Prescriptive or descriptive?

Modern education really approaches the idea of man and his end differently than the ancients did.  And I don't think it improves upon them.  David Hicks agrees with me:

Now, the modern educator is apt to dismiss prevarications told in deference to an ideal Type, while he condemns the arbitrariness of a prescriptive understanding of man.  He presumes to have found a method for replacing it, at least initially, with a descriptive understanding...So, without much sober reflection, the early record is quietly dismissed as unscientific--therefore, error-ridden and useless.  In its place, the educator erects a sort of science without reason, random induction predicated upon gnomic utterances like those of Marshall McLuhan: "Data accumulation leads to pattern recognition."
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.3

I live in a scientific town, and am married to a scientist, and am surrounded by world-renown scientists.  But the best scientists I know are the ones who understand the limits of science, and when science ceases to be a descriptive tool, and tries to be a prescriptive one.  As Hicks says:

...[The ancients] themselves, would have agreed that of all creation, the unstable creature man most needed transformation.Thus, Democritus' theory of atomic structures did not start a scientific revolution in physics, but it did provide a theoretical basis for the Epicurean way of life...But modern science-- a phrase we cannot utter without wedding it to technology-- ignores these old warnings...
~David hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.6

It is hard to overstate the consequences of leaving behind the prescriptive in favor of the descriptive alone. One need only look at our current cultural chaos to see its consequences. And if every teacher understood this important distinction, education would be a very different animal!

The equation of truth with science is peculiarly modern, as is the assumption that the science of the ancients desired to be turned into technology "aiming to mold the future"... [This view of education] effectively excludes the normative aspects of all knowledge (the inquiry concerning what ought to be done) in favor of the operational (the inquiry concerning what can be done). It shuns the prescriptive in favor of the descriptive.
~David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education p.7