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Text Box: The New Enlightenment Institute for the Preservation and Advancement of Civil Democracy

The Constitution of the United States of America

Text Box: NEI executive director Tom Gotsill was guest speaker at the recent Simmons College Alumnae Association of Cape Cod luncheon. The gathering was held at the Yarmouth House restaurant on Saturday, October 27th. The subject of the speech was “Education and Civil Democracy”. The speech was a response to what Gotsill said was the widespread effort by Washington and American corporations to set the primary goal of public education at “preparing students to compete in the new global economy”. Gotsill acknowledged the importance of addressing globalization but warned that “our response has been disproportionate to the problem and is causing us to overlook … the primary purpose of education.” “The fundamental task of education in a democracy,” Gotsill argued, “is the apprenticeship of liberty—learning to be free.” He said that civic learning includes those skills necessary to live in democratic communities such as critical thinking, responsible action, and the ability to listen empathically to and accommodate others in a pluralistic society. A question and answer period followed the speech.

Text Box: The complete text of the Simmons College Alumnae Association speech can be seen below.

Text Box: Simmons College Alumnae Association South Yarmouth, MA October 27, 2007 Thank you very much for inviting me to speak with you today. For over a century Simmons College has played a major role educating women as independent, equal and empowered citizens. You have every right to be proud alumnae and I am honored to speak with you here today. I’d like to share some thoughts with you today about education in America. As you know, it is now political season. That means it’s time for us to elect the next “education president”. We’ve had education presidents before, as well as education governors, but education as a national institution, education as a potentially powerful national resource, continues to stumble along, receiving little more than lip-service, illegitimate step-brother to the military-corporate favored son. No one to date has displayed the courage necessary to begin a truly national conversation about why we educate our young and about how that education ought to look. Seizing on the lack of historical understanding and vision in Washington and the apathy of the public, corporate America has been hard at work organizing its political cards in order to influence the direction of American education. It should come as a surprise to no one that corporations hum the tune, and politicians dance to it. Subsequently, politicians begin humming, and the educational community begins to dance. And the mantra corporations have been humming for the past decade is “the new global economy”. Now there is no denying that globalization ought to be recognized as a historical development that education should address. But our response has been disproportionate to the problem and is causing us to overlook what I believe to be the primary purpose of public education. Whereas one of the original justifications for tax-supported schools was the need to train workers for a young, industrial economy, the unspoken justification today is to educate a new generation of consumers. Ours is no longer an economy based on the Puritan ethic of hard work and production. That system was not only economically and culturally sound, it was ethically sound. It was based on the belief that one’s hard work addressed the needs of the larger community. Both the individual and the community benefited from such an arrangement. The Puritan ethic placed a value on hard work, investment, savings. People practiced altruism, self-denial, a deferred gratification. Our current economy, the one that corporations want to grow in order to compete globally, is quite the opposite. Ours is no longer a productivist capitalist system. It is a consumer capitalist system. We no longer manufacture goods to satisfy needs; for most Americans, but certainly not all, our needs have already been met. Instead, we invent goods and services that are merely wants and market them to consumers as needs. These are the new essentials that we cannot live without – 7,000 square foot homes, instant communication for ten year-olds, and Hollywood-type bodies courtesy of silicone. The result has been the rise of hyperconsumerism. American history has seen a transformation from a people who valued work for work’s sake, self-denial, altruism, and saving, to a people that values wealth with or without work, self-indulgence, instant gratification, amusement, and spending. Sadly, it is this vision of “the good life” that American education is addressing. Ask any high school students, and ask their parents. Success in school is about college and career. Little else matters. A solid career is the key to having all the toys and gadgets one “needs” to be happy. A people compelled to a life of self-gratification, narcissism, and amusement are not a free people in the strictest sense. They are controlled by their passions and their desires. Today’s students are, like their parents, intellectually sluggish, indifferent to the world around them, and controlled by those who market everything from corn flakes to presidential candidates. But I can guarantee you this, if their MCAS and SAT scores continue to rise, most Americans will believe we have achieved something meaningful. It is fool’s gold. If creating the next generation of marketers and consumers is not the purpose of education, what is? The fundamental task of education in a democracy is the apprenticeship of liberty – learning to be free. In our rush to pursue wealth, we have forgotten civic learning, the pursuit of happiness as Jefferson and the ancients knew it. As Benjamin Barber has put it, “The literacy required to live in a civil society, the competence to participate in democratic communities, the ability to think critically and act deliberately in a pluralistic world, the empathy that permits us to hear and thus accommodate others, all involve skills that must be acquired. Excellence is the product of teaching and is liberty’s measure. There is no excellence without freedom… only the free and self-sufficient can be virtuous … living well and living justly in the human world.” These educational ideals are a far cry from “preparing for the new global economy”. Democracy is not a natural form of civic association. It is a political contrivance. It is often very inefficient and slow to both recognize dangers looming and to solve