A few years ago, I signed up for education classes at my local community college. The economics of journalism were collapsing, so I thought I might make a second career in teaching.

It was there that I discovered what is wrong with the American education system—and how we might fix it. With the Department of Education under new and increasing scrutiny, including calls for it to close, it’s a good time to revisit that experience.

The first two classes I had to take as an education major were “Foundations of Education” and “Introduction to Special Education.” Our textbook was called Teachers, Schools, and Society. It purports to offer the history of education, starting with Horace Mann, the father of the American public schools. Before we even got to the first assignment, however, there was a mix-up in class. Our professor, a liberal I’ll call Karen, noticed that a few of the students had purchased the wrong book. Instead of Teachers, Schools, and Society, they had with them a book called Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough. It turned out that the two books were stacked next to each other in the campus bookstore and a number of students simply had grabbed the wrong book by mistake. When this was pointed out, Karen’s look of disgust and her comment, “You can return that book,” told me all I needed to know.

I immediately set out to buy and read Whatever It Takes. 

Tough’s 2008 book is the story of Geoffrey Canada and his quest to break poor black kids out of poverty. In the 1980s and ’90s Canada, a black educator, came across statistics that changed the way he looked at the problems of poor black people. Crucially, these statistics reveal a huge discrepancy between the vocabularies of poor people and everyone else.

It turns out that vocabulary affects everything. Canada’s research showed that in the first few years of life, babies from poor black families hear far fewer words than whites and, moreover, that too often the words they hear can be negative. Hearing fewer and mostly negative words had a physiological effect on the brains of children. Infants of all races who are read to with love, support, and kindness do better on tests, in conversation, in relationships, in job interviews, and so on. It is this positive vocabulary deficit, much more than racism or economics, that Canada believes holds back poor kids. Canada also shows why this research demonstrates the deficiencies in the conservative argument that IQ is destiny. It is not that IQ is unimportant but that we fail to understand how IQ is developed. Most important is the way in which a child is spoken to—which, Canada shows, has a great effect on personality and IQ. Change that part of the equation and you may be able to change everything. Tough summarizes it this way:

However you measure parenting, middle-class parents tend to do it very differently from poor parents—and the path they follow, in turn, tends to give their children an array of advantages, both cognitive and noncognitive: a bigger vocabulary, better brain chemistry, a more assertive attitude. As [researcher Annette Lareau] pointed out, kids from poor families may be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite—but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

In 1990 Canada opened the Harlem Children’s Zone, a social experiment designed to change the way poor black kids are read to, spoken to, and even fed. In 1997 the Zone started a program encompassing 24 blocks. In 2007, it covered almost 100 blocks. The results are amazing:

Of the 161 four-year-olds that entered the Harlem Gems in the 2008-2009 school year, 17% had a school readiness classification of delayed or very delayed. By the end of the year, there were no students classified as ‘very delayed’ and the percentage of ‘advanced’ had gone from 33.5% to 65.2%, with another 8.1% at ‘very advanced,’ up from only 2%.

In The New York Times, Geoffrey Canada summed up his philosophy: “For me, this is not an intellectual debate. This is quite literally about saving young lives. For parents in devastated neighborhoods such as Harlem, the decision to send their child to the local failure factory or a successful charter school is no choice.”

A few weeks into in my “Foundations of Education” class, we discussed stereotypes. Karen offered some ideas for discussion. Asian kids do better in school than all other groups. Blacks do worse than anyone else. “Why is this?” Karen asked. Students replied: because Asian families emphasize learning early on. Karen was irritated: “You’re using stereotypes!” Then Karen read an excerpt from Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities. Kozol is a liberal intellectual who oozes empathy but is almost always wrong.

Taking these education classes also made me very grateful that I had gone to Catholic schools because I realized there was something we had there that was most definitely missing from what is taught in public schools:  namely lessons about love, sin, sacrifice, and grace.

Recently Father Daniel S. Hendrickson published Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age: A Response to Charles Taylor and the Crisis of Fullness, a book that analyzes the problems with modern higher education. Jesuit Higher Education is meant to be a response to the book A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. In Taylor’s book we learn that the modern university “breathes secularism,” which results in less freedom and more disenchantment with the world. As one reviewer put it, Taylor believes that in the modern age “intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control.” 

Taylor argues that we have become “specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart.” The schools have lost what Taylor calls “fullness,” that grace-filled feeling of purpose and spirituality. Father Hendrickson, the president of Creighton University, offers three things he believes would help restore Taylor’s “fullness.” Study, solidarity, and grace. “The pedagogy of grace, he writes, “represents what is not planned, or what is unprepared, or surprising. It is a pedagogy that cultivates an availability—or appreciates in students the kind of openness cultivated by study and solidarity—whether for inexplicable and phenomenal moments of wonder, awe, inspiration, gratitude, consolation, or confirmation. They are experiences that I regard highly.”

For Father Hendrickson awareness of God, Grace or “the Other” is what makes life worth living. Grace often flows from the work of self-examination and “study.” Hendrickson does not mean mere memorization, but a self-examination grounded in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. The spiritual exercises encourage us to examine our own flaws, examine our consciences, and ultimately to see God in all things. By solidarity, Hendrickson means “seeing the world as your home.” It’s a place both familiar and full of wonder—as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkin wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”—a place at once familiar, and new, and exciting. 

Thanks to the influence of celebrated educational reformers like Horace Mann, the kind of education Hendrikson recommends is quite different from what our public schools now offer. A 19^th century Massachusetts reformer, Mann convinced Americans that there should be “common” or public schools, a position that is criticized by Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. In the chapter “The Common Schools: Horace Mann and the Assault on the Imagination,” Lasch notes an irony: The theories of Horace Mann were understood to be egalitarian, pro-peace, and humanistic, yet it is precisely his philosophy that has caused the narrow, secular, woke and boring pedagogy education that now exists.

Mann was the product of both the Enlightenment and New England Puritanism. He thought that America should “[stand] as a shining mark and exemplar before the world.” Yet Mann’s reliance on science, humanistic hostility towards war and his Puritanical distrust of love and other human passions created schools that were antiseptic.

Lasch explains:

The history of reform—with its high sense of mission, its devotion to progress and improvement, its enthusiasm for economic growth and equal opportunity, its humanitarianism, its love of peace and its hatred of war, its confidence in the welfare state, and, above all, its zeal for education—is the history of liberalism, not conservatism, and if the reform movement gave us a society that bears little resemblance to what was promised, we have to ask not whether the reform movement was insufficiently liberal and humanitarian but whether liberal humanitarianism provides the best recipe for a democratic society.

An education that does not deal with war, God, the dynamic nature of life, the destiny of humanity, the eros of art, or the debates about democracy, Lasch argued, is not an education at all. In rejecting these things, we instead, “share Mann’s distrust of the imagination and his narrow concept of truth, insisting that the schools should stay away from myths and stories and legends and stick to sober facts, but the range of permissible facts is even more pathetically limited than it was in Mann’s day.”

Indeed. We are a nation with an incredible history and fascinating people. Our founders were geniuses who gave everything for our freedom. We defeated Communism and may soon be going to Mars. Faith was certainly a part of the story of how we accomplished these feats, and it is part of who we are. Our educators should be allowed to get excited about our accomplishments.