beings may be, we are able to accomplish extraordinary deeds when we take responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities.

How do we learn to take responsibility? One vital way is through the education we receive as children and young adults. Education enables us not only to gain knowledge but also to develop sound character, to discover our God-given talents, to lead honorable lives, to become truly good parents, neighbors, and citizens.

For several years I attended a boy’s school—a politically incorrect form of education if there ever was one. The headmaster, Frank Ashburn, was fond of quoting the Bible verse, “The bond are free, and the free are bond.” He told us that “bond” meant “bound” and that the message of the verse was this: When you develop discipline, you become a free person. If you don’t develop it, you will suffer a blighted, narrow, and constricted life. He explained further,

You might say that a boy was free who never had to do any learning at all. But he would be free as an animal tied to a stake is free. He would be free in the sense that he would have more time on his hands, but he would be limited by his own experience and culture.

You cannot read or write without the bondage of having learned to read and write. You cannot play football without giving time and energy to practice.

Mr. Ashburn went on to tell us,

What is training? Training is preparing oneself to be able to do what one can’t count on having to do. In a football game, training is the thing that keeps one’s muscle from giving when the unexpected strain is applied, which means that little extra bit of wind when everyone’s wind is gone. Training of the mind is that which enables one to handle not the problem that we have been over—most of us can do that—but the problem we have never met before. Training of the heart is that kind of conditioning that makes one steady when he is sick in fear, or bewildered by strangeness, or hurt and bruised in the mind.

He noted that there were four main fields of study that ought to comprise the core of any school curriculum. The first is communication, or literature; the second is the physical world, or science; the third is the social world, or history; and the fourth is the spiritual world, or religion and philosophy. In the end, these fields must merge into one unified body of knowledge. He concluded, “When this happens, we may say with confidence that a boy has experienced the essence of a liberal arts education. He is a free intellectual and spiritual being, free as only the bound are free—the bound who have benefited from knowledge, training, and discipline.”

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The New Classroom

The old classroom is an invention of the Prussians. After the battering they took in the Napoleonic Wars in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they decided to create a classroom that would be specifically designed to instill discipline and obedience in students. They did not do this for any noble reason but because they wanted to turn out more bureaucrats and soldiers. The word “kindergarten” may mean “garden for the children,” but in Prussia, kindergarten was more like boot camp. It removed children, especially young boys, from the “weak” influence of their mothers and taught them that they owed their primary allegiance to the state.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, liberal American educators and politicians were successfully leading the drive for public education based on the Prussian model. The model suited them perfectly because it put government and the “experts” in charge. It was the beginning of a slow, steady decline in the quality of education and of an assault from within the gates on the traditional values and curriculum that my old headmaster Frank Ashburn described.

But in the new era the Prussian model has been widely discredited. It has not produced well-trained or well-educated students, and it has not been consistent with the principles of the free society. Thanks to technology, students are learning more outside the old classroom than they are inside. And parents, fed up with the public school system’s failure to adapt, are at last demanding genuine educational choice.

That is why it is time to open the doors to a new era for our schools, because educational freedom is the next great civil rights battleground, and it is a battle we must win. How do we move forward? One immediate way is to take all the funds the Department of Education awards and turn them into block grants that cannot be released to states and local communities unless they are accompanied by this directive: Let parents choose schools that work-schools that are safe, clean, drug-free, disciplined, and academically challenging and that reinforce rather than undermine the moral and spiritual values that are being instilled at home.

Real school choice means public and private schools, charter schools and home schools and parochial schools, tuition tax credits and educational savings accounts and vouchers. A parent should not be forced to send a child to a lousy school. Just imagine if parents and teachers—not politicians and bureaucrats—ran our schools. With this new freedom, together with real accountability and competition, we could send a message to all schools: perform or perish. That would raise the standards and quality of all schools.

Another vital step is to encourage pastors, priests, and rabbis to open a new frontier of faith-based schools, especially in our inner cities. Already many religious leaders are turning Sunday School rooms into classrooms during the week. They are helping children to find faith in God and their place in the world. We should do everything we can to help in this effort because education is about more than just developing our intellects. It is about building the architecture of our souls.  [read more]

An interesting and informative speech. I’ve read four of his books including the Flat Tax Revolution (2013) which I own and blogged about in a past posting.