Thoughts on education and civics, part 3

Here's the third installment of the series I began in my post on March 2, and continued on March 14. It should be read as a continuation of the same overall essay.


And so, we posit that the government is obliged to provide an education which is responsive to the various diversities of its population. Let us ignore, for the sake of argument, the very real pragmatic problems one might raise here (paying for such a program, for instance). Even assuming that a civil government is fully able to fund and staff such a system of education, nothing can come of it until a central question is answered: who is empowered, and competent, to decide which students receive which education, among they myriad possibilities? Society as a whole (in practical terms, this means the representatives of the government), or individuals? Our intuitive, reflexive response is toward the latter: only parents, teachers, and the students themselves have the relevant knowledge to make appropriate choices for individual students' education. But by appealing to such justification, we have surreptitiously changed our goals and our point of view. Up to now, recall, we have been constructing our hypothetical educational system based on considering the needs of civil society, not of individuals. Parents and students may indeed be the most competent judges of what education is best for individual students. But are they at all competent to determine the needs of society as a whole? Does any given parent, teacher or student have the necessary knowledge, insight, or objectivity to recognize, analyze, predict, and privilege the elements required to provide society with the maximal pool of civically prepared citizens? Perhaps. Yet even if we grant it so, this conclusion rests on the prima facie unrealistic assumption that, in the immortal words, 'the good of the many' and 'the good of the few, or the one' will align. It is far too clear to anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of humanity that this assumption is unworkable.