After a week of no school due to the snowstorm, Northern Virginia kids were in their classrooms again last week, but for what?

That seems a bit snide of me, but seriously, why are they dutifully sitting in classrooms, doing homework and getting an education? The typical answer, stripped of its high sounding rhetoric is so they can be good worker bees in the global economy.

The White House website is one example among many. “In today’s global economy,” it says, “a high-quality education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity — it is a prerequisite for success.” And success means marketplace success for individuals and the country. The site adds that “economic progress and educational achievement are inextricably linked.” Indeed they are, but does that mean that economic progress is the whole point of educational achievement? Apparently so because if you expect to find alternatives to student-as-future-worker-bee, you will search government and most education sites in vain.

Of course it’s really no surprise. Prior to the nineteenth century, most education was still in the service of religion. In order to read the Bible, you had to learn to read. But the advent of American public education in the 1830s that became mandatory education in the 1860s brought about a shift. Education now served the state by providing standardized citizens and served the economy by providing standardized workers.

The same is true today, only instead of cranking out human cogs for the American industrial economy we’re cranking out human plug-ins for the global knowledge economy.

If that seems offensive as you picture the school-aged children in your life, it’s because treating humans as means is always offensive. Humans were not meant to be tools we use, but persons we love. We were not meant to belong to the marketplace (insofar as it might be possible to belong to the marketplace), but to communities.

In “Populism,” his editorial in the February First Things, R. R. Reno explains the revival of populism and the rise of Donald Trump by contrasting marketplace and community. “In the United States,” writes Reno, “Donald Trump has unified a significant portion of the American right around his blunt and blustering populist gestures. He does not promise new programs or policies to meet economic needs. Instead, he uses the ‘we’ word — ‘We will be great again’ — and offers himself as a strong man who will revive national pride.”

Why is it working? Because of a preexisting “metaphysical disquiet.” Increasingly, Reno argues, we see our lives as revolving around the marketplace, the world of work, career, producing, using and consuming. Traditional forms of community — most especially the family and the church — are seen not only as outdated, but have been recast as “bondage and subservience.” And so we are offered a choice between the marketplace and nothing.

While the marketplace may make people “richer, healthier and freer to get and do what they want,” we were meant for more. “Ordinary people,” Reno goes on, “are awakening to the decline in [community], which leads to a sense of isolation and vulnerability — and a suspicion, often accurate, that one’s betters are no longer loyal to a common project that includes them.”

In the marketplace, competition and success are what matter and money is life’s little report card. If that’s all there is, we’re guaranteed a disgruntled, hollow, envious, ungrateful populace looking for some common enemy to blame for life’s problems And that populace rushes to the populism of a Donald Trump.

The reason for the anger and the hollowness is that while we need the marketplace, we were designed for community. In the report “Hardwired to Connect,” researchers discovered that not just the desire, but the need for communities is part of human nature. We are hardwired for “close connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning.” The marketplace only provides an occupation and a paycheck.

The Church, on the other hand, provides “close connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning” in abundance. Along with Reno, “I’m biased, of course, but to my mind religious convictions and religious communities hold the most promise for this revival [of community]. To belong to God! To stand with the people of God!”

This, as Reno points out, does not mean we can abandon the political community. But the Church has the resources, the mandate and the opportunity to offer disconnected and fragmented individuals much more than the transgressive thrill of voting for The Donald. And Christian education has the resources, the mandate and the opportunity to offer much more than expensive, high-end vo-tech training for the global economy.

The opportunities, in fact, abound. Now if we will only seize them.