I know it’s liable to drive tribalists crazy, but the truth about education is that it is both conservative and liberal, both traditionalist and progressive—always has been and always will be. And that’s okay.

I’ve always been a “you need two wings to fly” kind of person, so that idea doesn’t bother me much. It bothers a whole lot of other people, though. We’re in a “missiles over planes” mindset about pretty much everything these days: whatever it is, it must be one thing, aimed in one direction, fixed relentlessly on its target, with a mission to destroy something rather than carry someone to a new place.

Unfortunately for them, and perhaps fortunately for the world, our opinion about a thing doesn’t change its actual nature.

Regardless of one’s political mindset, the fact is that education is conservative and traditionalist at its core, and to pretend otherwise is silly. The point of teaching content—any content—is to connect our children to their culture and history so that they can continue the story that our forebears started and that we have been a part of. It’s a connection to our past, whether we’re teaching actual history or something like science, literature, or even math. The textbook is a collection of the things we’ve learned as a society, that we’ve decided (collectively) to keep in our brains for another generation.

Education allows each of us to be smarter than any of us; it allows us to access the history of thought, of experimentation, of discovery. The ability to access a wide and deep world of other brains, and not have to discover everything by ourselves, individually, through trial and error, repeatedly in each generation, is the superpower that has made humans what we are. 

But education is also progressive. Maybe not in every time and in every place, but certainly here in our country. Our Founders read history to find out how other people in other places had solved problems similar to the ones they were facing, and they used what they learned to forge a new path for themselves—to do it better and to make it last. They were scientists and tinkers and optimists at heart.

We have students read novels about problems and conflicts and sadness and pain—not to bum them out and make them feel that the world is terrible, but to help them develop empathy beyond what they can see and hear, and to build within them a desire to help others and improve the world.

Yes—improve the world. Because the desire to make the world anew is our birthright as Americans (and sometimes our tragic flaw). If you ban those books and squelch those topics and decide that the Precious Flowers in the classroom can’t handle direct sunlight, you’re not going to grow very hardy plants. If you believe in American Exceptionalism—if you believe that this country has a unique job to do in the world—then you’d better make sure you raise children who understand the world, and who know how to engage with it—in all of its glory and ugliness. Antifragile students who can weather the storms of life and keep growing.

A med school professor who made a speech to my freshman class, the first day of college, spoke of the early European explorers and the importance of finding a point on the horizon past which you know nothing, and sailing straight for it. That—he said—is what education is all about. That—he said—is what this country is all about.

And yes, those explorers did terrible things when they reached what they thought was a new world, because they brought their traditions with them, which included all their limitations and ignorance and bigotry. And that part needs to be taught, too. The blessings and the curses. The desire to make a new world and the tragedy of importing your old hatreds into it.

Never stop asking. Never stop learning. Never be satisfied that you know everything you need to know. Never assume the land you stand on is the promised land simply because it’s where you are, or that you are its savior simply because you’re You (any more than you should assume that the land you stand on is cursed, or that you are a devil, simply because of your history).

The real promise is the fire that drives you forward.

But don’t go forward empty-handed…or empty-headed. Learn the past. Learn from the past. And build on it. Conserve…and progress. 

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