Mike on The Pharisees of Education

Background and Context

Filed among Mike's other instructional-design maxims — courseware design, incompetence, disparaging education, merit and perception — this line carries no explanatory note of its own: no dated incident, no named institution, just the bare declaration signed "(Me)." The absence of scaffolding is itself informative next to a companion file like "Mike on Merit and Perception," where he attaches a full autobiographical account to the maxim it houses; here he apparently felt none was needed, either because the target was too obvious to name or too many to name. The first-person plural — "we," not "I" — casts the fight as shared rather than solitary, a standing condition of the field rather than a grievance against one office.

Interpretation

The metaphor does its work by importing a specific New Testament complaint wholesale into a modern professional context. In the Gospels' polemical portrait — not, scholars now stress, a reliable account of the historical group — the Pharisees stand accused of an exacting devotion to the letter of the law that has drifted loose from its purpose, a habit of "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel" (Matthew 23:24), enforcing minute ritual compliance while missing the larger obligations the law was meant to serve. The specific charge in Mark 7:8 — that they "leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men" — names the mechanism precisely: human tradition displacing the thing tradition was supposed to protect. That is the entire structure Mike imports. "Pharisees of Education" names people and institutions whose devotion to the procedures of education — accreditation checklists, seat-time requirements, standardized rubrics, sign-off paperwork — has become detached from, and in practice antagonistic to, the purpose those procedures were meant to serve: getting people to actually learn something.

The word choice does two things a blander phrase like "bureaucrats" or "gatekeepers" would not. First, it supplies hypocrisy as the specific accusation, not just obstruction — the Gospel Pharisees are not simply rule-followers; their rule-following, per the polemic, masks a failure to embody the values the rules exist to encode. Applied to education, the charge is sharper than "these people are slow": it's that the compliance apparatus has become a performance of caring about learning that substitutes for the harder work of actually producing it. Second, "Pharisees" supplies authority as the site of the problem. The Gospel Pharisees are religious authorities, entrusted with interpreting and enforcing the law — not marginal figures. The metaphor locates Mike's antagonists inside education's own institutions, wielding its legitimate authority against its stated purpose, not saboteurs working from outside.

"Never-ending" is the second load-bearing word, and it forecloses a final victory. Mike is not describing an obstacle he expects to clear; he is naming a structural, recurring condition of the field — a fight refought in every institution, every accreditation cycle, every new compliance regime, because the underlying dynamic (institutions defaulting to legible, auditable process over harder-to-measure learning outcomes) regenerates faster than any single reform retires it. Read alongside his companion maxim on courseware design — "words are cheap... strategy is fragile... building is everything" — this is the institutional version of that same complaint: a system that can produce endless paperwork attesting to its own rigor while the actual "building" (real, transferred competence) goes unmeasured or unrewarded. His maxim on disparaging education supplies the mirror failure: where that file worries about an institution that quietly mocks its own subject matter, this one names an institution that reveres the form of education so completely it stops noticing whether the substance survived the process.

Current Relevance

American K-12 policy over the past quarter-century supplies the maxim's most legible modern battlefield: the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and its successors made standardized test scores the primary legible proxy for learning, and a substantial literature — most visibly the 2011 Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, where dozens of educators were indicted for altering answer sheets to hit mandated targets — documents what happens when the proxy becomes the actual object of institutional devotion: schools optimize for the auditable number rather than the harder-to-measure learning it was supposed to stand in for. That is the Pharisees dynamic exactly, restaged as policy: rule displacing purpose, enforced by authorities acting in good conscience within a system that structurally rewards the wrong target.

Higher education and corporate/military training carry parallel versions. Accreditation exists to protect students from fraudulent credentials, a genuine good, but accreditation review famously runs on seat-time — credit hours logged, not competencies demonstrated — a proxy so entrenched that competency-based programs (Western Governors University among the most prominent) have had to build elaborate parallel compliance architecture just to satisfy accreditors that skipping seat-time doesn't mean skipping rigor. In corporate and military training — the terrain Mike's own maxim collection is drawn from — the same dynamic shows up as check-the-box compliance modules: certificates issued, hours recorded, with only thin evidence connecting any of it to actual behavior change. Instructional designers who try to replace a compliance-driven course with something built around real skill transfer routinely report the same friction: the new design is harder to audit and threatens metrics (completion rates, seat-time-per-employee) the institution has learned to treat as proof of diligence. Generative AI adds a newer front, since it can now produce plausible-looking, standards-compliant course content in minutes — raising the prospect of compliance apparatus satisfied by material nobody, instructor or student, meaningfully engaged with.

