Progressive Education: The End of Reason

T he June issue of the New Republic is dedicated to “American Fascism,” the phrase on the cover written in red Fraktur on a foreboding black background beneath a portrait image that melds the faces of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. The editor of the series, Michael Tomasky, insists that it is not hysterical, that the contributors are “our leading intellectual historians of fascism.” I’ll take him at his word that he believes it. The series exemplifies the smug sanctimony of modern progressivism, which is so focused on the slivers in the eyes of conservatives that it cannot recognize the beams in its own eyes.

That sanctimony is on full display in the article by Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University. Tomasky describes him as “one of our most incisive cultural critics.” Stanley’s article “Education: The End of Civic Compassion” is thick with the ironic double standards that always accompany sanctimony, beginning with his title.

According to Stanley, “education in a liberal democracy introduces students to the diverse perspectives through a nation’s history, in order for people to foster a kind of empathy and understanding for one another; what my father in his work called civic compassion.” Democracy, he sententiously writes, “is a system where we let ourselves be affected by our fellow citizens’ perspectives.”

A worthy goal. One wishes Stanley had followed it. Apparently civic compassion extends to everyone except conservatives, whom Stanley accuses of “trying to frighten parents about supposed ‘Marxist indoctrination’ in schools and universities (a common tactic in today’s fascist international).” What about progressives trying to frighten parents about supposed fascist indoctrination?

In fact, Stanley’s article should have been named “Progressive Education: The End of Reason.” It reveals the depth of the rot in elite higher education.

In his article Stanley levels his attack on Hillsdale College, where I have been privileged to teach for almost 20 years. And he targets my online course Introduction to Western Philosophy. “One wonders,” Stanley writes, “if Hillsdale’s Introduction to Philosophy mentions that it was Plato who recommended, well before Marx, that children be removed from their families to be raised by the state (and that homosexual relationships between teachers and their students were regarded as quite normal in the era the curriculum regards as ‘classical’).” The abuses of reason here would make a sophist blush.

Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the heart and the peak of classical education, providing it with its point and purpose. When it goes bad, the rest of classical education goes bad with it. Philosophy requires a steadfast commitment to pursue the truth. This is not an easy task. As the self-professed liberal but refreshingly unsanctimonious Jonathan Haidt points out in The Righteous Mind, a book I frequently teach, all human beings are prone to motivated reasoning. “Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning,” Haidt writes. He cites the formulation of fellow social psychologist Tom Gilovich: “When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves ‘Can I believe it?’ and we search for supporting evidence. But when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves ‘Must I believe it?’ and we search for contrary evidence.”

It is one of the difficult tasks of philosophy to resist the strong psychological pull of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias for the sake of the truth, and to help others do the same. Stanley does precisely the opposite: Instead of challenging the complacent opinions of his progressive readers, he reinforces them.

As Haidt shows, liberals are far less accurate describing conservative beliefs than conservatives are describing liberal beliefs, and this difference becomes more pronounced the more liberal one is. Safely ensconced within their privileged and credentialed ivy towers, progressives are notoriously bad at checking their blind spots. Stanley proves the point.

Take his statement about my course. “One wonders,” he begins. This is a good start, since Aristotle tells us that philosophy begins with wonder. But whereas wonder for Aristotle leads naturally to the pursuit of causes, Stanley merely asserts his unexamined opinion. To satisfy his wonder, all Stanley had to do was watch my course, which is free. In fact, Stanley indicates that he did not watch any of Hillsdale’s online courses. He merely cites their titles to support his suspicion that Hillsdale College promotes an “education for authoritarianism” and “indoctrination.”

In the case of my course the error is especially ironic, since Stanley accuses conservatives of seeking to “erase” books or ideas “that might make them uncomfortable.” But in the very first sentence of my promotional video for the course I tell my students, “You’re going to have to get used to asking questions that might make you a little bit uncomfortable.” It is a sentiment all of my colleagues at Hillsdale share. And it includes asking questions not only about what classical philosophers say, but also about the reigning dogmas of modern liberalism.

In fact, in my online course I do not treat any of the proposals for the family in Plato’s Republic. The task was to treat all of Plato’s thought in about 30 minutes. But in my course at Hillsdale, which is the basis for the online course, my students read the entirety of Plato’s Republic and treat with care Socrates’ proposals for the family. This means humility before the text and a firm resistance to the tyranny of the present. What does this look like?

In the first place it is important to notice, contra this Yale philosophy professor, that the proposals are not Plato’s. They belong to a character named Socrates. It is a rudimentary principle of correct interpretation that one should not assume a character in a work of fiction is the voice of the author. We should not assume Socrates is the personal voice of Plato any more than Julius Caesar or Hamlet or Macbeth are the personal voices of Shakespeare.

