The Missing Institution

Why Our Young People Are Not Flourishing

What if many of the ills of our society are due to the fact that we are missing a key institution for the improvement of the human condition? What if young people need to be raised in healthy moral ecologies that are becoming increasingly rare? What if we do not have the institutions we need to transmit expertise in living a well lived life?

Many people will acknowledge the existence of extraordinary teachers, such as Jaime Escalante (immortalized in the film “Stand and Deliver” as the teacher who created one of the best AP calculus programs nationwide in an East L.A. school), or Marva Collins, founder of Westside Preparatory School in Chicago. Because none of these educators have succeeded in scaling their successes, the conventional wisdom is that they are idiosyncratic pedagogical geniuses and that their work cannot be replicated.

An alternative interpretation for the failure to replicate pedagogical genius might focus on the fact that there are no institutions in our society that support the replication of pedagogical success. Teaching is fundamentally a performance art – real time interactions in chaotic and complex human situations. There are no institutions in our society that provide for an environment in which master practitioners of this performance art systematically transfer their expertise.

Instead, academic departments of education have an effective monopoly on teacher training. In order to become a professor of education one must complete a Ph.D. and publish a series of research articles. The ability to produce academic research articles is not related to the ability to practice a pedagogical performance art. The analogy that I find compelling is musicianship – while there is nothing wrong with the academic study of music, one would never imagine that academic courses taught by music scholars provide the optimal path to becoming a performing artist. We don’t require Placido Domingo or Adele to take courses taught by music Ph.D.s in order to perform. There is no reason to believe that there is any correlation between being able to ace an exam on music theory and being a dazzling vocalist. Why should we imagine that such a correlation exists in education?

There are brief student-teaching assignments at the end of many teacher credentialing programs, but they are the lost stepchild of an education department – one doesn’t climb the academic career ladder for creating a better student teacher program. Moreover, even these programs are designed and controlled by education professors rather than by virtuoso teachers.

Imagine, instead, if Escalante had been a great martial arts teacher. He might have established his own school. Students from around the world would have flocked to learn directly from him. Gradually, some of his best students would open up their own schools. They would prominently display their lineage, the fact that they had studied directly with Escalante. People who were interested in becoming serious about a particular martial arts form would ask around to discover who were the best teachers. Those schools could charge a premium. Sometimes such schools would trace their lineage back through several generations of great teachers.

I describe the fact that there is no Escalante School of Mathematics Teaching as “The Missing Institution.” In the absence of government and academic domination of education for the past century, we would have seen the creation of many such training centers founded by brilliant educators, each designed to transmit their artistry.

Indeed, the Montessori and Waldorf educational systems were each designed by inspired educators; their work has existed outside of the system for nearly a century, despite considerable hostility from the establishment. Both have their own teacher training and school accreditation systems. This demonstrates that distinctive pedagogies spontaneously generate distinctive teacher training systems when they are able to do so. “The Missing Institution” is not missing in the case of Montessori and Waldorf (though in each case the training institutions are imperfect and financially precarious).

KIPP Academies succeed in part because of a year-long internal administrator’s training program. Thus despite the fact that they are working completely within the dominant standard, they have found it necessary to create a small version of “The Missing Institution” with respect to educational leadership. Hi Tech High is a celebrated charter school focusing on project-based learning. It is unique in that it has been allowed to license teachers through an internal training system. It too has been spontaneously driven to create “The Missing Institution.” The Comprehensive School Mathematics Program (CSMP) was a well-funded public school mathematics innovation in the 1970s that was dropped by public schools because it required too much teacher development. Its developers have since created a chain of private mathematics teaching centers where they can ensure quality by means of more extensive training of teachers – yet another example of the spontaneous creation of “The Missing Institution.”

