In book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that the men who rule His “just city” should be philosopher kings. His proposition is met with dissent from his debate partner Adeimantus, whose only experience with philosophers were the sophists. He responds:
Someone might say that in speech he can’t contradict you … but in deed he sees that of all those who start out on philosophy … most become quite queer, not to say completely vicious; while the ones who seem perfectly decent, do nevertheless suffer at least one consequence of the practice you are praising — they become useless to the cities.
Socrates’ reply is simple: these men aren’t philosophers. According to Socrates, men with the true philosophical spirit were pressured by their families into politics at a young age. They wanted more for their children than a life of endless study. The so-called philosophers left over, then, were those who could not excel in the world of politics. The result? Those who cannot do, teach.
This dialogue is eerily similar to the dialogues of the world we find ourselves in today: a brutal and exclusive technocracy, which holds in contempt those who dare speak out against the “credentialed.”
This is no secret. In 2020, Americans were forced to live under the now-defunct rule of so-called experts, suffering punishment for non-compliance. In 2021, parents across the country railed against gender ideology in their children’s classrooms, only to be removed from school board meetings. In the 2024 election cycle, education became a polarizing platform issue, especially President Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education. And now, among rising job competition, tuition inflation, and the prevailing belief that college campuses serve no purpose other than to liberalize their students, a stunning 64% of Americans have lost their confidence in higher education.
The world of Academia has begun to feel, for Americans, like a troupe of sophists dominating the national conversation, providing little value to the society around them.
While these complaints about American higher education are based in truth, many conservatives now mistakenly believe that unless you’re getting a technical degree, college is worthless.
This is a distorted view of education.
I experienced this attitude in high school, where my peers often bemoaned the requirement to learn calculus with cliches like “when will I use this in real life?” If the purpose of education was simply to get a job after graduation, this attitude would be perfectly ordered. However, that is not the purpose education should serve.
The idea that education should focus on a career is an idea co-opted from 20th-century psychologist and cofounder of the pragmatist movement, John Dewey. His philosophy assigns value to ideas and public policies based upon their usefulness. Significantly, Dewey became a champion of progressive education with his book Experience and Education, which proposes a model of education based upon the social contract, setting the teacher and student as equals within the educative process and urging educators to model their lesson plans on teaching judgment through student discovery.
Though he generally takes the stance that education within itself has no inherent value, even Dewey would disagree with the prevailing attitude towards education today; Dewey writes,
“When preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted. The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself.”
Here, Dewey makes an important point. If the purpose of education on any level is dedicated solely towards preparation for an eventual career, then the student will lack formation in those things basic to human life: observation and reason.
While, today, we have reduced the value of a college degree to a job prerequisite, (around 75% of jobs created in the last few years require a bachelor’s degree) universities should have more to offer our students.
In the mid-nineteenth century, St. John Henry Newman wrote a series of lectures titled The Idea of a University, partially to defend the departmental supremacy of classics at his alma mater, Oxford University. The value of education, according to St. Newman, lies not within its application, but within itself. The mental refinement that comes with a literary and philosophical training perfect the inherent human capacity for reason, creating a student who is, simply, better at being human. This, not any amount of practical knowledge, is the true value of a college education, and it is far from useless. With a true liberal education in this manner, a student gains, no matter their job title, the ability to think clearly, organize their thoughts, and articulate their ideas — three skills which many lack today.
Unfortunately, our current universities (perhaps through pride and greed) have rendered themselves incapable of providing such an education to their students. But, in this way, they have become useless, not education itself. If we misplace the blame of a dysfunctional education system on the act of education rather than the system, like many have, it will be impossible to reform and once again achieve an education dedicated towards creating better humans.
This is why the steps that the Trump administration are taking against the Department of Education (DOE) are both so dangerous and important. On one hand, the popular rhetoric surrounding the dissolving of the DOE is effectively signal-boosting the progressive, utilitarian philosophy towards education that got America into their current problem in the first place. On the other hand, dissolving the DOE will hopefully do away with FAFSA, the federal program which provides financial aid to college students, and decrease the availability of higher education.
While it may sound counter-intuitive to try and fix higher education by decreasing its consumer-base, in reality, federal aid like FAFSA is what created the problem we are in right now. Before FAFSA, a college degree was hardly a requirement to enter the white-collar workforce; but, once federal aid made higher education affordable to all, the college degree was no longer an uncommon resume-booster, but instead became an expectation for young applicants. With the increased demand for degrees that came with this hiring shift, community colleges and degree farms began sprouting up like weeds, causing the “degree-inflation,” so to speak, that we see today. The only way to reverse such a process would be to decrease the availability of degrees altogether. If this happens, hiring managers would no longer be able to expect such qualifications, and the degree farms would fall out of business due to lack of demand.
We do need to drain the swamp of the DOE, but this cannot come with the sacrifice of generations deprived of a true educational experience. Education is the key to human freedom; ripping it from the coming generations will guarantee decades under tyranny of the state and of the self.
We must end the war on education. But the solution isn’t to abandon the idea of education—but to dethrone the sophists and restore the philosopher-kings.
