Is The Soul Of America Anti-Education?
I’ve often felt in 2025 that I’m beating against the current, trying to stick with the schedule I planned, but repeatedly being borne back into the past — both to the polemics that drove
at its inception in 2022 and the long arcs of history that I’ve often mined for answers to why American universities continue to struggle. When I read reports about the federal government withholding $1 billion from Cornell and $790 million from Northwestern in research funding, as the government has also done for Columbia and UPenn, I can’t help but feel impatient with the emphasis on the Trump Administration as the cause of higher ed’s ills. A piece like ’s essay on the side effects of ignorance makes me want to travel further back in American history to show that anti-intellectualism has been baked into our nation from the start.So in place of my usual craft essay this week, I’m updating a piece from September 2022 — not merely to state the problem, as I mostly did then, but to grapple with what might be done about anti-education culture going forward, if anything. As Slouka says, we are now reaping the whirlwind of ignorance, borne of long-standing attacks on public education. Perhaps the suffering that results will reawaken an appreciation for an education based on knowledge, not mere skill acquisition and business application. But the odds of this happening are quite steep, because even when education has enjoyed more public support, the underlying attitudes that we’re now watching run roughshod through our government and civic life have run just as deep, even if they have not always manifested in the full-throated sneer now on display. Winning back the White House in 2028 would do little to address American skepticism about universities as crucibles of knowledge and truth seeking.
Take, for instance, one of President Biden’s signature initiatives. Before his federal student loan forgiveness plan was struck down earlier this year in federal court, more than 5 million Americans saw their college debts erased. The 2022 plan was controversial from the start. Either you thought that helping people struggling with college debt was a good thing, regardless of how you financed your own college education, or you thought that you were being asked to bail other people out of debts they assumed of their own free will.
But that’s not really what people disagreed about then or what they disagree about now. I saw this ad three years ago while watching college football, and while it initially shocked me, it strikes closer to the heart of the debate about higher education in America than any of the talking points about budgets.
“Tell Congress: Stop Biden’s Bailout for Rich Kids” was produced by the American Action Network, which claims to promote “center-right policies based on the principles of freedom, limited government, American exceptionalism, and strong national security.” There are reasonable arguments to be made from that platform. William J. Bennett made one of them in his 1987 op-ed “Our Greedy Colleges,” where he argued that increases in federal financial aid only encourage increases in tuition and other student fees. Research shows that the Bennett Hypothesis has only accurately predicted the behavior of for-profit institutions. Still, a lot people (including me) continue to wonder whether it is good policy to pay down student debt without addressing the root causes of rising tuition, such as administrative bloat, the demand for posh facilities, and dwindling state and federal support for universities.
But the American Action Network doesn’t try to make a reasonable argument. You can hear it in the sneering tone and see it in the actors’ smirking faces. The punch line, “College is on me,” is dishonest and the producers know it. Who thinks that $10K in debt forgiveness goes anywhere near covering the full cost of anyone’s education these days? You’d hear the same sneer if anyone had the temerity to propose renewing the state funding that made public universities affordable to many generations of Americans in what my kids now call the 1900s. What you get from the ad is an honest expression of American anti-intellectualism. People used to be too polite to say these things out loud, but you hear it twice in 60-seconds: it’s those struggling artists and theater majors that working people really don’t want their money going to support.
I’m still haunted by this ad for two reasons. First, it expresses a disdain for learning that is as old as European settlement in North America. It is alarming to hear that loathing expressed as unabashedly as a slur. Especially because my oldest child has found theatre to be life raft on the tempestuous sea of middle school. But even more than this, I’m troubled by the incoherence of the message. When you peel back the sarcasm, it is very difficult to say what the ad is for.
Outrage in search of purpose is a deadly thing. This, too, is the whirlwind we now reap.
Storytellers and fiddlers
American hostility toward art and literature can be traced directly to Puritan New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne captured the sentiment in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, where his narrator imagines what his Puritan ancestors would think of him becoming a writer.
