Classical education is in a unique position to acknowledge in humility that every person is a sinner, and that some people and institutions in the West have been monstrously evil. Yet the Western heritage includes that which can never itself be complicit in evil: the true and the good, those inexhaustible resources that set us free.
We have come to the beginning of strange new school year. In addition to the challenges of COVID-19, primary and secondary classical schools, colleges, and universities that provide a liberal education aimed at achieving wisdom and virtue, in part through an examination of the Western heritage, may find some students, parents, and outside observers asking whether they perpetuate racism. Some classical educators—bewildered at a world on fire in which figures of intellectual and artistic excellence or moral heroism like Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Damien of Molokai, Fredrick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Flannery O’Conner, and Walt Whitman are being attacked or preemptively defended—may ignore such questions due to confidence in the value of what they do. But, I believe that to ignore these questions is a serious mistake for students and the classical education movement.
This summer’s broadening of an ongoing conversation about systemic racism in our nation was needed and long overdue, and it is reprehensible that it took the horrific killings of George Floyd and others to do it. If student concerns go unaddressed, many may later reflect back and conclude that their education’s unwillingness to have a dialogue about these matters was, at worst, a concealment of actual complicity in evil or, at best, a sign that classical education is hopelessly antiquated and hypocritical.
In an effort, then, to assist classical educators in responding to student and parent concerns, I here offer five different ways of talking about classical education in order to reveal what it is, or at least part of what it is not (i.e., not inherently racist and oppressive). While there is some overlap among the appeals, each offers something distinct. I order them below from simplest to the most complex.
The Honesty-Piety Appeal
First, classical education is honest and pious. It does not seek to turn a blind eye to the manifold injustices that are part of the Western story it teaches; it does not shy away from calling a false or evil idea–e.g. that “racially separate facilities are constitutional and good”–what it is. Moreover, it traces the historical consequences of such ideas. Moreover, classical education does a difficult thing: It balances this truth-telling with a cultivation of piety towards our intellectual, political, and familial ancestors, fallible sinners all. Such an education, then, can both condemn the slaveholding and hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson while admiring his moving articulation of the principle that “all men are created equal.”
The Those-Who-Know-History Appeal
Secondly, classical education is sensitive to the past and inspiring for the present. Classical education offers its books (and subjects) to students as from a particular moment and as possessing sapience that transcends time or place,. Classical educators bring students to an encounter with a broad tradition of philosophic realism and—in the case of religious schools—a theism, while treating all great texts and traditions of thought with a measure of deference and humility. Such an approach equips students to understand this moment in the life of our nation. We can enter into dialogue and seek real and good change while remaining aware that injustice in society begins with injustice in the human heart and that injustice will never be wholly extirpated—although we must never cease the effort. This is the lesson of Aristotle, Augustine, and Solzhenitsyn. And lest this truth lead to complacency, the studies of a classical education provide the stories and principles that help order our emotions, imaginations, and intellects in such a manner as to stir up sadness and anger at contemporary racism; and these studies linger upon exemplary figures whose courage and zeal we can imitate as we seek to remove racism from individuals and institutions. For instance, students whose classical education has led them to encounter subtle-but-sympathetic portraits of the likes of David against Goliath, of Horatius at the bridge, of Joan of Arc at the stake, of William Wilberforce in Parliament, and of Dr. King in jail have been provided with many different images of courage which they can emulate.
The Via-Media Appeal
Third, while classical education has been painted as an extreme view opposing the moderate sensibilities of more common forms of pre-collegiate and university education, it is, in fact, a middle way between extremes. Take, for instance, canon formation and maintenance. Classical education is a tradition with principles upon which it forms a canon of great texts—including significant works that oppose (e.g., On the Genealogy of Morals) or that did not originate within (e.g., The Analects) said tradition. These principles allow classical educators to canonize the truly new book or author whose emergence—as T. S. Eliot knew—rearranges the relations of all the books in the canon. Also, in cases where, for example, racism has led to the wrongful omission of a past author or work, such principles allow us humbly to admit that such a work needs to be included. This approach finds a via media between voices that advocate either for a static body of works in a canon that cannot be adjusted or for having no list at all.
This middle way of classical education can be seen in many other spheres (pedagogy, school policy, etc.) in which all too often scholars and educators have abandoned one extreme in favor of another. Classical education, with an understanding of itself and its principles, is poised to avoid extremes and—as John Henry Newman put it in the context of a very different argument—to exercise with integrity and by its principles a power to assimilate what is true and good in ideas offered from one extreme or another. In short, classical education shows itself to be dynamic without being destructive. It studies the wisdom of the past in a way that challenges the too-tidy habits of mind into which we can fall in a given present, in a way that opens us to various expressions of the true and the good, and in a way that helps us make creative responses to the difficulties of our present day.
