The liberal case for a conservative education

Reforming our schools should be a priority.

I often wonder if I was failed by education. I freely admit my sense of envy towards my parents’ generation who were schooled before the advent of GCSEs and the grade inflation that so consistency rewards mediocrity. I barely revised for my end of school examinations, still managed to achieve a respectable set of results, and emerged knowing very little. The far more demanding O-level system of previous decades meant that intelligence was not enough. This is why older people are often able to recite whole poems from memory or the dates of the kings and queens of England, while the rest of us are having to resort to an online search engine.

I have always maintained that autonomy in adulthood can only be achieved if we are adequately socialised in youth. Most of us have noticed the growing infantilism of political discourse, with the shrill and the ill-informed bleating we hear in parliament and in the mainstream press. How can it be that students at the top universities in the western world are calling for censorship and indulging in tantrums whenever they hear views that challenge their own? The art of critical thinking seems to be dying, and all of this points to a failure in the education system.

The argument that we ought to return to a more traditional form of education is not as conservative as most suppose. I take the view that such an education is in keeping with the key values of a liberal society. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the conservation of freedom for an adult population depends upon greater restrictions in childhood. The instillation of discipline in the young creates the conditions for their individual liberty in later life. Our capacity for reason, so crucial to a fulfilling existence, is scotched from the outset if we are not well educated.