[Download] "Why Modern, Liberal, Pluralistic, Secularist Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves (Essay)" by Modern Age ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Why Modern, Liberal, Pluralistic, Secularist Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
In his masterpiece, Paideia: The Ideals of Creek Culture. Werner Jaeger wrote, "Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character. ... The formative influence of the community on its members is most constantly active in its deliberate endeavor to educate each new generation of individuals so as to make them in its own image." For Jaeger, what education requires is a well-defined community capable of and willing to engage in deliberate, collective action. And for this action to create a definite, effective, and lasting educational result, the community must possess a distinct, coherent, and intelligible image of itself and be willing systematically and integrally to impose it upon its members. Do the communities we call modern, liberal, pluralist, secularist democracies meet these indisputable requirements for authentic and effective education of the soul? Can they educate themselves? Of course, in a certain sense the answer must be yes, since millions of citizens in today's Western liberal democracies are, indeed, liberally educated. Yet, it one asks precisely how such a high-level and broad extension of education has occurred, the answer, as we shall see, is manifestly not through the deliberate, communal, image-making, educational agency of the modern, liberal, secular, democratic state. At best, this state has provided some free, yet ideologically tainted, space for the true educational agents to do their work. Not that the state shouldn't be an educational agent--indeed, it is such by its very nature--but it must first of all be a state, that is, a genuine political community embodying an intelligible and obtainable common good, and not a mere public-interest organization or military alliance. Insofar as it is not an authentic political agent, it cannot be an authentic educational agent.