No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine — if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success — would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life, — what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, — may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”
Anyone still trying to teach the arts and humanities in high school or college will recognize these words — worthless, disgraceful, degenerate — as descriptions of how their work is often perceived by the general public. Ironically the same contempt and narrow definition of what is serviceable to mankind allows the corporate university to keep whittling away at the liberal arts, even as corporate jobs are increasingly hard to get and even harder to keep during waves of layoffs.
I once heard from a former student that House of Light, a book of poems by Mary Oliver that we read for a course in nature writing, helped him get through a divorce. While working through his grief, he took Oliver’s book with him on hikes where the land and Oliver’s particular way of seeing it helped him feel hopeful again. Judge for yourself whether this meditation, which brings House of Light to a close, is serviceable to humanity.
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down out of the freezing sky with its depths of light, like an angel, or a buddha with wings, it was beautiful and accurate, striking the snow and whatever was there with a force that left the imprint of the tips of its wings — five feet apart — and the grabbing thrust of its feet, and the indentation of what had been running through the white valleys of the snow — and then it rose, gracefully, and flew back to the frozen marshes, to lurk there, like a little lighthouse, in the blue shadows — so I thought: maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow — that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light — in which we are washed and washed out of our bones. Mary Oliver
President Biden often claimed that we were battling for the “soul of the nation,” which is much the sentiment now expressed on the White House landing page. When I hear rhetoric like that, I think of the year 1628. The Pilgrims had only been established at Plymouth for about eight years. There was no nation yet, just a smattering of colonies. Not far from Plymouth, a competing colony called Merrymount began to flourish. Its leader, Thomas Morton, had convinced many servants to desert their masters, and they lived together in an egalitarian collective that supported itself by trading guns, ammunition, and whiskey with neighboring Native communities.
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, felt that Morton was endangering the Pilgrims by arming people they wished to subdue, but he also thought Morton attracted lowlifes. Bradford even referred to Morton’s band as the “scum of the countrie.” When Morton constructed an enormous maypole to honor the Anglican saints Philip and James, the Pilgrims mistook the revelry for idolatry.1 It did not help that the Maypole dancers had written a poem for the occasion riddled with mythological allusions. The Pilgrims cut down the maypole, imprisoned Morton, and sent him back to England, which is how one was canceled in those days, if not by hanging, beheading, or burning at the stake.
Bradford believed that Morton was an atheist who wanted to revive pagan traditions, such as bacchanalian orgies. For his part, Morton scorned “the precise Separatists” for being too uneducated to understand the symbolism of his festival. Morton was, in fact, blending a traditional Anglican ceremony with the Roman celebration of Maia, goddess of spring, for whom the month of May is named. The point of Morton’s maypole was to have fun, let off steam, and raise the morale of young bachelors who found their lives in the New World lonely and bleak.2 But to the Pilgrims, poetic allusions to Maia, Oedipus, Triton, Proteus, and other mythological figures represented “unnecessary learning.”
I worry about this for my children, because I don’t think it’s really a question of college affordability that we’re debating. It’s the Puritan grandfather versus Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Bradford versus Thomas Morton. It’s the Edith Hamilton and Emily Wilson volumes that I bought for my daughter that won’t ever appear on her college syllabi. The real fear for some Americans is that more students might choose to study art and theater if they really had the freedom to do so without enormous financial risk. Anyone who learns enough about history and language to perform as a Shakespeare character will be difficult to manipulate politically and will favor a more inclusive society.3
If the stage can be framed, like the maypole, as the playground of degenerates or as a frivolous pastime for rich people who pay for it on their own dime, it can be effectively written out of the soul of the nation.
Anger in search of purpose
The characters in the AAN ad imagine that their hard-earned money is being wasted on rich kids who are trifling with art and theater. I can understand that resentment, as factually incorrect as it is, but what troubles me more is that none of these characters seems happy. One says he spends more time working on cars than with his own family, another claims to be breaking his back mowing lawns, and the third is working two jobs where, by her own admission, she guzzles coffee to keep her strength up. If they had formerly been employed in lucrative manufacturing jobs that had been replaced by automation, these characters would be more comprehensible. I can’t quite tell if they represent people who never had other opportunities or people who truly believe that they made their own beds and ought to lie in them.
