Georg Simmel, one of the foundational theorists of sociology, never offered a theory of education, but he observed many strange or exotic social structures that are applicable to a variety of very usal events. One of these is the secret society, where people bind together with one another through oaths and rituals and signs known only to their other members and that accomplish and share between themselves a special illumination or purpose. Secret societies include the Ku Klux Klan, the Shriners, and the Masons, and so seem outlandish and different from the usual walks of life. That definition, however, includes some pretty pervasive and even largely inclusive parts of a population. Christianity is a secret society. Part of its genius is that membership is offered to anyone who sincerely agrees to be a follower of Jesus and there are numerous rituals, such as the Mass or declaring one to have been born again, which make you within the community rather than outside of it, the reward of which, for that belief, is that in some sense or other a participant or member is offered eternal life, whatever that may come to mean over time. Fellow members understand what they are up to so that Christians may think that an annulment is not much different from a divorce but for the sake of form the distinction is respected as the Catholic way of doing things, and Protestants will think themselves transformed or saved in that they have been financially successful. Those inside get one another or act as if they do, however much friction there may be between denominations or national churches, some theologians and pastors arguing the cut off point between membership and its reward and those outside of membership. Is a Mormon a Christian or is a Mormon not so, whatever their protestations, because Mormons do not believe in original sin while all other Christians do? Other secret societies may be more trivial but also pervasive. Children join clubs that have special jackets and thereby are entitled to friendship and loyalty, as do military organizations, where there is less emphasis on illumination than on duty and suffering.
The idea of the secret society also applies to that everyday event and institution of education, throughout its elementary and secondary and post secondary institutions so that everyone is exposed to it and is somewhat transformed by it. Schools from pre-k through post graduate, have sub groups, cliques, factions and/or interest groups that have designations, such as colors of clothing or badges or designations that may not be secret societies except in the sense that people experience themselves as different from those other groupings because of some experience that has been undergone through that group. So sports teams feel that they and their teammates have gone through some rigor and have experienced the tension and the glory that they think people in the grandstand may not appreciate, and the team that put together the Literary Magazine or the Yearbook can think that the members of the group have bonded over the struggles that led to what was eventually produced. These are not secret societies in that there is no effort to make the members remain secret or to have an overall illumination that is vouchsafed through joining the sworn to be secret membership. That is not true of the schools themselves, which are secret societies in that all of them are pledged to get information and insight, supposedly in preparation for having become people sufficiently able to have internalized the skills and knowledge and acumen so as to be considered educated, that goal being the illumination which is gained. Schools accomplish this by presenting all of their activities as having an educational purpose. People in high school and college sports learn how to compete fairly and in a sportsmanlike manner, to discipline themselves, to learn cooperation, so that they can thrive in life in general whether or not they pursue a life in sports except as an avocation. It did them good. Similarly, debate or math teams do the same, as do every other set of people, including those in classrooms, who strive to be as excellent as they can be, everyone graded not for automatic advancement but for having accomplished a level of proficiency that is roughly also graded by age. Moving along means, by and large, that you can do more difficult work. Indeed, students in public schools have a sense that accomplishing education, how well they are doing at it, is part of the permanent record card by which teachers indicate the pluses and the minuses of student performance.
It is important to understand that it is a mistake to think of a school as a microcosm of a society rather than as an intentional community dedicated to make every one of its members better educated. Even though the classic community study by Robert Lynd, “Middletown”, described a high school that way in Muncie Indiana in 1924 and its legacy has dominated the study of education as a community. Lynd thought that developing a “Bearcat Spirit'', a school dominated by its camaraderie, was the hallmark of education because the obvious educational failures of schooling in Muncie, as indicated in the fact that no graduates made it through an out of state college, meant that it must have some other purpose. But there are so many ways in which schools are not communities. For one thing, schools do not have the range of things necessary to be a community. Yes they have lunch rooms and maybe dental services and swimming pools, but they do not have butcher shops or auto dealerships (though maybe instruction in auto mechanics). Rather, schools have a curriculum devoted to administering information and insights to a menu including required courses on subjects designed by the educators to make a person who has gone through that curriculum some minimum proficiency in those areas and so putatively to have accomplished an education. Schools are also different from occupations where people are devoted and recompensed for some single kind of knowledge where they are already proficient or soon enough acquire it so as to be a worthwhile employee, while students are always in the mode of learning how rather than doing even if, as a Dewey follower, you may think that doing, however clumsily, is a way of learning. The idea of learning is paramount even if the job is done poorly or hardly at all, as was made clear in a wonderful Joseph Wiseman documentary about a rural town whose high school teachers were so bereft of education that all that one of them could do was tell their students about past athletic accomplishments. The teacher had nothing else to offer. There are failed schools rather than schools who do some function other than educate.
Another consideration about secret societies. There is a difference between having a secret and being part of the secret. Having the secret means that there is a bit of knowledge that the members in the group are onto the fact and that secret may or may not be momentous. It is trivial to know the secrets of the Masons in that the significance of it is only the fact that they are secret. Being a part of the Oak Ridge or Los Alamos community is very important because the secrets of the atomic bomb have to be protected from those who may try to steal the secrets for the Soviets. It is important to keep the secrets even if they do not offer only knowledge rather than personal enlightenment. Somewhat on the borderline, I suspect, given the sparseness of the information, is that the travelling Ark of the Covenant was a secret in that what it contained were the writings about and by God that were conveyed from place to place that radically different from the places and shrines which were sacred to local populations. The Ark suggested that very radical notion that God was not in a place but was an idea conveyed in words, the nature of words being that they are portable and universal because of the nature of words, something the Israelites discovered early on about religion and so making it different from other religions, though we do not know what those words were,and so gradually becoming a religion that did not need any material representation, the words independent of the Ark but inspired by and inspirited within religious followers whose appreciation of that understanding made them into the secret experience that was shared and distinctive, other peoples not appreciating the significance of that transformation. Education can also be understood as this internalization, the grades on your report card just the tokens of the internal transformation rather than the substance and ritual of the accomplishment, though students still think that getting the marks they believe they deserve are the real measure of accomplishment rather than an indication of internal transformation.
As these and other examples suggest, the lay in secret societies between the secret known and the secrets of those known can transform situations into being very different from one another and create something very distinct or what might be considered out of left field, like an invisible God or an only internal sense of whether a person has accomplished knowledge rather than accomplishment. That process is very different from the one offered by Max Weber on why people become dedicated to knowledge, what Wber calls “science”. Weber understands that knowledge is a very distinctive attribute or object. Most people do not indulge in it for its own sake. Rather, people use knowledge for power or social advancement and use rhetoric rather than reason to reach their conclusions. But there are some people who are devoted to knowledge for its own sake. Weber thinks of those people as having a calling, something akin to a religious calling, whereby people are devoted to knowledge for its own sake, perhaps because its rewards are elusive in that knowledge will be so readily disregarded by people of power and influence. The professoriate and even the gymnasium teachers nonetheless do what they do because of their zeal of conviction.
Georg Simmel offers an alternative mechanism. Those in a secret society transform the secret, whether an object or a procedure, to a matter of principle, whereby that becomes the collective spirit of the newly re-minted idea which becomes an end in itself. This happens in the evolution and, I would say, the devolution of academic disciplines. Literary studies transformed in the generation before World War II from becoming the study of the establishment of texts to the art of the criticism of texts. In the Eighties, studying computers transformed from being a technology to being a way of thinking, a discipline in itself. And, in my view, criticism has deteriorated into becoming advocacy for the groups subject to discussion. The same thing happens in lower levels of education, where high school boards of education are more interested in what they say about history, whether it is or is opposed to critical race theory, rather than considering the enterprise of history itself as how to explore social causes and the spirit of a variety of ages, some of them more palatable and others not, but all having that sense of both being familiar and also clearly dated and different from contemporary experience. Which of these endeavors are enlightened and which are to now be thought to be sham? That is important because every kind of education can pursue a miseducation instead.
