The Virtue of Education

One shocking element of the October 7 attack on Israel was the response by students and faculty at elite US schools and universities.

The past year needs no rehashing — protests in support of Hamas terrorists, encampments, harassment of Jewish students, and destruction of property. Three university deans lost their jobs due to failure to protect Jewish students.

Even now — one year later — the problem persists. Just last week Columbia allowed a well known antisemitic professor to teach a class on Zionism. And a national association for elite private schools invited an antisemitic keynote speaker.

Something is fundamentally wrong. Seemingly bright students — and faculty — are morally confused and cannot tell right from wrong. They praise terrorists who rape and murder Israelis, and then blame Israel.

One cause is antisemitism, which shape shifts over time and is currently manifested as anti-Zionism. As this newsletter has argued, there is no practical distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism as both see Jews as a legitimate target of violence.

But antisemitism cannot explain everything.

The education system has also failed to teach students how to think critically and evaluate events from a moral perspective of right and wrong. Universities are failing to educate students to be principled moral leaders.

It is worth considering how we got here.

Education in Pursuit of Virtue

Originally education was in the pursuit of virtue and truth.

In Plato’s The Republic, he tells the famous allegory of prisoners in a cave. Having lived their whole lives there, they have a distorted version of the world. One prisoner finally breaks free and enters the real world, and realizes a totally different reality; but when he returns to tell his fellow prisoners of an entire world outside the cave, they dismiss him as dangerous.

To Plato, education and philosophy was a path to empower individuals to seek truth and discern reality from fiction.

Aristotle believed the purpose of education was to cultivate intellectual and moral virtues. Aristotle valued wisdom, intellectual humility, curiosity, and a desire for truth; and generosity, temperance, honesty, courage, justice, kindness, and loyalty. He did not believe people were inherently born knowing what was virtuous, but rather developed it through natural traits, training, and education.

Similar views on education prevailed in Eastern cultures, too. In China, Confucius focused on moral education and cultivating qualities such as persistence, self-control, and introspection. The building of character was in service not of the individual, but of the family, community, and world.

Later, during the Middle Ages, the Islamic Golden Age emphasized truth and scientific knowledge, with a focus on inquiry in science, math, and philosophy.

Education Loses its Foundations

In modern times, three factors have contributed to educational systems abandoning teaching students critical thinkers in pursuit of truth.

First was a shift toward more practical degrees. The Industrial Revolution led the evolution through creating demand for new fields of study such as engineering and business management. High rates of immigration led to new schools to train teachers to educate the newcomers. In response to rapid urbanization, the government subsidized agriculture research and education.

This evolution enabled rapid economic progress, but came with a cost. Suddenly, students were no longer being taught history, literature, and philosophy.

The trend continues today. In 2022, the percentage of bachelors degrees in the US conferred in a subset of humanities disciplines that includes classical studies, English language and literature, history, languages, linguistics, and philosophy dropped to less than 3.7%, the smallest share since record keeping started in 1949.

Second, simultaneous with the evolution of education has been the decline in religious observance in the US. Data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute show that religious observance in the US has declined from over 95% in 1900 to ~75% today. Approximately 35% of Americans are likely to attend church service in a given week today.

At universities, the percentage of professors who are atheist or agnostic is ~23%, higher than the US national average of ~7%. According to Harvard Magazine, the figure rises to 37% among “elite research schools like Harvard.”

Secularization of education has enabled advancements science and other areas, but the decline of religious observance more broadly across society robs students of sturdy moral foundations.

Humans crave structure and meaning. And so without a basis of history, culture, philosophy, and religion, other thinking fills the void.

One such filler is the introduction of new moral theories in universities and schools such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). Drawing on Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School, CRT is a Marxist-aligned theory that is critical of the West and delineates society along historical power structures, into oppressors and the oppressed. A 2021 analysis showed that CRT was integrated into curricula across the country.

Situation Today

Students and faculty faced the October 7 attacks with neither a foundation in moral and critical thinking nor the tools to properly understand the events.

Left without skills to reason critically, they have been clumsily applying the frameworks at their disposal, such as CRT, however inappropriate they are for the situation.

Zionism is a story of indigenous people who have been oppressed for most their several thousand year history finally returning home. The perverse application of CRT to Jews erases the uniqueness in their national identity and history, which itself is racist.

With the wrong framework incorrectly applied, one can see how intelligent but poorly prepared students and faculty equate Israel — a tolerant, liberal democracy — with evil, and Hamas — a terrorist organization that kidnaps, murders, and rapes — with good.

The students and faculty may believe they are actually being virtuous in their assessment, but like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory, they are either unable or unwilling to realize that they are being tricked by Hamas and other Iranian proxies into backing cynical, homicidal regimes that celebrate death and destruction.

On the other hand, Israel’s vision for the Middle East is based on peace and shared prosperity. This aim should be embraced by all.

Looking back to education as perceived by Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and others, it seems that the current US education system has strayed very far, and has much work to do to get back on track.

Was this email forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe.