The conservative movement, having spent forty years dismantling the institutions that once taught a child what to love, has just discovered that someone still has to do it, and its answer is a university in Malibu and a standardized test. In “Yes, We Should Teach Students What to Think,” Pepperdine president Jim Gash and Classic Learning Test founder Jeremy Wayne Tate argue that the old educational saw — “We teach students how to think, not what to think” — is a dodge. Education, they insist, always forms character; neutrality is a myth; the real question is what virtues we are forming. Their answer is that schools should deliberately teach students what is good, true, and beautiful, inculcating wisdom and virtue from a coherent tradition rather than pretending to an impossible neutrality.
The argument deserves the strongest version. Gash and Tate are right that no education is morally empty. Every classroom inculcates some conception of the good, and C. S. Lewis was right that an intellect starved of moral training produces precisely the hollow, articulate graduate they describe. Grant all of that. The diagnosis is sound.
But the indictment ought to begin at the doorstep of the movement that Gash and Tate write for, and the thing it indicts is not a pedagogical slogan. The conservative movement spent four decades dismantling the family table, the parish hall, the town square, and the working neighborhood — the very institutions that once taught a child, through the slow, embodied, daily practice of living among people who knew his name, what is good. It championed an economic order that sent both parents onto the commuter train and left children in after-school programs run by strangers who rotated through every semester. It celebrated labor mobility as freedom and treated the extended family — grandparents in the same county, cousins down the road — as a drag on economic growth, a friction that the market would efficiently eliminate. It worshipped the creative destruction that leveled the factory town, and it was surprised only later that the parish and the VFW went with it. The fusionist compact traded the thick, local institutions that form moral character for corporate tax cuts, deregulated finance, and Supreme Court seats, and it called that trade conservatism. A community that refuses to teach its young what to love is not being neutral; it is teaching them that nothing is worth loving — which is a moral formation all its own, and a disastrous one. Now, when the social landscape is a moral vacuum filled by a therapeutic DEI bureaucracy, the movement’s answer is to hand the job of character formation to a university president in Malibu and a testing company in Washington. This is not a solution; it is a confession.
The deeper error is that moral formation cannot be outsourced to a curriculum, no matter how classic, any more than it could be outsourced to the market. Virtue is not a body of propositions to be certified on a scantron. It is a habit of the heart, cultivated in a specific community over time, in the presence of particular people whose lives the student can watch and imitate. A child learns to love the truth not by memorizing Aristotle’s Ethics but by sitting at a kitchen table where a parent corrects a falsehood with patience, or in a parish hall where an adult admits a mistake without defensiveness. A child learns justice not from a textbook but from a community that punishes the bully and honors the honest worker. When the conservative movement severed moral formation from the local institutions that once provided it — the family, the parish, the co-op, the neighborhood — it created a need that no standardized test, however beautifully curated, can fill. The Classic Learning Test may be a fine alternative to the College Board’s offerings, but it cannot make up for the loss of the dinner table, the parish forum, and the union hall where men argued policy face to face. A curriculum can transmit a tradition, but it cannot incarnate it, and a moral education that is not incarnate is mere sentiment.
And the logic of the op-ed, if followed to its conclusion, leads directly into the post-liberal temptation. Gash and Tate are careful to speak on behalf of their own institutions, and Pepperdine and the CLT are free to teach whatever vision of the good they believe. But the argument that all education must deliberately inculcate a substantive moral order, that neutrality is impossible, and that the state’s schools must therefore do the same — that argument is the gateway to a centralized moral curriculum, imposed by whichever faction happens to hold the Department of Education. The conservative who now demands that schools teach “what to think” will be horrified when the next administration decides that “what to think” means the opposite of everything he believes. The answer to a left-captured educational bureaucracy is not a right-captured one; it is to break the link between moral formation and the administrative state altogether, and to return that work to the institutions that can actually do it.
The Christian faith has always known this. My own tradition teaches that the way a child learns to love the good is through the sacraments, the parish, and the family — not through a standardized test scored in a College Board cubicle. Søren Kierkegaard, who understood as well as anyone the difference between genuine virtue and the cheap imitation that comes from social pressure, insisted that faith must be an inward, individual venture, a leap made in fear and trembling, never an automatic inheritance delivered by a state or a school system. The moral formation that a Christian university can offer — and Pepperdine, to its credit, attempts to offer — works because it is embedded in a living community of faculty, students, and worship, not because it has the correct list of “what to think.” Strip away that community, reduce the curriculum to a set of testable propositions, and what remains is not virtue but ideology, as brittle as the DEI bureaucracy it hopes to replace.
What actually works is smaller, slower, and far less scalable. The Adams County Historical Society holds a lecture series in the back room of the Heritage Center — folding chairs and linoleum, maybe thirty people — where a retired railroad man who spent forty years on the Chicago and North Western gives a talk about the dieselization of the Adams Yard. He takes questions for an hour. A man who disagrees about the date the roundhouse came down argues from memory, and they hash it out, and everyone goes home knowing something they did not know before. That is moral education. It teaches the love of truth, the discipline of listening, the respect for evidence and the courage to be wrong — not because a curriculum mandates it, but because a community of people who share a place and a history have gathered to ask a real question together. The co-op’s annual meeting, where farmers argue policy face to face with the books open and motions on the floor, teaches justice and prudence in a way no textbook can. The parish adult forum, where a difficult theological question is asked and the room sits with it rather than shouting a slogan, forms souls through the practice of charity, not through the memorization of a catechism. These are the mediating institutions that the conservative movement should have been defending for forty years, and their absence is the real reason a Pepperdine president and a testing entrepreneur now feel the need to promise moral formation from a podium in California.
The chest needs a hearth, not a curriculum. The family, the parish, the cooperative, the local lecture series — these are the only teachers of virtue that can survive the next election and the one after that. The test-makers will sell their wares regardless, and they will measure something, but they will never teach a child to love the good. Only a neighbor can do that, and the neighbor has to have been there, year after year, in a place the child recognizes as home. That is the counter-model the conservative movement forgot it was supposed to conserve, and no amount of standardized virtue will bring it back.