Summer History & Heritage — #3

“A Wise Provincialism in Education”

Thomas Fleming in The Morality of Everyday Life warns of the dangers of devoting our
lives to universal abstractions like “the rights of man,” “compassion for suffering
humanity,” or “international relief and development.” Liberalism, generally, has made
much of such things, including the goal of “educational excellence for all” by means of
state standards and subsidies. What gets lost in the lofty rhetoric, invariably, is what we
might call local patriotism which, with its communal freedom and network of personal
loyalties, serves as the true matrix of virtue. In the excerpt below, Harvard’s Josiah
Royce (1855-1916) is the source for my title, “A Wise Provincialism in Education.”

Internationalists ask us to sacrifice family and friends and all our lesser loyalties to the
global idea. Josiah Royce, by contrast, made the principle of loyalty the basis of his
moral philosophy. Although Royce was a Harvard philosopher, he had learned a great
deal from his mother, whose diary of a westward trek he published. On that trek his
mother noticed that even strangers on a wagon train or in a mining camp could develop
into a little community whose members, loyal to the group, treated one another with
respect.

According to Royce, we begin by accepting the various petty responsibilities that may
be thrust upon us and, in the course of our lives, assume more and more loyalties. The
ultimate principle he called “loyalty to loyalty,” by which he meant a sort of Golden Rule
of obligation: In making decisions, we are to consider whether our acts will augment or
diminish the loyalty not just of ourselves, but of other people, even our adversaries.

At the very beginning of American philanthropy, Royce applied his principle to the
Carnegie Foundation’s effort to raise the standards of American colleges, and he
rejected the foundation’s universalism in favor of “a wise provincialism in education.” He
was all in favor of high standards, but there was no need for all the colleges in America
to have the same standards.

Royce feared the centralization of standards and power that would inevitably subvert
the lesser provincial loyalties that are always (whether in classical Greece, medieval
Italy, or frontier America) the foundation of a robust moral and cultural life. From this
point of view, there is an inevitable clash between loyalty to tradition and family and the
obedience that is owed to the state, especially when the state is bent on increasing its
power.

Today, it is to be lamented, such common sense may be lost on us. Perhaps we don’t
really trust our neighbors and thus prefer the supposed-quality that comes from
supposed-experts via central planning. But neither the UN, nor DC, nor the State of
Ohio can teach our children. It is doubtful they even care about them, other than as
taxpayers-to-be (tomorrow’s urban workforce living by mass consumption). Centralized
schooling (like most centralized things) can only enslave and impoverish us.