Safeguarding Knowledge
December 5 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Education====
Roger Scruton, writing in “What’s the Point of Education?”—a Nov. 3 article for the British magazine, the Spectator: Why does the state take an interest in education? The prevailing view . . . has been that the state takes an interest in education because it is the right of every child to receive it. . . .
The assumption has been, in other words, that education exists for the sake of the child. In my view the state takes an interest in education only because it has another and more urgent interest in something else—namely knowledge. Knowledge is a benefit to everyone, including those who do not and cannot acquire it. How many of our citizens could build a nuclear power station, judge a case in Chancery, read a grant of land in medieval Latin, conduct a Mozart concerto, solve an equation in aerodynamics, repair a railway engine? We don’t need to have the knowledge ourselves, provided there are others, the experts, who possess it. And the more we outsource our memory and information to our iPhones and laptops, the more those experts are needed. If that is so, then the state must ensure that education, however available and however distributed, will reproduce our store of knowledge, and if possible add to it. . . .
The state has another and greater duty which is a duty towards us all—namely, the duty to conserve the knowledge that we need, which can be passed on only with the help of the children able to acquire it.
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