American suspicion of education, according to George Packer, is rooted in a belief that “the authentic heart of democracy beats hardest in common people who work with their hands.” But the characters in this ad are not proud farmers or loggers or entrepreneurs. They seem to feel stuck in dead-end work that no one appreciates. The only virtue they associate with their labor is the right to keep every penny to themselves. If these characters were real people, an affordable college education would be the best way for their kids to avoid a similar fate, and a community college degree might even improve their own prospects in midlife. But they seem driven by a kind of spite: I got left behind, so you shouldn’t get a chance if I didn’t. It’s hard to imagine them feeling any differently about students who go on to pursue ostensibly more practical careers in law, medicine, or business.
We all chip in a little for the upkeep of our shared roads and municipal buildings. Why not for broader opportunities for our young people than most families can provide themselves?
The AAN advertisement captures a simmering economic resentment in America that, as yet, remains too incoherent to support real mobilization. The January 6 riot also remains a mystery to most political experts, who recognize that the rioters expressed rancor without any clear purpose or plan. What are you rebelling against? Whaddya got?
Anger like that typically finds a target if it doesn’t have one at the outset. In Puritan New England, it was independent women, Quakers, slaves, and those who dared criticize the religious courts. If Thomas Morton had still been around in 1692, he would assuredly have been hanged as a witch. In twentieth-century Germany, the primary targets for working-class anger were Jews, but the list of victims grew to include anyone the Nazis viewed with scorn: people with disabilities, queer people, and dissidents of all kinds. Contempt as obvious as that in the screenshots below is a precursor to violence.
What education has been and could be
When I finally decided to go to college (I very nearly chose a career in stenography instead), I chose a Christian school in Tennessee. My beliefs were challenged there, but not by intimidation or force. Instead I learned to recognize the weakness of confirmation bias and ad hominem arguments, to weigh context and evidence carefully, and above all to be humble about the conclusions I drew. My opinions were works in progress, not immovable truths. I’d been raised to stick to my principles no matter what, but college taught me that changing my mind based on new information could be a better measure of character. And that’s where I learned about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Morton.
I also learned about a great many pro-education Americans, including the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, whose sermons read like philosophical treatises. If you’d like a reading challenge, I’d encourage you to tackle Edwards’s “A Divine and Supernatural Light.” It is rather astounding that Edwards could deliver a text like this to a congregation in 1734 and not only expect most of his parishioners to understand it, but to understand it so well that they could apply his teaching personally.
Compare that reality to a recent essay, “The Average College Student Today,” which tracks with what most of my colleagues now working even at reputable state universities and private colleges say. Not only are many students not reading, they aren’t even buying the books. So before there is any meaningful conversation to be had about debt forgiveness or college affordability, Americans will need to believe in education again: in public, in private, at the family dinner table, in the quiet of their hearts before they go to sleep.
What are the rewards of a quality education? One of them is simply the ability to read and understand. Whole worlds open up with advanced literacy. Take this passage from Edwards. How many college students today would comprehend it well enough to be capable of an accurate paraphrase?
It is out of reason’s province to perceive the beauty or loveliness of anything: such a perception does not belong to that faculty. Reason’s work is to perceive truth and not excellency. It is not ratiocination that gives men the perception of the beauty and amiableness of a countenance, though it may be many ways indirectly an advantage to it. Yet it is no more reason that immediately perceives it, than it is reason that perceives the sweetness of honey: it depends on the sense of the heart. — Reason may determine that a countenance is beautiful to others, it may determine that honey is sweet to others, but it will never give me a perception of its sweetness.
It was the privilege of my life to talk with young people about passages like these. The distinction between truth and excellency is no trifling matter. And isn’t it true that people from many different walks of life and belief systems can appreciate the mystery inherent in beauty, how there is no more rational accounting for what catches the eye of one beholder compared to another than there is for how humor tickles one person and leaves another cold? Edwards makes a dazzling argument throughout his sermon about the interdependence of reason and spiritual awakening, how the two can work together, but how rational judgements can only take you so far. A burst of supernatural light might come after a rigorous search, but it detonates beyond the reach of a reasoning mind.
One purpose of education is to carry thoughts like this within us, turning them over, living with them until they become as real as one of our limbs.
