In “Conservatism: A Rediscovery,” Yoram Hazony emphasizes the importance of living a conservative life: one in which duty, honor, and a deep respect for family, faith, tradition, and nation are the highest values. The classical purpose of education is about forming young people to be just such kinds of adults.
Political philosopher Yoram Hazony’s latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is an outstanding exposition on the many reasons that liberalism has failed as a political philosophy, despite its near-universal acceptance in the United States and Europe since the end of the Second World War. Dr. Hazony advocates for the rediscovery of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, which is rooted in ancient British constitutional theory and historically was articulated most clearly in the United States by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and other champions of the Federalist Party.
I have reviewed the main arguments of Conservatism: A Rediscovery elsewhere. In this essay I want to focus on the educational implications of Dr. Hazony’s book, which like his previous work, The Virtue of Nationalism, are many.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz has argued in National Affairs, the heart of our collective national struggle over education policy is about the competing purposes of schooling. Conservatives and liberals have differing understandings of education’s purpose rooted in their differing views of the human person and the source of political obligations.
Conservatives, liberals, and the purpose of education
Yoram Hazony describes conservatism this way:
A conservative is a traditionalist, a person who works to recover, restore, and built up the traditions of his forefathers and to pass them on to future generations. Political conservativism is a political standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time (p. 1).
Conservatism recognizes that human beings are born into social structures, including families, clans, tribes, and nations. It is through these social structures that human beings learn to show honor and live virtuous lives.
Understandably, then, conservatives have a keen interest in education, since by its various forms it involves the passing down of a civilization from one generation to the next, handing on values, ideas, and institutions that our forefathers found valuable. As Chesterton put it, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. It is the transfer of a way of life.”
Note conservatism does not maintain that everything from the past is worth conserving, nor that our institutions are never in need of updating. Repairs to our institutions must be made, Dr. Hazony argues, both because there is inevitable decay in the best of institutions due to human nature and because some institutions have proven unworkable or unjust over time. But conservatives seek to make repairs to institutions, causing as little damage to traditions as possible.
Liberalism has different premises about the nature of human persons and the source of political obligations, and therefore possesses fundamentally different views about the purpose of education.
Liberalism, as Dr. Hazony explains in great historical detail, is based on the modernist assumption that the “free” individual is the basic unit of society. Liberalism posits that human beings can use reason alone to arrive at universal political principles to organize societies based purely on personal consent. Liberals believe that the main purpose of government is to maximize individual liberty, freeing us from the constraints of tradition, which is always viewed as backward and oppressive.
This suggests an approach to education this is about teaching students to question and challenge the traditions of their culture to liberate themselves from their various constraints.
History education in America is now carried out in a thoroughly liberal way, emphasizing concepts such as “the individual, freedom, equality… consent… and right,” Dr. Hazony notes. “But such instruction is powerless to explain many of the most basic phenomena of political life” (p. 91). Liberalism, and its educational forms, ignores that individuals are born into social structures that precede the government, create obligations, and form human beings.
Sadly, “The premises of Enlightenment liberalism are taught at every level of our educational system,” Dr. Hazony writes. “Many find it difficult to imagine that there might be a different way of thinking about political life. But Enlightenment liberalism is not self-evidently true” (p. 100).
Education as learning to honor our fathers and mothers
Of course, an appreciation for individual freedom is also a premier value to conservatives of the Anglo-American tradition, but for them personal liberty is situated into a larger framework of sometimes competing social obligations and purposes for government.
According to Dr. Hazony, “Many of us learned something like this view of the political world from our parents and grandparents, or from the Bible and religious community to which we belong,” though not likely from our education in secular, government-run schools (p. 101). But if civilizations, including those that value freedom and democracy, are to persist across the ages, children must learn to honor the past that gave rise to those values in the first place.
Honor is a concept that appears across all human societies, Dr. Hazony argues, and “We find that there can be no conservative society – by which I mean a society capable of conserving any teaching or text, institution or form of behavior, so that it persists from one generation to the next—unless it is permeated throughout by a concern and regard for honor” (p. 118).
This begins with helping children learn to honor their actual, biological parents, as the family is “the training ground for one’s participation in all other hierarchies, whether one has joined them by consent or not” (p. 131) .
Hierarchies, Dr. Hazony notes, are natural to all human social organizations. From learning how to show honor within the hierarchy of the family, children learn to love and appreciate a nation that was formed by various competing clans and tribes learning how to show honor to one another:
“The child’s self is expanded to embrace the entire clan, and he will set aside even the most bitter disputes with other members of his clan when a threat from the outside is experienced as a challenge to all. … The child experiences the suffering and triumphs of his tribe or nation as his own because he experiences the suffering and triumphs of his father and mother as his own.” (p. 113)
Dr. Hazony’s theory of thriving social and political organizations suggests an approach to education that embraces the value of cultural traditions handed down from generation to generation. It suggests a curriculum driven by history and literature that emphasizes how the past is often an idea-driven struggle to establish bonds of mutual loyalty in the face of collective adversity, and how each individual student is called to make his own contribution to the flourishing of society within the framework of traditions passed down by our ancestors.