The absence of “The Missing Institution” has been especially harmful for children whose parents are least likely to model intellectual engagement and other species of cultural capital at home. These are the children who do not have access to the crucial cultural capital needed to succeed in life. It is critical that we create pipelines of talent to improve the lives of those children. Technological innovations in education will have the least significant impact on underprivileged children precisely because the human relationships that are key to motivation, meaning, and dignity cannot be transmitted by technology alone. “The Missing Institution” is essential to transmit crucial cultural capital across the boundaries of class and ethnicity.

The Importance of The Missing Institution

We are missing an institution critical to human flourishing. The absence of this institution is a fundamental cause of much of the world’s misery, particularly in prosperous nations.

The missing institution is a system for enculturating young people to live flourishing lives.

“Schooling” has prevented the emergence of this critical enculturation function. Schooling, managed by the government, is a model which is now ubiquitous around the world. Despite benefits for a few, on balance schooling has been a costly mistake for the many. It has been a costly mistake because it has prevented the emergence of new micro-cultures of virtue appropriate to the rapid social, moral, and spiritual transformations that have rocked cultures around the world.

The “grammar of schooling” dictates that roughly from age 6 through age 18 the dominant institution in a child’s life is one organized primarily by grade-level sequential academic instruction: 3rd grade math, 7th grade language arts, high school chemistry, etc. This instruction is predominantly “taught” by means of state-certified teachers who are managed by state-certified principals who report to state-certified superintendents who answer to elected school boards. For the most part, the state functionaries are required to “cover” state-mandated curricular objectives using state-approved textbooks. The results are then evaluated using state-approved “assessments.” This is how we’ve chosen to raise our young.

By contrast, consider the fact that in traditional cultures young people were raised learning the work of the adults of their gender. Boys typically learned to hunt and fish, girls to gather. They all learned the rituals and sacred stories of their tribes. They typically were unaware of other beliefs or rituals except perhaps for a fragment or two from neighboring tribes.

In the interpretation of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, until the 20th century all children around the world were raised in a rich virtue culture. The cultural template for how to be a good person in one’s society was well-known to all whether one was raised in Confucian China, Protestant Prussia, or Sufi Senegal. Unbeknownst to most of us, by the late 20th century we embarked on the most frightening educational experiment imaginable -- one in which no particular cultural norms served as the dominant educational foundation for young people.

The unseen corollary to the grammar of schooling is the absence of an adequate grammar of meaning to replace traditional systems of meaning. As students have been raised in a world in which traditional institutions, including religion, family, the community, and common moral norms have steadily diminished in influence, their most formative hours take place in an institution in which it has become increasingly challenging to create a coherent moral community. The combination of political governance (e.g. school policies set by elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels) with bureaucratic administration (e.g. hiring, firing, and promotion set according to impersonal, morally neutral procedural rules) has prevented the creation of new, relevant, applicable moral communities. In the absence of a coherent moral universe, in the absence of socially enforced and universally respected moral norms, many schools have left young people without meaning, purpose, and direction.

At the same time, there is no one “correct path.” Some of us want and need intellectual freedom. Others want and need the sacred, an afterlife, religion, custom, and tradition. In plain fact, all of us need both polarities to a greater or lesser extent. In fact, there are infinite pathways combining these aspects of human existence, and the dichotomy itself is false. Instead of schooling, we need institutions designed to optimize human flourishing. These institutions should provide a coherent template for developing healthy habits and attitudes.

They should provide young people with distinctive models of human excellence embedded in particular cultural ideals. These models of excellence should be shared by all faculty and staff, the faculty and staff should exemplify key practices as much as possible, and the literature and history of these institutions should support and enforce the cultural norms to which the institution aspires. Hiring, firing, and promotion, along with curriculum, behavioral norms, heroes, symbols, rituals, etc. should all be shaped by a distinctive moral vision. These “objective standards of the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty” should be perceived as “objective” within the learning community.

Teens need to be raised within communities that support an interpersonal reality based on shared norms of excellence. While traditional religious schools will continue to provide the support needed by many, we also need to allow for the creation of (mostly new) educational institutions that support such innovated virtue communities.

