The Myth of Neutral Education

Out of the great 19th-century liberal revolutions, there was the aspiration that society could forge a new path with the formation of neutral institutions. This was particularly salient in public education, with the creation of non-sectarian public schools. Historically, according to this view, teachers should not shape the moral life of their students’ interiority, but only transmit the fundamental and pertinent information. As a rule, they should present competing perspectives without sectarian, partisan, or ideological preference, and in doing so, cultivate critical thinking without providing moral direction. The belief was held that this type of education would prepare students to make their own judgments free from the influence of inherited values, as well as facilitate a more pluralist society. The early 20th-century educational reformer, John Dewey, built his pedagogical philosophy on this premise: that education should cultivate democratic habits rather than religious or partisan commitments. While this is no doubt an attractive proposition, it is also fundamentally impossible.

If we look into the earliest annals of civilization, even beyond the classical world of Greece and Rome, into Egypt, Babylonia, and Sumer, we see a recurrent theme. Every civilization has understood that the function of education is part and parcel of the formation of character and the selection of virtue. Elements of knowledge are undoubtedly attached to this, but the value, directive, and proper use of that knowledge are part of the educational process. The ancient Greeks spoke of paideia, that is, the cultivation of character through the study of the humanities: through literature, rhetoric, philosophy, and civics. They believed that the study of humanities gave formation to the human soul and informed its constitution. Just the same, the Romans regarded formal education as preparation for comprehensive participation in republican citizenship. Good citizens were informed on matters in the body politic and were able to demonstrate how those issues should be properly considered using their own natural reasoning. While a departure from the classical world, the high civilization of medieval Europe also understood the task of learning as an apprenticeship in “God’s sciences.” They sought to expand the body of knowledge of the world through empirical observation, develop a rightly ordered state of wisdom, and temper knowledge toward the practical concerns of civilizational continuity. 

It is only a modern development that has posited the strange conviction that schools can offer knowledge without making judgments about what is good and bad in the world. At the core of this proposition is a general state of confusion, where neutrality to people and neutrality to ideas are conflated. It should safely be assumed that a teacher should treat their students equally, regardless of their beliefs or social background. However, it is an impossible proposition that a teacher can remain neutral about different beliefs themselves. They enter the classroom and address the subject material through the lens of their own experiences, personal values, and subjective orientation. This subjectivity does not diminish the value of the knowledge that they are providing, but that knowledge never exists in a totally impartial state. Every college syllabus instantiates an abstract theory of what knowledge is worth transmitting. Every academic history course identifies some events as salient features of a chronology, and others as peripheral epiphenomena. Even some teachers’ or institutions’ decision to emphasize the utility of critical thinking over memorization is itself a philosophical judgment about the purpose and directive of education.

Education cannot escape values because education itself is a deliberate act of the selection of virtue. Every curriculum is built upon the sundry judgments about what is worth knowing. Therefore, it is impossible to separate education from the question of virtue, for the very process of becoming educated requires the cultivation of certain intellectual and moral habits. Attempting to create a value-less education is akin to the process of trying to bite your own teeth or stand outside of your own shadow. The very act of constructing a formal educational system presupposes a vision of what constitutes a well-formed human being, whether that vision is acknowledged openly or concealed beneath the language of neutrality. For most of its existence, higher education never had the pretensions that it was otherwise. The English scholar and churchman John Henry Newman argued that the function of the university was to cultivate an “enlargement of mind.” This is a proposition that exists beyond any notion of technical or vocational competency. Contemporary with Newman, Matthew Arnold believed culture meant acquainting students with the highest aesthetic ideation, with “the best which has been thought and said.” Even in the Americas, Irving Babbitt warned that the fate of civilization depended upon the idea of moral restraint formed through the study of the humanities. While these men disagreed on particulars of pedagogy, they shared a formative assumption about the state of education and its fundamental teleology—that education exists as moral formation, and that its sine qua non is to mold the right kind of people.

The rejection of this ancient premise has not improved the state of our educational systems, nor has it made the process of education neutral. It has only concealed its moral assumptions beneath the language of proceduralism. Our contemporary educational institutions contain their own litany of moral propositions, some relatively old, others novel. It is possible to agree or disagree with any of these propositions, but it is first worth noting that none of them are morally neutral. They reflect substantive claims about the nature of justice, human anthropology, man’s existential purpose, and the ends toward which society ought to direct its conscious efforts. Schools continue to devote their attention toward the promotion of certain ideas, via student assemblies or curricular revisions. The question is not whether values are being taught. Plainly speaking, they are, and have been for quite some time. What is at hand is whether educators are willing to acknowledge that they are making distinctive moral judgments.

Perhaps this is hard to fully envision in our own contemporary world, but this is not a new challenge to public institutions. The nativist riots of the mid-19th century were a function of similar neutral pretensions. At the time, all students in the newly formed public school system were to read from the King James Bible, including both Catholic and Jewish pupils. Protestants generally regarded this practice as religiously neutral because the King James Version had become so culturally ubiquitous that it seemed to transcend the familiar sectarian American identities. However, Catholics in particular saw this matter quite differently. Requiring children to read from a translation their Church rejected was not institutionally neutral at all. It was seen as the encroaching of Protestant school officials under the guise of common civic culture. The resulting tensions in the educational system erupted into the Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844. The controversy became paradigmatic of the impossibility of religious neutrality in education. Nativists sought vengeance for this dissent. Catholic churches were burnt, many people were killed, and the Pennsylvania militia was eventually required to restore civil order in the city.

Indeed, the insistence upon neutrality often functions less as a genuine institutional principle than as a thinly veiled rhetorical strategy. The pretense of neutrality only obscures democratic accountability. Citizens cannot meaningfully debate educational priorities if those priorities are presented as objective tenets or as technical necessities. This becomes particularly apparent in exploring the selection of content, in what schools also choose not to teach. Cultural omissions reveal salient priorities every bit as much as inclusions in curriculum. Students who complete their formal education without a passing familiarity with Homer, Shakespeare, Augustine, Dante, Tocqueville, or Frederick Douglass have not received a neutral education. They have received an education shaped by different judgments regarding the value of cultural inheritance and where it is to be found.

This is all to say, there is no view from nowhere. The frustrating and tragic irony is that institutions that speak most frequently of institutional neutrality often possess the most potent, tacit moral vision. Students are taught that all moral traditions are historically contingent or socially constructed, while simultaneously being inducted into a new anthropological orthodoxy. Whether students embrace or reject these ideals is immaterial. The point is that they are ideals. They are moral propositions about what constitutes the good and the proper ordering of society. As such they are religious ideals, even if formally placed in secular drag. 

This is not to suggest that schools should become instruments of strict sectarian polity. Particularly in the age of misinformation, the distinction between proper education and manipulative propaganda remains as important now as it has ever been before. Before all else, the purpose of education is to cultivate habits of judgment, intellectual humility, and the capacity to reason, not to produce ideological conformity. Paramount to this, it is necessary to observe that these are themselves virtues. A school that teaches honesty, diligence, courage, charity, or an abiding respect for truth has already entered the realm of moral formation. There is no escaping this reality, only denying it.

Dr. D.P. Curtin is an Irish-American psychologist, author, and theologian. He holds degrees from Villanova University, Chestnut Hill College, and Chatham University. His work has appeared in First Things, Public Discourse, VoegelinView, Public Orthodoxy, Law & Liberty, and Providence Magazine. He is scholar-in-residence for the Third Order of St. Augustine, and also Editor-in-Chief of the Scriptorium Project.