Liberalism: Dishonoring the past
When it comes to honoring the past, “There is no more obvious difference between a liberal political order and a conservative political order than this,” Hazony writes. “In a liberal order, the things that a child must do to honor his parents and remain loyal to them are found to be, for one reason or another, distasteful or wrong:” (p. 123).
“Liberal society is one in which everyone is free to pursue happiness, but the most obvious things that must be done to ensure that a family, community, or nation remains functional and whole have become optional…Communities are free to teach a condescending disdain for their forefathers in the schools.” (p. 154-155)
Of course, this is precisely what has happened in America’s public schools with the explosion of critical race theory driving instructional decisions and the popularity of the New York Times’ historically inaccurate 1619 Project that seeks to redefine the date—and the core values—of America’s founding.
What Dr. Hazony calls “cultural Marxism” has become the de facto guiding philosophy of the education establishment. Today’s neo-Marxists see only oppression and race-driven conflict in our cultural past. Their agenda is not to understand the complexity of our ancestors’ struggles, and certainly not to see how bonds of mutual loyalty formed between disparate groups over time to create a common, unified nation, but just the opposite: to tear down our inherited structures of political and social order and replace them with an egalitarian utopia that will inevitably descend into violence and tyranny.
Our pathologically polarized public discourse is a symptom of the kinds of historical dishonor that liberalism has spawned:
“A nation becomes dissolute where the heads of the various tribes or factions do not give honor and weight to one another. Then every disagreement becomes an excuse for insult and anger, accusations and slanders proliferate, and when mistakes are made there is no forgiveness, because each has lost the capacity to think of the other as a part of himself.” (p. 140)
Liberalism is not Marxism, as Dr. Hazony is careful to show. But liberalism’s disdain for inherited traditions makes it fatally susceptible to the conflict obsessions of Marxism. This is seen vividly in modernist, progressive educators’ focus on “critical thinking” over the delivery of cultural knowledge.
“Since its purpose is not the preservation of the nation and institutions, [critical thinking] is satisfied with multiplying and amplifying the grounds for criticism until all the old ideas and behaviors are dishonored and discarded,” Dr. Hazony writes. “Critical reasoning is properly regarded as a revolutionary form of reasoning” and inevitably leads to nihilism (p. 153).
Conservative education and social reform
As stated above, conservatism is not blind to oppressive structures or the need for social reforms. Students should not be taught a version of the past that disregards or ignores conflict and societal failures. Our most vivid American example, of course, is the legacy of racism and slavery, which was itself a gross deviation from the core principles of the Anglo-American tradition.
But even the Civil War and the struggle for civil rights are properly understood from a conservative perspective that recognizes how nations fall into chaos and violence when groups within a society are systematically mistreated and dishonored.
Repairs and reforms must inevitably be made in social, cultural, and political traditions, and students should see their own duties and responsibilities in regard to participating in such reforms as American citizens. But we pursue such reforms as members of a tradition, not as revolutionaries bent on destroying all inherited institutions.
“The tension between the individual’s capacity for judgment and the propagation of ideas in society takes on an entirely different aspect if we consider the search for truth as a collective enterprise,” Dr. Hazony writes. “This does not mean that the individual simply accepts everything that has been handed down. But neither does he wish to discard or overthrow what he has received to his benefit” (p. 183).
Conservatism: A Rediscovery would benefit from more historical examples of how conservative societies have undertaken such necessary reforms in the past, but perhaps Dr. Hazony has left that to a future project.
Empowering families and living a conservative life
As Dr. Hazony notes, the government-run education system in America is thoroughly under the sway of a culture-decaying liberalism. School choice policy mechanisms should be pursued to give every family schooling options in settings that respect parents as the primary educators and empower families with the capacity to educate their children according to conservative values:
“Present conditions, wherein children are required by law to attend liberal schools, in which there is no recognition of God and no awareness of the biblical basis of civilization, are debased and dangerous, and should be ended wherever a majority of the public so desires,” Dr. Hazony writes (p. 342-343).
Even in a robust school choice environment, however, there is an opportunity to promote education that reflects conservative principles. As long as there are public schools, these schools belong to local communities who should insist that education be about the transmission of our complex cultural inheritance. Such a focus has implications for curriculum, instruction, teacher training, family engagement, and school culture. Conservative communities should not shy away from battles to reclaim these schools as our own.
In the final part of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Dr. Hazony emphasizes the importance of living a conservative life: one in which duty, honor, and a deep respect for family, faith, tradition, and nation are the highest values. The classical purpose of education is about forming young people to be just such kinds of adults.
While Conservativism: A Rediscovery is not a treatise on education, the implications of Yoram Hazony’s nuanced theoretical and historical arguments are clear. Conservatives should carefully study this book and consider the essential role of education in preserving the best of Western Civilization.
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The featured image is “Dysputa Św. Pawła z Petroniuszem” (between circa 1896 and circa 1902) by Piotr Stachiewicz, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
