Bricks in the Wall

Something is going wrong with people's attitudes. People are less considerate of and polite to each other. Neighbourliness is difficult to find. People are less respectful of authority. The electorate is failing to turn-out on polling days and the reported incidence of mental health issues, especially depression and anxiety, is increasing. I suggest that this is all due to a single common cause: namely the loss of values, vision and purpose which has resulted from the substitution of subjective-relativism for objective-realism at the heart of our culture. This has been a long drawn-out process. In the academic sphere, it started with Aristotle's Materialism; continued through the "Renascence", "Reformation" and "Enlightenment"; gathered pace as "Rationalist Empiricism", and culminated in Nietzsche's Existentialism. The change of orientation has gradually percolated into general society over the years, causing havoc wherever it has taken root. More recently, this process has been aided by the rise of state sponsored and controlled education, which was hijacked by proponents of subjective-relativism in the 1960's. Before training to be a teacher, I believed (on the basis of my own happy experience of school and college) that education was a straight-forward matter. Now, I know differently. Over the last half century, a battle has been fought out among very different philosophies of education. From my point of view, this battle has largely been won by "the enemy" and the sad consequences of their victory are only too visible on every side. This pamphlet is an attempt to delineate what the real issues in education are and to suggest why a return to a Platonic understanding and practice of education is so very necessary.
About the Author: Stephen Lovatt was born in 1958 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. The jolt of his mother's death when he was fourteen, made him resolve to become a member of the Methodist Church. He came into the possession of a strange little book called "The Testament of Light" in about 1974. This introduced him for the first time to Plato, Whichcote, Glanville, Mill, Blake, Chesterton, Julian of Norwich, Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche and The Cloud of Unknowing. It was about this time that he first encountered with Catholicism, in the writings of Teillard de Chardin. He was accepted to read physics at Trinity College in 1976. While at Cambridge, he discovered the works of Cardinal Newman and as a result was received into the Catholic Church in 1979. After graduating, he worked for about ten years in the electronics industry. During this period he became familiar with the works of Karl Popper and developed an interest in epistemology and the basis of Quantum Mechanics. In 1990, he returned to academic studies researching in relativistic quantum mechanics and multiple scattering theory at Bristol University. At this time he was introduced to the works of Ayn Rand, the American founder of the Objectivist school of philosophy and developed an interest in teleology and ethics. After obtaining his doctorate in Physics, he returned to the electronics industry, before conducting a stint of post-doctoral research in the fields of Density Functional Theory of the Physics of Liquids. At about this time he discovered the works of Plato. In 2002 he began two years of teacher training, after which he was appointed lecturer at the Army School of Electrical and Aeronautical Engineering.