Column: Contours of Culture
The Lost Sense of Learning
by Ken Myers
Many books that most wisely describe the ideals of cultural flourishing (and which thereby diagnose cultural confusions) are books about education. This should come as no surprise, since the work of education is at root the transmission of culture—of a body of knowledge and a way of situating ourselves in the world so as to seek understanding and live well.
Our society typically regards education as a means of progress to some unknown and better future, not as a matter of cultural conservation. So we tend to think of schools as places where individuals acquire dispositions and skills to live out their idiosyncratic dreams and remake the world to satisfy their desires. Our schools thus transmit the cultural values of individualism, progress, and relativism, and thereby conserve the anti-conservative ideology of modernity. Neat.
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Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also served as editor of Eternity, the Evangelical monthly magazine, and This World, the quarterly predecessor to First Things. He also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on Culture from the online archives
29.3—May/June 2016
Our Choice Is Obedience or Jesus as Anti-Christ by Anthony Esolen
35.2—Mar/Apr 2022
on Fatigued Christians Deciding to Engage the Culture by Keith Lowery
more from the online archives
33.4—July/August 2020
Our Views on the President Are Not Crucial by S. M. Hutchens
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
28.3—May/June 2015
Whittaker Chambers's Lonely War Against Godless Collectivism by Hunter Baker
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