We do not have such institutions. “Character education” through lesson plans at schools should be regarded as comparable to verbal descriptions of music that we have never experienced. Day to day immersion in real, living cultural norms is completely unlike verbal descriptions of “grit” or “honesty.” Exhortations of whatever sort, in the context of a morally relativistic social environment, are a charade. The primary moral influence on most teens at present is pop culture, social media, and gaming, not their school environment.

If one compares the possibility of immersion in a culture in which these human characteristics are both a daily and lifelong norm of human excellence with “lessons” at “school” that “cover” “learning objectives.” then one begins to see the insanity of our current approach. The “grit” of a Japanese samurai, Mandan braves, or Spartan warriors would never be developed by means of “lesson plans” at school.

Angela Duckworth’s “Character Lab,” funded by Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. recommends exhortations such as,

Celebrate it. When you see grit, draw attention to it: “Your work this past quarter has demonstrated enormous dedication. I know it wasn’t always easy.” Praise passion: “You’re so into this! That’s just awesome!”

Compare with the approach to cultivating grit through the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan,

The younger men generally underwent torture to demonstrate their bravery. Long wooden skewers were pushed through cuts in the skin on their backs or chests, and they were hung by ropes from beams. Their bodies were weighted down with buffalo skulls hung from other skewers thrust into their thighs and calves. The torment was extreme, but crying out was a sign of cowardice, and those best able to stand the pain became Mandan leaders.

Obviously we won’t and shouldn’t return to the voluntary tortures of the Mandan. At the same time, if we are serious about character education, a focus on experiential learning that goes beyond Duckworth’s “Character Lab” seems like a worthy aspiration.

I don’t know the extent to which programs such as Outward Bound or NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) can inculcate worthwhile character traits, but they certainly beat cheesy videos and banal praise. Martial arts academies often have dedicated virtue cultures based on the moral and disciplinary traditions of founders based in a cultivated practice (this critique of “traditional martial arts” includes traditionalist rhetoric). CrossFit is a more contemporary culture of discipline that has spread widely among adults. Scouting is a more traditional pathway with a hundred years tradition. Regardless of the tradition within which discipline is developed, what all of these kinds of practices share are common cultures of commitments to disciplinary ideals.

But one way or another getting kids out of desks in a classroom to exert themselves beyond what they believe is possible is likely to be more effective than “lessons” on grit with the cheesy video curricula.

All of this leads me back to the “Missing Institution.” Education became a state-managed institution during roughly the same time period the world became secularized. Governments began managing education in the 19th century, starting with what we would now call elementary school. It was only towards the middle of the 20th century that public high school became the norm. Thus when we embarked on government education in the 19th century, around the world we were still religious cultures, deeply steeped in tradition.

In the 20th century, first the intellectuals became more aggressively secular and then gradually by the end of the 20th century education, journalism, academia, and entertainment had all become aggressively secular. At the same time, electronic stimulations, TV, video, gaming, the internet, social media, and now VR/AR took over the lives of our children. Teens now spend about 8 hours per day on digital media. If they were to get 8 hours of sleep and go to school for 6-7 hours, that leaves 1-2 hours for grooming, physical activity, family and face-to-face relationships with friends.

A virtue culture that empowers young people to restrain impulses on behalf of longer term goals is a sine qua non of human happiness and well-being. The notion that we can get there by means of exhortation (“You’re so into this! That’s just awesome”) is delusional. If our tech billionaires are funding Ivy League professors to produce this curriculum content, then it is time to start over again.

If education -- if human development -- had remained firmly in control of families and communities, rather than state bureaucracies informed by secular intellectuals, what kinds of institutions might have developed? What kinds of institutions may yet be developed?

A version of this article was published as “The Missing Institution” in New Pathways in Teacher Preparation and Certification edited by Eric Wearne, Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis, November 2023.

Photo by Robin Schreiner