Feature
Fool & Lie Makers
Public Education & the Secular Idols Replacing God
by Nicholas Nussen
St. Paul, passing through one of our public-school classrooms, would find his spirit stirred at a culture no less given to idolatry than that of the Athenians in his day. Only in place of the altar to the "Unknown God," he would find an altar to the all-too-familiar god of the Self; and among the "new things" on the lips of our adolescent sophists, he might hear something like, "Hey, you can't impose your morals on me!"
Such was the exclamation of one of my tenth-grade students two years ago in response to a "judgy" peer, expressing the one moral rule left in our culture, taken almost from the lips of our Savior: "Judge not." However, this is not, as in the Gospels, an admonition to remove the beam from one's own eye before plucking the mote from another's. Rather, it is a blanket prohibition of all judgment whatsoever, proceeding from what the shrewd apostle would recognize as a "strange doctrine" more dangerous than anything preached at the Areopagus: moral relativism, or the notion that all sincerely held beliefs, being neither right nor wrong in an objective moral sense, are immune to criticism.
Setting aside the irony of the student's statement (in that, in accusing his peer, he "imposed" his own moral judgment), I was not surprised to hear such a remark from a high-schooler, whose brain was newly capable of grasping the slippery sophistries sliding out of our academies. I was startled to discover, however, in teaching at a middle school the year before, that even thirteen-year-olds had received into their tender minds the latest and most refined installments of the moral programming—indeed, the most sophisticated relativism and nihilism—that could only have been designed in the loftiest chambers of the ivory towers.
Having, like Childe Roland, passed through those dark towers myself, I immediately recognized the insidious handiwork of the technicians of "tolerance"—who, to the rural and impoverished students I taught, would remain in cloud-capped obscurity, like dark and malefic gods engineering the fates of peasants and professors alike. These students would, in all likelihood, go on to work as mechanics and supermarket clerks, having never heard of Marx, Freud, or Derrida, or of any of the "-isms" that, like arch-demons, inhabit and move the bodies of nations; but their minds, nonetheless, will have been twisted and fixed, unconscious of the hands that turned the screws.
Doctrines of Demons
One such turn of a mental screw, probably made in kindergarten, has resulted in a healthy respect for benign expressions of cultural diversity, such as habits of diet and dress. But of course the drill bored too deep.
In my students' discussions of literature, the good character was the one who "followed his heart," no matter what his heart told him to do. The notion of an errant or unformed conscience seemed foreign to my students, who were often as willing to admire the villain as the hero. Students frequently respected characters who "did what they wanted," often in defiance of social norms, without any apparent concern for the rightness or wrongness of the characters' actions. I perceived that the underlying assumption unconsciously held by most students was that "right" and "wrong" do not really exist. What matters, instead, is self-expression—or authenticity, as the existentialists, of whom they had never heard, would say.
In fact, one eighth-grader, a self-proclaimed "gender-fluid pansexual" and Satanist, went so far as to explicitly assert that good and evil do not exist at all. She said this after first claiming that we have no right to judge terrorists, because they are only following their religious convictions. Indeed, if the supreme virtue is to "follow your heart"—or, as it is more popularly put, to simply "be you"—how can one condemn another's heartfelt desire to open fire in a Parisian cafe or detonate a bomb in a subway?
Such rank relativism was, admittedly, a minority report among my students, and was met with gasps and shouts from those who, reared in the "old-time religion," understood that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Yet such chilling remarks were not rare, and always recalled to mind "the rulers of the darkness of this world," the "spiritual wickedness in high places."
Surely, such are the doctrines of demons, for they could not have originated in these students' poor town, where hardly anyone had the misfortune of enduring introductory courses on postmodern ethics. Such teachings come from the top, from the areopagi and academies, where they are pumped into prospective teachers, who in turn transmit them to their elementary targets.
Nicholas Nussen lives with his wife and infant son in Ohio, where he formerly taught in a public high school, and now works at a university and attends law school.
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