Liberal anxieties and liberal education

by Alan Ryan

Education seems to be in one of its perennial crises, and all shades of political opinion quarrel over the reasons and the cure. Alan Ryan asks what these culture wars are really about, and why the battle is so ferocious. His answer is that for two hundred years education has been the focus of three great anxieties: that modern times have turned workers into uncultivated machine-minders; that democracy is degenerating into mob rule; and that our fearsome pace of change leaves us morally and spiritually adrift. Schools have the impossible task of rescuing us from these ill-defined dangers, and discussion about school reform arouses feelings more appropriate to wars of religion. Ryan argues for more perspective and less panic, for a calmer, livelier sense of the complexity and contradictions inherent to democratic education.