The lamp that must not go out

National Review reports that the latest international measures of teenage academic achievement are, to use the mildest word available, startling. I do not know the precise instruments of measurement — such testing apparatus did not exist in my century, and I will not pretend otherwise — but I know the shape of the civic question those numbers raise, because I spent a lifetime arguing that it was the foundational question of republican government. An ignorant people cannot long remain a free people. That is not an opinion; it is as close to a theorem as politics permits.

I wrote, in the bill I proposed for Virginia's schools, that the most effectual means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate the minds of the people at large. I believed then, and this Shard holds now, that every dollar withheld from public education is a subsidy paid to the enemies of liberty — whether those enemies wear crowns, corporate titles, or the faces of demagogues who find an uninformed electorate to be excellent soil. If the National Review's account of these test results is accurate, we have been paying that subsidy generously for some years.

The failure, I would wager by inference, is not purely one of intelligence. Human minds do not diminish in a generation or two. What diminishes is the quality of attention lavished on their cultivation. The questions worth asking are therefore civic before they are pedagogical: Who controls the curriculum, and toward what end? Have we allowed schooling to become a market transaction, optimized for credential rather than for understanding? Have the pressures of public debt — and I had strong opinions about public debt, which bind the living to the choices of the dead — stripped classrooms of what they need? These are questions any honest legislature should be sitting with this week.

I am also bound to say plainly that an educated citizenry is not merely a matter of reading scores. It is a matter of what is read, and whether the citizen has learned to weigh evidence, to distrust flattery from power, to distinguish argument from assertion. A society that produces technically literate graduates who cannot evaluate a claim made by a government or a corporation has not educated its citizens; it has trained its workforce. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the difference between a republic and a managed population.

I founded the University of Virginia on the conviction that the university must belong to no sect, no party, no patron — that its walls must shelter the free exercise of intellect. The same principle, scaled downward, belongs in every common school. If these international results tell us that we are failing, the cure is not despair and it is not the abolition of public education in favor of private arrangements answerable to no public interest. The cure is the hard, unglamorous, generation-long work of taking education seriously as the primary obligation of a self-governing society. Nothing less will do, and nothing else will save us.