Classical education to be sure offers much that is wonderful. But the most important discoveries come by effort that is often painful. A joyful tour of the “true, good, and beautiful” without pain is likely a superficial substitute for a real education.
When I see T-shirts and bumper stickers that declare, “I survived Catholic schools,” I feel like making a T-shirt of my own: “I survived progressive education.” In the fourth grade, I was enrolled in the “Optional Program” in my public school. We had a table and chairs, not rows of desks, and we often sat “Indian style” on the carpeted floor. We called our teacher by her first name (her name was “Silver”—no, I am not making that up) and we designed our own curriculums. I designed a program of studies in which I worked on math once a week, and wrote stories most of the time. To my parents’ alarm, my grammar and spelling worsened, but the teacher did not wish to correct those things and “inhibit my creativity.” Even though I was pulled from this program at year’s end, I was enrolled in a similar program in high school. As I recall, we spent some time taking Myers-Briggs personality tests and discussing whether we were “thinkers, sensors, feelers, or intuitors.” This time, my parents took only two weeks to pull me out.
Both of these programs suffered from the same vice. They never wanted a child to experience the educator as a commanding “other” opposing the will of the student. They wanted a native “love of learning” to carry me through. The curriculum was lowered to meet the affective responses of a ten or fifteen year old. It is no exaggeration to say that the reason I went to college with anything like an education was because of the extra-curricular efforts of my father, who made me read, among other things, Xenophon’s Anabasis and Caesar’s War Commentaries. (My father was never self-conscious about being a commanding “other.”)
I recognize in many classical programs this same modern spirit. They have a vastly better set of books than I was given, but the message is the same: truth, beauty, and goodness are naturally attractive. Give students great books, great works of art and music, and they will love their education. It is easy to forget the observation made famous by George Orwell, reflecting on his own experience learning Latin as a boy: “I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried on without corporal punishment.” Classical education to be sure offers much that is wonderful. But the most important discoveries come by effort that is often painful. A joyful tour of the “true, good, and beautiful” without pain is likely a superficial substitute for a real education.
C.S. Lewis makes this point in his essay, “The Parthenon and the Optative.” Everyone knows the Parthenon, the symbol of the Golden Age of Athens. But the “optative” is known only to those who have been exposed to Greek grammar. It is a “mood” of the verb that expresses wish or desire, just as the “indicative” expresses matters of fact or the “interrogative” expresses questions. Lewis opens the essay by remembering a colleague of his looking over mediocre entrance essays and lamenting that “The trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative.”
What does this mean? As Lewis explains, “I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in ‘Appreciation’ and ends in gush. When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like. He may decide that he doesn’t care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn’t care for it, and he knows he hasn’t got it. But the other fails most disastrously when it most succeeds.”[*]
Classical education then cannot merely mean “Socratic discussions” where children romp like young puppies, or activities where they build their own triremes and armor, or field trips to the art museum. That is, it cannot mean a program of classical sources and topics through the filter of what children immediately find enjoyable, a kind of “unschooling” in Athens and Rome. This is the same approach as the “Optional Program” I had in the seventies, only with the pretensions of classical culture.
Rather, an education called “classical” should be a thorough, prolonged, and liberal education which immerses students, line by line, in the greatest works of the closely related disciplines of history, literature, and rhetoric. As the poet W.H. Auden observed, “Anybody who has spent many hours of his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own, learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned so well in any other way. For instance, it inculcates the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking, ‘What is its exact meaning?’ ” Classical education should offer both the “Parthenon” and the “Optative.” But exciting the emotions and imagination is relatively easy; providing intellectual rigor is considerably more difficult.
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Endnotes:
* C.S. Lewis, On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature, pp. 109-11.
Editor’s Note: The featured image is an illustration by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) for Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1936) and is in the Public Domain.
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We still had corporal punishment in my public school back in the day. We used phonics and diagrammed sentences. In German class we memorized poems which I can still recite. We even learned Christmas carols in German. No one objected or demanded a safe space from Stille Nacht. We also didn’t have school shootings and the metal detectors etc. No one catered to us and we were expected to obey. It worked just fine.
I can only relate this to my own experience as someone who underwent a personal ‘classics renaissance’ in mid-life.
Clearly a solid classical education requires effort, perseverance and personal sacrifice. But always motivating me was the conviction that in the works of Plato, Cicero and others were vital clues relevant to improving life and reducing human suffering today. Providence always supplied not only the means, but the *will* to study. It was a natural outcome of my Catholic school education in Christian principles that led ultimately and inevitably to an interest in classics.
My point is that perhaps we should pay more attention to education the ‘will’ before the intellect here: how can we harness the power of compassion and conscience to motivate the study of classics?
What strikes me is this: that in itself, much of a proper classical education is very attractive to the student. Augustine offers a testimony I could never equal when he writes about his own education. But, coincidentally, he points out the two precise points at which classical and liberal learning become painful: first, in the study of languages, and second, in the changing of the soul that such education effects.
We can’t escape the first problem, unless we run away from liberal learning altogether. The situation, in fact, is all the worse since Augustine’s day; then, a man could read everything worth reading on literacy in Latin and Greek alone. Today, anyone will fewer than five languages is hard pressed to consider himself learned. He will need Latin and Greek, of course, but also French and German, and English if he doesn’t know it. Nor do translations alleviate the problem. In fact, I’d argue they make it worse, because by reading in translation we can deceive ourselves into thinking we understand another man’s thoughts.
But the second is worse. It’s one of the whole problems of ‘The Confessions,’ if we’re honest with ourselves. The act of reading has the potential to change the soul, but only the potential. The actuality itself comes from us, and changing our behavior to conform with a higher standard is downright excruciating.
So most of classical learning is pleasant. It’s the doorway and the exit that are painful.
I’ve got mixed feelings. Education as it was done in the mid- to late-20th century left the U.S. trailing most of the developed world in educational outcome, and I am a firm believer in evidence over anecdote. On the other hand, widespread ignorance of history and basic grammer appalls me.
While still a child, I’d already noted the inverse correlation between a teacher’s propensity toward violence and bullying, and his or her intelligence and teaching ability. It was a lesson in the real world: the best leaders don’t need touse threats and intimidation as a first resort.
Parenting, too, has everything to do with it. My parents expected their children to do their best in school and didn’t accept excuses, and took the teacher’s side when I was in the wrong. A teacher can’t do much with an unmotivated student if the parents don’t care either.
Inspirational teachers can make a difference in the lives of children raised with low expectations, but – again – the best teachers in my experience were never the paddle-wielding brutes.
Thank you Alan W. I am an educator who writes a blog about classical education and this piece disturbed me a bit, enough that I showed it to my husband, a Latin teacher of some local repute, and pressed him for an answer: does it really require some kind of academic ugliness or force to teach Latin? His answer (and he’s been studying Latin pedagogy for some 20 years) was that the best Latin teachers use methods which make the rote knowledge of foreign language study approachable and even fun for the students. In his school they use call and response routines called “snap drills” and other methods to condition students to master the rote material. This type of routine puts an extra demand on the teacher, but it’s one that good teachers gladly bear for the better results you get from your students. Renaissance humanist and classical educator Vittorino de Feltre called his school “La Casa Gioiosa”, the House of Joy, and that model is the one I think we should be following.
For some there is a temptation to put classical education in a “law and order” kind of frame, but, as they say “from the beginning it was not so.”