Truth, Goodness, Oak Trees, and “The Phoenix Declaration”
“Like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes of its former self, we envision an education system that emerges stronger and more vibrant, building upon our nation’s foundational values while meeting the challenges of today.”
Thus Jason Bedrick of the Heritage Foundation, the chair of the drafting committee of “The Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education,” unveiled in mid-February in Tempe, Arizona, just outside Phoenix. “Education,” Bedrick and the fourteen other drafters (including my American Enterprise Institute colleague Robert Pondiscio) remind us, “is the cornerstone of individual opportunity, family flourishing, and national prosperity.”
The brief and elegantly composed document about K–12 education emphasizes various virtues: knowledge, character, and “the good, the true, and the beautiful,” as well as virtue itself. No doubt the declaration will prove controversial in our polarized environment, but it is difficult to understand how anyone, regardless of political persuasion, could raise serious objections to something specifically intended to be “American” rather than “conservative.” Yes, some—not for the most part readers of Public Discourse—may not appreciate that there is one mention of God (children deserve to “achieve their full, God-given potential”), but as long as “In God We Trust” remains on American coins and bills, I would hope this would not prevent people from joining the list of signatories and advocates. Noting that “[s]tudents should . . . learn about America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions” is not religious advocacy; it is a simple comment that you cannot count yourself an educated person in this country if you have no knowledge of the Bible.
The declaration espouses seven principles: “parental choice and responsibility,” “transparency and accountability,” “truth and goodness,” “cultural transmission,” “character formation,” “academic excellence,” and “citizenship.” The explanations of each are straightforward: for example, the opening sentences of the first two principles are “Parents are the primary educators of their children” and “Schools, as secondary educators, should work with parents, not attempt to serve as replacements for them.”
The unveiling of the declaration took place at a conference in a hotel just a few blocks from the center of the Arizona State University campus. In addition to the rousing keynote addresses of Ryan T. Anderson and Bill McClay, sessions were held around six of the seven principles. (Because there were three sets of parallel sessions, one—“citizenship”—got the short end of the stick.) I was honored to participate most vigorously in the session that considered the third principle, “truth and goodness,” whose opening sentence is “Education must be grounded in truth.” Along with Erin Valdez (University of Austin), I acted as a respondent to remarks by Rachel Alexander Cambre (Belmont Abbey College) based on her recent white paper “Liberal Education’s Antidote to Indoctrination.” What follows are some of the remarks I made that day, based on my expertise as a linguist as well as on my experience as the father of a young child.
“Oak Trees” and Two Kinds of Goodness
Cambre’s white paper nods here and there to etymology. She points out that the word indoctrination has its root in the originally far less loaded Latin verb docēre (“to teach”) and, referring to Roosevelt Montás’s 2021 book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, notes that education is literally a “drawing out” (Latin ex/ē, “out of” + dūcere, “to lead”). (To be specific, the source of educate is not Latin ēdūcere, which has the basic meaning “to lead out,” but rather the derived ēducāre, “to bring up (children), nurture.” But this is of minimal importance right now.) As Cambre nicely puts it, “Whereas education draws out, indoctrination imports in.”
Sometimes looking into the deep background of a word is useful for understanding our current situation. Other times it is less so. Consider, for instance, the English verb wield: if you want to know why it means “use” but takes as its object only weapons and force, it helps to know that the Old English form, wealdan, meant “to have power over,” that the closely related Modern German noun Ge-walt means “power, violence,” and that these forms all go back to a prehistoric root with the meaning “rule.” That said, this same root is also part of the histories of the personal names Oswald, Ronald, and Walter—but it is unlikely that anyone can make much of this other than impress at a cocktail party.
Still, linguistic histories do often offer a window onto metaphor, and I suggest that thinking etymologically about truth is useful even though it would be unreasonable to claim that the word’s deepest associations have a direct impact on how people use it today.
The noun truth and its associated adjective true have long histories in the language, going back respectively to trēowþ and (ge)trēowe in Old English, a thousand and more years ago. Together with trust, which may be a Scandinavian loanword, they go back to *deru- or *dreu- (“be firm, solid, steadfast”) in Proto-Indo-European, the mother tongue of 5,500 or so years ago that gave rise to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, English, and many other languages. (An asterisk indicates a reconstruction rather than an actually recorded form; the precise details are to some extent disputed in this case and need not occupy us here.) And this is interesting in the present context because the same root also underlies our word tree (Old English trēow, a neuter noun homophonous with a feminine one meaning “trust, loyalty”).
Now, throughout its history in English, tree has always referred to any sort of tree. But a number of cognates of tree throughout Indo-European mean specifically “oak” or denote other hardy trees with strong roots deep in the ground that are able to withstand buffeting winds—trees whose wood makes good spears: Greek drūs (“tree, esp. oak”; cf. doru, “shaft of a spear”), as well as Old Irish daur, Welsh derwen, and Albanian d(r)ushk, all of which mean “oak.” These trees are durable—an adjective I use advisedly since its source, Latin dūrus (“hard, firm, solid”), also goes back to *dreu- (it was once something like “drūrus”).
So when we say, “Education must be grounded in truth,” the linguist in me suggests that we imagine a durable and robust (cf. Latin rōbustus, “oaken; strong,” the adjective corresponding to the noun for “oak,” rōbur) oak: “Drawing students out requires an oak tree in the ground.”
And how do oaks propagate? Through acorns, of course, which, when they are good, fall into fertile soil, and, provided they are not eaten by animals, turn eventually into full-grown oaks. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, we might say that the larger the forest of oaks, the greater the dominion of truth.
There is more to say about truth and goodness. A curiosity about the word true is that it has two quite distinct meanings. The one that the drafters of the Phoenix Declaration were surely imagining is “conforming to reality,” as in “a true story.” But the other meaning—incidentally, the only meaning of the adjective’s cognates elsewhere in the Germanic languages: e.g., German treu—is older and remains important: “faithful, loyal,” as in “a true friend.” The same split is found in good as well. We speak of believing things “on good authority” and “with good reason” while also prizing our “good friends.”
The question then arises: what do we do when the two kinds of truth and goodness come into conflict, especially in education? How are we to act when someone is a good teacher—someone who is a true buddy to a child in his or her care—but who at the same time says things in the classroom that are untrue and not capital-G Good in a deep way?
Last year, my wife and I visited a nursery school classroom where the teacher went by “Mx.” (rather than “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss”) and had posted signs about “their” pronouns: “they/them.” We left the visit knowing that we would not send our daughter to that school. And yet we did not feel entirely comfortable since we agreed that the teacher, though actively espousing something we do not consider Good, did herself seem good: a genuinely sweet and caring person.
There was some disagreement among the conferees in Tempe about how parents, administrators, and (in the case of a public school) the government should respond to such a situation. Broadly speaking, conservatives and libertarians approached the matter differently—as they did other matters, too. Unsurprisingly, then, the Phoenix Declaration does not have all the answers. But it is an important volley in the restoration of truth, goodness, and many other necessary qualities to K–12 education in America.
Image by stone36 and licensed via Adobe Stock.