Thomas Jefferson was another pro-education American. He founded the University of Virginia in 1819 as “a public university designed to advance human knowledge, educate leaders and cultivate an informed citizenry.” Jefferson didn’t presume to know what form that knowledge might take and he was quite content to let the informed citizenry debate freely. In an act that many would have found heretical had they known about it, Jefferson cut portions of the New Testament out of his Bible that he did not agree with. Jefferson said very little publicly about his private beliefs, but I would have loved to hear him speak with Jonathan Edwards about the biblical text. That, too, is what education has been and could be. In fact, it was precisely what I tried to encourage students to do by placing texts into conversation with one another, reading against the grain of one with insights from another.
Some educators would now say that the only salient fact about Jefferson and Edwards is that they were both slaveowners. There’s no need to sweep this fact beneath the rug of their historical significance or to minimize the contradiction it posed in their lives, since both men assuredly prized their integrity. But can we say that they were nothing but colonizers? Or that their devotion to education (in Edwards’s case, working as a minister and teacher with the neighboring Mohican Nation) is little more than an expression of white supremacy? Those who would splash red paint on statues of Jefferson and Edwards or paint “Slaver” over their faces, concluding that there is nothing more to learn about either of them, are just as anti-education as those who think texts are relics that now serve no purpose but to train ChatGPT.
I wonder if Edwards ever learned anything about the Mohican origin stories, if he ever came to understand how firmly storytelling is centered in the shamanic tradition. There already was an American literature before European settlement; many indigenous cultures held what later came to be known as the humanities in the highest esteem. Classic stories like “Rip Van Winkle” are really variations on trickster tales (Irving admits as much in his footnotes). The sophistication of indigenous education is clear in transcribed speeches, such as Chief Seattle’s, and in the writings of Ohíye S'a (also known as Charles Eastman and Zikala-Ša (aka Gertrude Bonnin).4 When American education has approached its potential, it has embraced this rich history.
We would not have Phillis Wheatley’s poetry if it were not for her private education. What conclusions might we draw from the paradoxes that drive her poems, including “On Being Brought From Africa to America”? Anne Bradstreet’s father educated her privately and allowed her to read freely from his library. Bradstreet’s education was thoroughly patriarchal, and in many respects she was a model Puritan, yet she became the first published poet in the New World and defended her vocation by appealing to the Greeks. How many Wheatleys and Bradstreets never found their voice for lack of a quality public education? How many geniuses like them have we lost?
Indeed, it is just this thought — the recognition that there is that of God in everyone, and that education is how we all benefit from supernatural light that manifests in each individual — that has made Quakers one of the most consistently pro-education groups in America. Many of my most memorable educational experiences have followed the Quaker principles of open conversation, careful listening, and radical respect. This was how I preferred to teach, creating an intellectual commons where the unique intelligence that every student brought to class had the potential to enrich the group. There were prerequisites for this model, such as doing the assigned reading and thinking about it for a beat or two before walking in the door, but when the conditions are right — when everyone believes in the value of meditating together on a text — the results are transformative. I still hear from students about the echoes of those moments in their lives.
Some of my favorite teaching memories, which seem so distant now, came in the early 2000s, when the United States partnered with Middle Eastern countries (Syria, Morocco, Oman, Lebanon, and many others) to bring international student leaders to American colleges and universities. Most of those students came from privileged backgrounds, but unlike their entitled American counterparts, they saw education as a gift and the rigorous standards I set as welcome challenges. All of them were Muslim, and I saw firsthand how the rigor of their faith practice brought discipline to their studies. Even the sleepy farm kids who just wanted to check my class off their requirements so they could graduate woke up during those discussions. I don’t think any of us ever thought about American identity the same way again. That, too, is what education has been and could be.
Try this syllogism on for size: If the soul of America includes First Nations, and if First Nations relied on storytelling as the vehicle for cultural education and memory, then the soul of America is pro-education.
