Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D.
Introduction
Thank you to Jason and Heritage. I have great admiration for Heritage, for Jason, Lindsey Burke, and Kevin Roberts. I spent a wonderful decade as a research fellow at Heritage, writings books on marriage, marriage and religious liberty, religious liberty and discrimination, and transgender ideology. After moving to the Ethics and Public Policy Center as president, I wrote a book on abortion. So, I have no idea why they invited me to keynote a gathering on education. I’m not an education policy wonk, though my work on religious liberty, discrimination, and gender ideology have all been crosscutting in recent years with ed policy. Still, I’m not an ed policy specialist per se. And while I’ve taught at several colleges and serve on the board of a state college in Florida, I’m not really an education expert either. In fact, I’m not even a decent educator: My wife and I tried homeschooling, but our eldest was still illiterate. So last month he started at a classical Catholic school about a half hour from us, and three weeks later, he was reading. So, to the professional educators in the room: Thank you—we amateurs need you.
I mention my son now being able to read as an example of one of the ends of education. Almost all my work takes its philosophical inspiration from Aristotle. Aristotle teaches that we most fully know something—most fully know what something is—by knowing what it’s for, by knowing what it does or is supposed to do in its fully flowering form. Our modern age doesn’t have much time for theories that embrace teleology, but in fact we rely upon it all the time. My wife and I live on a farm, with well over a hundred animals of a dozen different species, and knowing something about what the flourishing adult of the species looks like helps when trying to care for the newborn offspring—the bacon seeds, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-conservative-vision-education