Impact and Legacy

As a private aphorism, the line's legacy is best read as this: it tersely names the animating adversary of a career. Filed among maxims about incompetence, courseware design, and disparaging education, "the Pharisees of Education" functions as connective tissue across the folder — a single label for the institutional failure mode the other maxims attack from different angles (the courseware-design maxim insists building beats talking about building; the incompetence maxim refuses to tolerate the gap between claim and delivery; this one names the system that lets that gap persist and calls it rigor). Its "never-ending" framing does legacy-work of its own: it pre-declares the fight unfinished rather than won, reading less like a rallying cry meant to end and more like a standing operating principle carried across successive institutions and roles, consistent with the pattern visible elsewhere in this folder (his stated Air Force career, his instructional-design work for military officers documented in "Mike on Disparaging Education"). Unlike a public manifesto meant to persuade an audience or move a policy, this maxim's only recorded readership, until this pass, was Mike himself — its legacy isn't measured in citations or movements, but in whether it kept functioning as a working diagnostic he could reach for again each time the pattern recurred in a new institution. That a single nine-word line could travel intact across an Air Force career, a subsequent instructional-design career, and multiple employers without needing revision is itself a kind of durability most public aphorisms never have to demonstrate, precisely because nobody but its author was ever grading it.

Contrasting Views or Controversies

The most serious objection to the maxim isn't about education at all — it's about the metaphor's source. The Gospel portrait of the Pharisees that "Pharisees of Education" draws on is not, modern biblical scholarship stresses (E. P. Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism is the pivotal text of this "New Perspective"), a reliable historical account. The actual Pharisees were a lay reform movement that worked to make Jewish law accessible to ordinary people rather than restricting it to a priestly elite — closer to populists than to the hypocritical legalists of later Christian polemic. "Pharisee" as a byword for rule-bound hypocrisy is a two-thousand-year-old caricature with a genuinely ugly afterlife, having fed centuries of Christian anti-Judaism; using the word — however common the English idiom has become ("grammar Pharisee," "safety Pharisee") — imports that caricature into a discussion of red tape that has nothing to do with Judaism. This does not make Mike's usage antisemitic in intent — the idiom is common and largely unmoored from its origin — but it is a false-etymology risk worth naming: the sharpness of the metaphor is borrowed from an inaccurate and historically damaging stereotype, easily done without noticing.

A second, narrower objection grants the metaphor and challenges its target. Not all procedural rigor in education is Pharisaism in disguise. Accreditation standards, licensure exams, and standardized assessment exist substantially because their absence has historically enabled real harm — diploma mills, unqualified practitioners, inconsistent grading. A maxim this categorical, applied without care, risks licensing an instructional designer's own impatience with oversight as evidence of institutional bad faith, when some of what looks like box-checking is a hard-won accountability mechanism protecting students who have no other way to verify quality before they've already paid the cost of a bad program. The line names the failure mode vividly but leaves the harder discrimination — which rule protects substance, which rule has drifted loose from it — entirely to the reader's own judgment.

Practical Application

• Individual (instructional designer/educator): Before objecting to a compliance requirement as bureaucratic dead weight, trace it back to the harm it was built to prevent — a seat-time rule protecting against fraudulent credentials is not the same failure as one blocking a genuinely faster, competency-proven path to the same outcome; the maxim is a diagnostic, not a blanket license to resent oversight.
• Organizational (training/education leadership): Audit your own metrics for whether they measure learning or measure compliance-with-measuring-learning — completion rates, hours logged, and certificates issued are Pharisee-friendly numbers precisely because they're easy to audit and only loosely tied to whether anyone actually learned anything.
• Organizational (curriculum and accreditation review): When a proposed instructional innovation (competency-based progression, AI-assisted personalization, project-based assessment) is harder to fit into existing compliance paperwork than the status quo, treat that friction as information about the paperwork, not automatically as evidence against the innovation.
• Civic (policy and standards bodies): Build periodic sunset review into standardized requirements — testing regimes, credentialing rules, accreditation criteria — asking whether a rule still serves the outcome it was built to protect; Mike's "never-ending" framing implies these dynamics regenerate rather than resolve, and static rules age into exactly the drift the maxim warns against.
• Individual (learner or parent navigating a system): When a requirement seems to serve the institution's convenience rather than your own learning or your child's, ask directly what harm the rule prevents — the answer either surfaces a real protection worth respecting or exposes a proxy nobody has re-examined in years, and either way you're better positioned to push back or comply with reasons instead of resentment.

Background on the Author

Mike Hower's maxim collection reads, across its dozen-odd entries, as the accumulated professional doctrine of a career spent largely in instructional design, including work building training for U.S. military officers (documented directly in "Mike on Disparaging Education," which cites his role at "the premier education resource for today's military officers," and in "Mike on Merit and Perception," which recounts his own Air Force career). That vantage point — someone who designed training inside large, rule-bound institutions rather than critiquing them from outside — is what gives this maxim its edge. It isn't an outsider's complaint about red tape in the abstract; it's the standing grievance of someone whose job was to build things that help people learn, filed against the recurring institutional habit of mistaking the auditable performance of rigor for rigor itself. The folder's other maxims corroborate the same throughline from different angles — impatience with unfinished process ("building is everything"), a refusal to tolerate the gap between claim and delivery ("I don't tolerate incompetence") — together reading as a working theory of what actually derails good instructional design: not lack of will, but institutional machinery built to reward the wrong proxy. What distinguishes this particular maxim from a generic complaint about "the system" is precision of target: it doesn't indict education itself, or even bureaucracy in general, but a specific recurring type — the sincere enforcer of process who has stopped checking whether the process still serves anyone. That specificity is the mark of someone who has had to work around that figure repeatedly enough to give the pattern a name, rather than someone venting about institutions in the abstract.

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