For every Puritan there has been a Quaker, and if not in equal number, then in equal resolve. One might even say that the Puritans had their share of Jonathan Edwardses and Anne Bradstreets. There have been Jeffersons and Franklins in every age, questers who loved truth more than wealth. Not one American university was built, initially, to be a skills factory. Literature was so popular in the early twentieth century that the Armed Forces made pocket editions of novels for soldiers to carry with them Over There. So while the commitment to public education in K-12 or in affordable pathways to college might have waxed and waned over the years, I cannot say that America is anti-education at its core.
We’ve just forgotten what education has been and could still be. We’ve forgotten the rewards it can yield for all of us, even if we don’t go to college ourselves.
One way to remember what education can be is to study history. That’s how we can say with confidence that the people at the American Action Network are like William Bradford. They don’t want anyone getting the kind of education I did, even if they pay for it themselves.
I prefer Thomas Morton’s notion that learning ought to be for everyone, that it should lift us out of our individual lives into celebrations of both commonality and difference, even stories with no obvious practical application other than delight, such as the story of how the month of May got her pagan name.
More essays on higher ed ⬇️
Thanks to your generous support, I earned $715 from Substack subscriptions in Q1. I’m donating 5% of my earnings to local nonprofits throughout the year, and I’ll share receipts as proof of good faith. I’m delighted to support Out of the Cold for Q1.5
Hawthorne wrote a satiric short story about Puritan ignorance: “The May-Pole of Merry Mount.”
I’m not holding Morton up as a hero of any sort, because he clearly enjoyed inciting controversy and might just as reasonably be described as an anarchist as an advocate of democracy. Even so, it’s hard to see him as quite the threat that the Puritans imagined.
This last point is what puzzles me about the “classical” model of higher education that Christopher Rufo and other conservatives have proposed. Shakespeare is central to any traditional definition of the Western canon, yet it is nearly impossible to read, comprehend, and enjoy Shakespeare without liberal-mindedness (about wordplay, sex, even social authority).
The painful memories these two writers carried from their boarding schools is an inescapable part of their stories. This, too, should be what a well-rounded education teaches about national history — that education can be used as a tool to silence, to divide, and to colonize people who already possess a rich literacy. We should never forget Richard Henry Pratt’s chilling rationale for forcing young people into boarding schools: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Big Sky Insights, LLC is the entity I formed in 2022 to merge my Substack writing with my coaching business.
Outstanding piece, thanks for writing it.
I'm conflicted on your phrase "advanced literacy" you are clearly right, I doubt the average graduate of a typically underfunded high school could parse that. And I found the primary difference between teaching authors like Arendt to students in a large public university compared to a highly selective private was that most of my time in the former was spent on translation and comprehension, while in the latter on substantive debate. But should we hold that as an *advanced* skill? Or should we push high schools to do better? While it risks a certain elitism that i generally dislike, one advantage of the old "gifted and talented" programs was identity building around arts, language and inquiry. Kids got status and self worth for being smart. The cost, of course, was that identification of such is fraught and often biased, particularly in heterogeneous classrooms. But finding a way to instill early a sense of positive identification with being smart seems a necessary prerequisite to escaping the mess we are in now, and the technological tide of mind numbing social media crossed with GPT as a substitute for craft is hard to resist.
On the deep anti-intellectualism amongst the right-wing working class, I think much of it has to do with a fundamentalist religious grounding. My mother thinks the biggest mistake of my attending college was that it educated religion out of me, and she's harped on that repeatedly to the one other kid (her grandchild, but long story) to go, i think effectively robbing her of what her college experience could have been. If you believe the Earth is 6000 years old, that even the most poetic elements of the psalms are to be taken literally, that education is memorized chapter and verse, then Universities are a threat. I gave her a copy of the social theory text we wrote at one point, and all she took was affront that Marx was included (so was Adam smith and Locke, for the record). Our former 5th grade teacher just informed me they are taking a trip to the Noah's Ark theme park/propaganda site...that's not a milieu in search of complex realities. That brand of religious right sees task-training as the only value in education, which you really do not need a liberal arts university to do. And that feeds directly into the cost-benefit calculation and sales pitch of STEM and business education at university. So it feels more and more like an uphill battle.
“Outrage in search of purpose is a deadly thing. This, too, is the whirlwind we now reap.”
Indeed…and we surrounded by it 🙄