Here’s an e-mail I got from a reader:

I don’t think your proposed solution to the question of education will have your desired effect. I take issue with your second point: You say that people should be kept “busy enough that they don’t cause trouble.” This won’t work, because people will always need time off. The relevant question is what they’ll do with that time. Will they do something good, like read a book, or something bad, like hiring a prostitute?
The only way to ensure that people made good choices is to give them a moral education. People need to know good from evil, or else they will not know how to use their free time well. This is why we study literature, history, philosophy, and theology, and why we think about deep, difficult questions.
Learning the insights of the world’s greatest thinkers teaches us how to distinguish right from wrong. We become better people not just because we’ve read a masterpiece but because it teaches us how to be better than we are.
The opposite of seeking moral education is to embrace ignorance and violence. You know, like a gangbanger in the ghetto.
Kyle Hofmann

I have one clarification and one disagreement here. The clarification: By “busy enough that they don’t cause trouble,” I didn’t mean “so busy they don’t have a spare minute in which to do anything wrong.” I meant that statistically speaking, idle hands really are the devil’s workshop — people who don’t work are far more likely to exhibit a variety of social pathologies, even if the government provides for their physical needs. You can see Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness for some research on this. Charles Murray also wrote about the pheonomenon, though I forget in which book.

My disagreement has to do with the dichotomy between “moral education” and “gangbanger” ethics. For one, again, I doubt 100 percent of students have the intellectual resources needed to undertake such education — so even if the reader is right, it doesn’t follow that we need universal moral education. But more importantly, right now, very few people have seriously studied morality or developed sophisticated, consistent moral codes of their own. Yet the overwhelming majority live morally. Tradition, religion, parenting, law, and social pressure by and large keep human misbehavior in check.

There’s an argument to be made that schools should participate in this process (Half Sigma makes it often). But this involves schools indoctrinating children into a set moral code — taking on the role of parents — not teaching “literature, history, philosophy, and theology” to every single student so that he may “think about deep, difficult questions.” As I said in my original post, I think some students should study these things, but many to most won’t get anything out of it.