The Unique-Resources Appeal
Fourth, classical education provides unique resources by which to seek justice today without abandoning truth. Westerners enslaved black Africans and derived great wealth from the despicable practice. Some Western explorers and nations oppressed indigenous peoples. If the West includes Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the U.S.A., then Westerners killed Jesus and Socrates and Cicero and Boethius and Dr. King. This is something that a primary student can grasp. Nevertheless, it is Western heritage that provided and provides in its books, history, and disciplines the best human resources by which to critique such injustice and sin in order to bring about positive change. It is notable, if largely unknown, that a few early contemporaries of the slave trade, drawing on the Western resources of “the Christian prophetic tradition, scholastic theology, Roman and canon law, and ancient ethics” demanded that slavery be eliminated and all slaves emancipated and paid for their past labors. And, while such calls went largely unheeded, we need look no further than the civil rights movement to see a campaign in which Western principles and exemplars proved an indispensable part of the movement’s vitality and success.
For without the wisdom of Jesus’s view of the person, there is not Jefferson’s view in the Declaration; without the principles of the Declaration, there is not Lincoln’s commitment to a new birth of freedom. Dr. King not only invoked these three figures repeatedly, but also in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” articulated his justification of civil disobedience on the principles of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, and on the example of the three youths in the book of Daniel, the early Christians, Socrates, and the Boston Tea Party participants. Moreover, in his call for extreme, nonviolent action, he invoked the principles and/or witness of Paul, Martin Luther, and John Bunyan in addition to Jesus and the two aforementioned presidents. Western principles—like those that King drew upon—remain powerful resources from which we can address systemic injustice today, especially because these principles yoke justice with truth, and thereby are able to uphold the dignity of the oppressed and advocate for those who suffer discrimination.
The “Secondarity” Appeal
Fifth and finally, classical education and the Western heritage it teaches is not its own. The Western heritage traces to Athens and Jerusalem, but as Rémi Brague has shown, this binary misses the indispensable contribution of Rome to the Western or European culture that was spread, among other places, to the United States, making the U.S.A. part of the West as well. For Brague, Rome’s greatest contribution to the West is the manner in which it transmitted the Athenian and Jerusalemite heritages; namely, that it did so with a sense of its own “inferiority,” “dependency,” and “secondarity.” Even amidst its imperial ambitions, Rome is culturally a humble, largely unseen mediator that has made “possible the coexistence of the two cities” and their “productive tension” in the development of the European and American “West.” Rome indeed assimilated and at moments synthesized these two heritages, but Athens and Jerusalem remained always other to Rome. Athens and Jerusalem become the inexhaustible sources to which renaissance after renaissance recurred from the 6th century to the present. In this way, the West has avoided and can continue to avoid stagnation.
If Brague’s account is right, then classical education has much to learn from it. Lest those of us who are descended from Europeans smugly speak of the Western heritage as “ours,” we need to see that, in a certain respect, the very foundations of the Western heritage are not our own, but are “other” and a gift. Therefore, classical education can welcome the Western heritage, wonder at it, and learn from it without treating it as a commodity to be owned, used and—as infamously expressed in the approving metaphors of Machiavelli and Bacon—abused. Moreover, classical teachers can imitate Brague’s Rome by humbly laboring, almost unseen, to bring the treasures of the Western heritage to students in the hope that individual students will be formed in wisdom and virtue (and develop habits of receptivity and dialogue), and that classical education might itself become another one of the renaissance movements that goes back to Athens and Jerusalem to bring wisdom, reform, and renewal to a new time.
Conclusion
As we begin the semester, we have something to contribute to the needed, but difficult, conversation about systemic racism. Let us do so effectively and with humility. That is, let those of us involved at any level in the classical and liberal education that traces to Athens and Jerusalem be open to those students, parents, and others who question whether the Western heritage is essentially racist and in need of being toppled from its place in classical and, indeed, all education.
Classical education is in a unique position to acknowledge in humility that every person is a sinner and that some people and institutions in the West have been monstrously evil. Yet, the Western heritage includes that which can never itself be complicit in evil: the true and the good, those inexhaustible resources that set us free. Let us, therefore, with humble confidence set out to defend classical education without being defensive, to value the manner in which it can help us think about the challenges of our times, and to support it as it grows and matures as a renaissance of learning in wisdom and virtue for the twenty-first century.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “The Education of Achilles by Auguste-Clément Chrétien” (1861). It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
We don’t need classical education. We just need to let the police do their job. Riots happen where police are ordered to let riots happen.