It is another basic principle of interpretation that the meaning of statements should be determined by their context. Proof-texting Plato is not philosophy. Studying Plato’s dialogues teaches us to be sensitive to rhetoric as well as to argument, to the subtle nuances and contexts and tones of discourse, and to be beware of flat, one-dimensional interpretations. This lesson is as important for citizenship as it is for philosophy.

In the case of his family proposals, Socrates is explicitly and repeatedly hesitant about their soundness. He is also notoriously ironic in his tone in a way that strongly suggests they are intended not as serious prescriptions but as occasions for deep reflection on the scope and limits of politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Socrates’ proposals forcefully place before us, without answering, difficult questions about the similarities and differences between men and women, the moral norms of sexual intercourse, and the competing claims of parental and political authority with respect to children.

Stanley also wonders whether I teach my students that “homosexual relationships between teachers and their students were regarded as quite normal in the era the curriculum regards as ‘classical.’” This observation is not likely to reassure parents that their fears about the sexual indoctrination of children are unwarranted. It is also not “quite” true. But more importantly, Plato’s Socrates explicitly condemned this practice, as well as homosexual conduct more generally. Notably, this subject has been the source of particularly egregious progressive sanctimony — if not hypocrisy — as Princeton’s Robby George points out in his eye-opening essay “‘Shameless Acts’ Revisited: Some Questions for Martha Nussbaum,” which never received a response.

Stanley fails in “civic compassion” throughout his article. Rather than dealing directly with the arguments of his opponents, he relies on inflammatory association fallacies and innuendo to confirm the biases of his readers. For example, he targets a bill in Virginia that, he claims, “would have allowed parents to request that any material they deemed to have sexually explicit content be replaced by other material.” This is misleading. The bill would have allowed concerned parents only to opt out their own children from the objectionable material. It would not otherwise have interfered with what was being taught in the classroom to other children.

The bill seems to propose a reasonable accommodation to parents’ rights, individual conscience, and pluralism. But for Stanley, “‘parents’ rights’ is an expression used to cover for an illiberal public culture.” Is this Stanley’s civic compassion? Then, in an ironic parody of progressive sanctimony, Stanley accuses supporters of the bill of “authoritarianism.” Wait, which party here is advocating for the use of coercive state power to override individual consciences?

Stanley makes much of the fact that the book behind the Virginia controversy was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And although he acknowledges that the parent’s expressed concerns were over sexually explicit content (an objection he wrongly characterizes as a desire not to make children “uncomfortable”), he can’t resist pointing out that Virginia is “an infamous slave state from its Colonial days until the Civil War,” and he adds to this inflammatory irrelevancy the astonishingly condescending non sequitur that “those who seek to view the nation’s past through rose-colored glasses, diminishing the erasing of its national sins, whether for the sake of self-aggrandizement or something else, will have stronger reactions.”

I think that Beloved is a first-rate novel, worthy of being included in a classical high-school curriculum for high-school students. But I understand parents’ objections to the graphic sexual content, and it is uncivil, illiberal, and even malicious to characterize those concerns as motivated by racism, sexism, and illiberal authoritarianism.

Stanley expresses derision for the conservative claim that education is infused with wokeism, and yet his style tacitly mimics the most troubling neo-Marxist aspects of woke ideology. Rather than treating reasons and arguments seriously and on their own terms, it dismisses them as merely superficial masks concealing and promoting particular power interests of a racial, sexual, or economic nature.

This Nietzschean assumption, widely adopted and followed, must lead to the destruction of both liberal education and “our democracy.” Far from promoting civic compassion, it militarizes civil discourse, reduces all rational persuasion to manipulation, and undermines motives to listen to, much less tolerate, the views of one’s opponents.

I do not deny that there are some dangerous elements on the American right, some of which I have written about elsewhere. But Stanley’s article will not help you find them. Having so compromised his credibility, how can he be trusted him even when he is right? And herein is the tragedy of progressive sanctimony: Every healthy, flourishing culture needs elites. Would we really be better off without true experts who excel in the fields of medicine, science, journalism, education, law?

But this whole structure requires trust rooted in high standards of personal and professional integrity. Progressive elites have repeatedly and sometimes aggressively betrayed that trust. Anti-elitism is not a desirable strategy. But there is no reason our elites must come from places such as Yale University. There are other places, and I am hopeful that they will have an important role to play in the restoration of a free and flourishing society in America. And if you are looking for a truly liberal education where reason, friendship, and civility are taken seriously, I have a college to recommend.