How, then, do you decide, if education is a secret society, then how much illumination is required in order to be considered a member of the accomplished sub group of the membership? Or to put it otherwise, how much education makes a person educated? It is easy enough to make the standard whatever it is that a person has accomplished, so you know enough to be a first grade teacher, or know more than your relatives or think you know enough to see through a politician, but are there more objective standards. Christians, for example, use multiple ways to measure whether they have made the grade. People move up through the hierarchy and that makes them successful but does not guarantee piety, while people who live in remote corners of the globe, unknown to their superiors, may still be vouchsafed for the blessings of religious peace, as happens in A. J. Cronin’s “The Keys to the Kingdom”. Moreover, a Christian can claim that they are dutiful but doubtlessly also flawed, and so people can remain ambivalent about being part of the illuminated, those in the secret society, letting god decide who really made it. Education is more strict about the designation of who has it and who doesn’t. There is a ranking of prestige as offered by degrees, publications and honors that indicates success and everyone is ranked accordingly, no alternative prestige hierarchies, as there is in religion, from success down to failure.
How do you tell whether the members of a secret society have become illuminated, transformed, saved, or otherwise accomplish that purpose, should that be the goal of the enterprise, and that is not necessarily a goal, in that the Shriners are interested in good works as an excuse for fellowship, while shamans going on fasts are out to get that, and often will, given how hunger and privation may indeed lead you to see visions. The case of Christianity is again instructive. Christians deliberately avoid the question of whether they accomplish their goal only satisfied with a promise that it has happened, perhaps because it is so difficult to say who is transformed other than to say so. A person goes up to the altar so as to be born again. Has that happened? If you say it has happened to you, has it? Indeed, it would be sacrilegious to try to measure whether Christians are more moral than are people from other religions or with no religion when they are of the same social class or region as the true believers, and that would hold for other outcome measures, such as being more spiritual or just having more fidelity to conventional morality. People in churches may indeed be more moral, but that may be because they are more integrated into society than are people with fewer affiliations. So we look at exemplary people to point out that they are credits to Christianity, and such people are to be found among the flock.
The same is true in education. Who has profited from their education, not by showing that people with more education make more money during their lifetimes, or that people of different ethnic backgrounds have more or less educational attainments, but whether people, in fact, have more information and insight as a result of education, that the essence of the matter? Everyone can point to a star pupil and a teacher can claim credit for having assisted in making the student more educated, and point out the dullards no one could have reached, but institutions of higher education are notorious for avoiding objective measurements of how much students have learned after having spent four years in a course of study, what with classes and laboratories and, until recently, the camaraderie of bull sessions and long talks into the night that many people will claim is their real education. As in religion, there are exemplars rather than statistics.
Some research studies, however, are available. One study shows that high school graduates of fifty years ago have the same level of education as current day college graduates as to information such as identifying a state of the United States that adjoins Canada. Not much insight, but a modicum of information. An older study suggested that high school students when World War II was waging on knew more about geography than did previous or subsequent generations, perhaps because the newspapers were filled with maps of Western Europe and the names of Islands in the Pacific. Those suggest that demographics rather than instruction or schooling improve information acquisition, much less wisdom.
But anecdotal information suggests otherwise, and not just because the people who become professors stood at the feet of savants and absorbed their aphorisms, more devoted learners finding a way to learn. It also happens with less distinguished students. A second grade teacher who had a Bachelor's degree in education becomes a devotee of Broadway theatre and not just musicals and makes insightful comparisons within and between plays. Was that the result of education or would it have happened anyway? A student once told me that she was embarrassed and pleased to admit that she could guess what you would say next during a lecture because she had gotten familiar with the way I talked about the different subject matters covered in the course. That is remembered by a teacher as an example of education working because she had absorbed my patter, what I would otherwise call my “analysis” of how I did things and not just my results, and showed to me that I had made a difference at least for some more than one of the students in the course. Education, like religion, gets a glimmer of what one is offered and so the real secret of education is how slippery it is to get hold of, that the real secret is that it is a mystery.