problems in our midst. If competence and productiveness are what we most seek in government, virtually any form of government would be superior to a democracy. Plato made this very clear 24 centuries ago when he wrote “The Republic” – his version of the ideal state. As Plato saw it, people flourished best in a state in which everyone literally “minds their own business”. What he meant by “minding one’s own business” is that citizens would be a member of one of three classes – the craftsmen, the auxiliary, and the guardians – and that they would not infringe on any of the other two classes. The reason they wouldn’t is because they would be experts in the activities of their own particular group and mere amateurs in the activities of other groups. The craftsmen would be adept at inventing and manufacturing those things necessary for all citizens to use in their pursuit of a civilized life. The craftsmen would be the masses of people responsible for everything from pottery to poetry and the markets in which they are sold. The craftsmen, as Plato saw it, were pleasure-loving people who would be more than satisfied with their lives because they were doing what they knew best, and could do it better than anyone else in the city. Without the craftsmen, the city could not function smoothly. One thing the craftsmen certainly were not trained to do was to provide for the safety and security of the state. This was the task for the auxiliary. The auxiliary was the “honor-loving” class who protected the state in time of war. They could do so better than anyone else because they cultivated the virtue of courage. They protected the city against everything from foreign invasion to fire and other calamities. As Plato saw it, since these people had extraordinary courage, the just state would be better off if they served, not as artisans or merchants, but as protectors. Another thing the auxiliary were not trained to do was to be philosophers, people given to intellectual pursuits. This was the purview of the guardians. Whereas the craftsmen were people most in pursuit of pleasure, and the auxiliary were people most in pursuit of honor and victory, the guardians were people most in pursuit of wisdom. Plato concluded that since humans were the only animal blessed with reason and a moral sense, the best human life was the life of the mind. Hence, the guardian, who had received the finest intellectual and moral training possible, would be the best leader of the city, what has come to be known as “the philosopher-king”. The Greek city, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten from your undergraduate days at Simmons, was called the “polis”. Hence, the person possessing the greatest wisdom, the person who knows what is best for both man and the state is, you guessed it, the politician. Clearly, Plato did not believe in democracy. He did not believe that the masses of people, the craftsmen, you and I, were intellectually or morally capable of governing the polis. This was better left to those who were trained in thinking, in ethical conduct, and in governance. That opinion flourished until the Age of the Enlightenment. Beginning with the rise of humanism, the dissemination of knowledge in the Renaissance, the decline of the authoritarian rule of monarchies and the Catholic Church, power began to shift, however slowly, toward the commoners. Eighteenth century philosophers like John Locke argued in favor of the rights of man and that, indeed, the people are capable of governing themselves. Implicit in this notion, from the beginning, was that to govern themselves, citizens needed to be virtuous, both intellectually and morally. They might not be expected to be the intellectual equivalents of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic, but they ought to be both thinking people and good people. The success of this “great experiment”, this American democracy, depends upon the collective virtue of its people. But as philosophers have observed for centuries, virtue is not a natural condition. We are not born intelligent nor are we born moral; but we are born with the potential for both. It falls to parents, family, community leaders, and professional educators to mold the untrained minds of the young into clear-thinking and morally virtuous adults capable of governing themselves. To think that anything is more important to the health of a free nation than this one act is to be sadly misguided. I believe many of our educational leaders are sadly misguided. They are currently humming the mantra of corporate America and the White House, seeing our young not as whole, free, future self-governing citizens. Instead, they have reduced our children and their achievements to objectified, quantifiable numbers. Good teachers in many places are no longer the possessors of magical arts capable of inspiring the imaginations and ideals of the young. Good students are now recognizable by their scores in high-stakes testing. Good teachers are recognizable by the high scores their students achieve. We measure our success in the classroom now the same way we measure the success of a product in the marketplace – by the numbers they generate. It is time to recognize that alongside our need for future generators of wealth stands our need for future self-governing citizens possessing creativity, sound critical thinking, and civic virtue. We currently have no political leaders who are courageous enough to tell us the truth about ourselves. And that is, that we have become a nation of people who are more in the habit of asking themselves “what do I want?” instead of “what do we need?” This does not bode well for democracy. It is in this spirit that we have created the New Enlightenment Institute for the Preservation and Advancement of Civil Democracy. We are a local, non-partisan educational organization here on Cape Cod and are committed to the principles of democracy as first conceived during the Enlightenment. We hope in the future, once we are more firmly established, to work with the schools to plant the seeds for more civic-minded curriculums. Our first activity has been the creation of Cape Lyceum, a monthly lecture series. Through this we hope to enable citizens to engage with others in civil discourse for the good of all. We hope that you see some benefit to this and join our association and attend our lectures. Thank you very much for allowing me to speak with you today. I hope you will give some thought to what I have shared. We don’t have to agree, but we do have to listen to one another carefully if our democracy is to survive. Continued best wishes in your efforts to support the mission of Simmons College.