Why Education Became Throwing Chairs

And why apart from Christ, throwing chairs is all we have

Remember students, chairs are a convenient and cost-effective way to manifest your existential rage.

What would you do with $25,000,000?

Maybe you’d renovate a French château and turn it into a tricked-out summer home. Maybe you’d grab Chopard’s newest 201 carat watch, which also looks like something you’d find in a Caribbean souvenir shop next to a punch bowl filled with shells. Maybe you’d just buy a bag of avocados.

Here’s another question. What would you do with $25,000,000 — of someone else’s money? If you’re a provincial government, I’ll tell you exactly what you’d do. You’d buy a rusted soviet-era submarine, fill it with rocks, then send it into the Atlantic Ocean to run military drills. I know this because it’s what Ontario just did. Except instead of purchasing a literal sinking ship, they’re building a brand new, 25-million-dollar public school.

You might be wondering what my problem is. You might be wondering, in light of the illimitable ways our tax dollars could be squandered, why we shouldn’t take some micron of comfort in the fact that some of it is actually going towards a worthy cause.

Well, it all comes down to definitions. Specifically, your definition of “worthy” . . . and “cause” . . . and “going towards.” That last one especially. In an ostensibly free society, I often find myself wondering why I’m required to pay for services I neither use, nor want, nor want for anyone else. If Jefferson is right, and I have reason to believe he is, then “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

And at this point — if only they were propogating ideas. The hard fact is that many public schools in Ontario no longer resemble education centres so much as they do underground Muay Thai fight clubs, and have been variously described as “alarming,” “distressing,” and finally, “in significant crisis.” Teachers, once hired to teach, are now responsible for the redirection of airborne furniture. One reports:

. . . I spend most of my time just trying to keep everyone, including myself, safe,” she said. “If one of the students gets upset and starts throwing furniture around, I have to do whatever I can to make sure no one gets hurt . . . My hope now is to make it to retirement without being badly injured.

And if you think “making it to retirement without being badly injured” sounds like something a bomb-disposal unit or logging worker might say, you’d be right.

But here we are.

The well is poison

The problems facing public schools are multilayered — like a cold-cut tiramisu — but they share a common condition. It isn’t, fundamentally, a lack of funding. It isn’t, fundamentally, a lack of support staff. It isn’t, fundamentally, that Lil’ Davey thinks 4+4 = Montana. It’s that Canadian institutions are downstream from Canadian households, which are locked in a full-scale, decades-long identity crisis. Households are headwaters. If the stream is contaminated at the source, things ain’t going to improve further down the line.

The sad reality — and I mean that — facing parents and children today is that most of them have no idea where their duties begin or end. Lil’ Davey, never having encountered discipline at home, is a walking keg of Ammonium Nitrate at school. His parents are surprised when they get a call from the principal later that evening. “Davey had a bad day,” he explains. “He threw a desk at Mrs. Finnigan and shattered her collarbone. She’ll never paraglide again.” It can’t be their fault, the parents reason. Davey must have ADD. Davey must need medication. Davey must need a new gaming chair.

That problem is we’ve lost the plot. And we’ve lost the plot because we rejected the story. And without a story, you don’t have characters, or development, or objectives, or resolution. You just have a bunch of people running around, divided up into those who throw chairs and those who run away from chairs.

Francis Schaeffer outlines the trajectory:

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality — each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in world view — that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole.

This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different — toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. They have not seen that this world view has taken the place of the one that had previously dominated Northern European culture, including the United States, which was at least Christian in memory, even if the individuals were not individually Christian.

When the West abandoned her story (Christ as Creator, Saviour, and King), a false and fragmented one rose to fill its place (Man as Creator, Saviour, and King). The breakdown of society isn’t a flaw in the materialist program. It is the only and inevitable end. Canada’s institutions only remained tolerable insofar as her “Christian memory” endured.

Jesus Christ is the Sun. He is the central Mass which maintains order and harmony in the solar system. One cannot dispense with the Sun without reducing the heavens to incoherent dust.

And yet, that’s what we did.

We rejected the Son. We exchanged the eternal glory of the Creator with the inferior glory of the creature. We exchanged the enduring Word of Christ for the trending word of man. We exchanged his multi-generational epic with our scabby tabloid personal ads. The reason everyone is running around throwing chairs at each other is because that’s what you get when you take away Christ. He is the Story within which every character finds their origin and telos. There is no reality in which one can accept the presuppositions of materialism and still have a coherent society.

Let it go, let it die

When I was a boy, I found a mangled robin under the porch — no doubt the unhappy referee of some local cats’ lacrosse game. As boys will do, I brought it inside and insisted my parents call the vet. But the robin was beyond the reach of medicine. My parents knew, and deep down, I knew, that the appointed consummation for that lil’ guy was a hefty bag and the tailpipe of our Mazda 4-Runner.

So it is with public education.

The state needs to stop administering taxpayer transfusions to a corpse that died sometime during the night. And if the state has become too blind to see it, taxpayers are going to have to start seeing it for them. This isn’t alarmist rhetoric. This isn’t about getting even. It is the next logical step of civil disobedience. At some point we’re going to have to admit that our addiction to paying taxes has become less about what Caesar is owed, and more about what Caesar demands. It isn’t principled. It’s self-protective. And all of us are paying the price.

The other, and most important, part of this is to recover the story within which we find our duty and identity, the first of which is to repent and be reconciled to God (Acts 17:30). God says that even the plowing of the wicked is sin, which tells us that, apart from faith, even outwardly “good” deeds, like farming and education, do not honour God.

Only when we are in a right position towards God can we be in a right position towards others. Only then will husbands love their wives. Only then will wives respect their husbands. Only then will parents take up their responsibility to discipline and instruct their children in the fear of the Lord. Only then will children take up their responsibility to submit to the discipline and instruction of their parents. Only then will teachers and school boards take up their responsibility to partner with parents, not in place of parents.

Who are we going to serve? That’s the twenty-five million dollar question.