There is No Such Thing as "Value Neutral" Education

The Amish and Peter Thiel Agree

In an excellent essay entitled, “The Citizenship Test,” Arthur Milikh argues that we can’t simply return to "value neutral competence” in education. Rather:

“every nation that wants to survive needs a critical mass of citizens who are to some degree devoted to it, respectful of it, and who want to preserve and serve it. An education focused on developing competence without reference to moral ends cannot produce such citizens.”

A nation ought to inculcate a shared way of life for its citizens. This does not happen automatically. It is difficult work that has to be done conscientiously. As Milikh points out, value neutral education is easily hijacked and subverted (i.e., CRT infiltration, etc). And indeed, in a certain sense, there is no such thing as neutral education; that is to say, all education orients us in some kind of direction (I don’t think that Milikh would disagree). Even an ostensibly neutral education that bestows basic competence in “reading, riting, and ‘rithmetic,” tells students that life is more about economics than about morality. Or at least we could say this: if someone asks, “why are we learning this?” the teacher owes the student an account of what their competence is for. To answer that is to orient the student toward a goal. To put the problem one more way: if to be moral means that we must impose on students the notion that it is not okay to impose morality on others you have still given them a moral directive. Even if you like this idea, it isn’t neutral—it points the students in a specific direction.

Indeed, even when our education system was more value neutral, the Amish took issue with it in the Supreme Court case “Wisconsin v. Yoder” (1972). Wisconsin has compulsory education requirements for students up to the age of 16. The Amish there claimed that they thought that American education after 8th grade undermined their way of life and endangered their salvation. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Amish (mostly because the Amish turn out well enough not to ask the state for anything).

Here is how Justice Burger put it in the majority opinion:

“The high school tends to emphasize intellectual and scientific accomplishments, self-distinction, competitiveness, worldly success, and social life with other students. Amish society emphasizes informal learning-through-doing; a life of "goodness," rather than a life of intellect; wisdom, rather than technical knowledge; community welfare, rather than competition; and separation from, rather than integration with, contemporary worldly society.”

The Amish reject modern liberal principles of political life. You might disagree with some of the Amish evaluations, but you can’t deny their contention that even education that bestows competence can’t help but impose a certain vision of the good life on its students. Even the idea that they would have to interact with “worldly” students entails an injection of moral notions that might explode one’s moral horizon. It is difficult not to conform to the ways of your friends. Interacting with teachers and even “classic” authors could pose a problem! I.e., would an Amish student benefit from reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, in which Captain Larsen argues that a human’s deep-seated fear of death is proof that one doesn’t really believe in the immortality of his own soul?

Many take for granted that encountering manifold and diverse ideas will always make us better. When we encounter new values, we optimistically think that either we will re-enforce our belief in our own values or we will exchange our values for new ones. But, as Nietzsche brings out with great clarity, what if our awareness of so many different peoples, times, and cultures makes us unable to take our own way seriously? What if encountering so many ideas starts to make our own authoritative traditions feel like mere costumes? It may well be that the Amish understand something very important about how to foster a moral and religious horizon that can bring comfort, happiness, and perhaps even salvation to its members.

In his dissent in “Wisconsin v. Yoder,” Justice Douglas attacks the claims of the Amish:

“If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today…if [a child] is harnessed to the Amish way of life by those in authority over him and if his education is truncated, his entire life may be stunted and deformed.” (emphasis added)

Douglas is concerned with the possibility that Amish children are being brainwashed and deprived of the opportunity to live a fully human life. He wants children to have a say in their education and he privileges the individual autonomy of the child over and against his parents’ wishes. In this way he tries to be neutral. But you can see that he wants to thrust the child into the “new and amazing world of diversity,” which is to say, he makes a value laden imposition of his own. For, while many do think that diversity is a strength, there are others, like Ed Erler, who claim that, “Any nation that believes that diversity is its strength has already made the decision to dissolve itself” (United States in Crisis pg 18). In other words, to say that diversity is good is a value judgment and isn’t part of a morally neutral education; but many people believe in diversity so much that to say it is good almost sounds neutral to them because they are so sure of its truth.

Strikingly, of all people, Peter Thiel agrees with the Amish about American education, though he takes things in a different direction:

“Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness…in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the places where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking.” (Thiel, Zero to One, pgs 35-36)

Whereas the Amish see modern education as corrosive of tradition, Thiel sees modern education as promoting dull and drab conformism that squelches creativity, deep thinking, and daring. Much of his start-up book is devoted to liberating his readers from business dogmas that constrain their vision and prevent them from even conceiving of far-sighted Promethean tasks. (I will say more about this book in a future post).

The point here isn’t to say that the desire to win is bad, but that with our heads down, we don’t see clearly what kind of possibilities exist. Even a man as daring as Alcibiades did not always harbor such grand ambitions. In Plato’s Alcibiades I, Alcibiades does want to rule Athens; but Socrates reminds him that because of his excellent nature, he shouldn’t consider his own citizens competitors with him, but only the rulers of Sparta and Persia. Alcibiades’ dreams were too small—he did not yet want to rule the world.

Education at any level, from kindergarten to college, cannot be value neutral. Thus, we have to aim high. We ought to promote the understanding of nature, deeds that are noble, and nationalism. My ambition is start a small college; I hope that MCC students dare to aim even higher.