I believe a classical education might allow you to see that when you advocate for the police to be able to “do their job”, you are advocating for law and order, a “classical Western” idea.
The police cannot “do their job” because those who influence public opinion refuse to distinguish (or cannot distinguish) between a “protester”–someone who exercises his or her free speech that is protected under our laws–and a “rioter”–someone who destroys and wrecks, or uses violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives, which has no protection under our laws and can be punished with arrests and other forms of force. Therefore, most who watch CNN have trouble distinguishing between those who protest and those who riot, and so they assume (with the commentators and reporters) that the people who smash the store windows or light fires have to be allowed to do it, etc. A classical education could correct this problem at the source. We have to look at a long-term turnaround because it is hard to correct these views once people have held them for much of their lives.
Riots happen when people are enslaved to their poor and false education, when they cannot communicate any better way. One definition of “liberal” means to be free, as in befitting a free man. In the not so recent past, only the very affluent were able to even receive an education. To be educated meant you were not a slave to your passions or social position.
“This summer’s broadening of an ongoing conversation about systemic racism in our nation was needed and long overdue, and it is reprehensible that it took the horrific killings of George Floyd and others to do it.”
Dr. Beier, I reject this as a starting point of the discussion. What do you mean, specifically by “systemic racism?” Do you mean that the institutions throughout our country including the academia, justice, media,, et al, are structured in such a way as to encourage or support racism? How do you define racism? I am not saying that there aren’t individuals with racist views and attitudes, but to condemn our society, on the whole, as racist, is not born out by facts (please refer to the extensive research by Heather MacDonald for information regarding police conduct with minorities) but rather a well-spun narrative by those with particular agendas – agendas set on remaking America in its own image and condemning Western Heritage outright.
I send my youngest child to a classical school to avoid the indoctrination which is taking place throughout public schools and instead wish him to learn about Western Heritage (flaws and all), in general and about our great nation (again, flaws and all) in particular. I refuse to go along with the push to recast our nation as irredeemable. Perfect? No. But still good and worth defending.
P.S. My older son graduated from HIllsdale in 2017 and I have a daughter who is currently a sophomore there.
Dr, Beier, You have some very important points here, but notes of appeasement ring out if it is suggested we attempt to answer questions like “when did you stop beating your wife?” This is not the project of a classical education. We should discuss the nature of racism and evil, not systemic racism that may or may not even exist. Certainly there have been racist institutions and those ought to be eradicated. However, to ascribe “determinative” power to material causes is a fundamental error. A classical education is concerned with “what is true,” not how we can engage in a conversation contrived by the material dialectic wrapped up in identity politics.
A most egregious false admission is to say “the west killed Socrates, Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr.” This is a terrible nod to collective responsibility that is a root problem of this conversation in the first place. Please read “Dangers of National Repentance” by C.S. Lewis to catch a glimpse of the error it is to deny individual agency or to suggest collective guilt. Also, ponder for a moment the atrocities we witness in many other cultures, ancient and present, the second worst of which come from the very material atheism that asserts “systemic racism” as in the errors of Russia and China. An answer is more likely to be found in fallen human nature then in the politics of recognition.
Maybe there is a fundamental flaw in what is being called an “education” here- Dewey would hold social and psychological concerns as the highest, I would hope Hillsdale would not follow suit- we hold that philosophical and theoretical considerations are much more important guides to the authentic education.
Excellent, thoughtful response, Steven. I tried to leave this comment a few days ago, but it did not appear in the thread.
Nerina, I was inspired by your comment in the first place! I am so deeply troubled by how far removed Academia is from Truth – even our beloved conservative schools have far too little acquiescence to authentic nature, nature’s laws and ultimate truth- Hillsdale had been one of our last great hopes and I can name only a handful more in the entire USA who are actually fighting the good fight, and the good fight is against sophistry, which in this day and age is CRT- Marxism, Naturalism, Scientism, materialism, relativism, subjectivism, historicism… (just many names for the different heads of the hydra which has consumed our schools.) You know, now that every one has been stuck at home and the content of the fetid public schools has been piped, like the exhaust it is, into our homes, I honestly thought there would be a revolt, with the race shaming, the sexual ideology and all the other perversions streaming full force into American homes, but no, no revolt- and to pour salt in the wound a Hillsdale professor suggests we take part in the debate on systemic racism…….while at the same time touting “classical education.” It is Orwellian. I am glad to see that here on this thread we are not completely alone, and I can add another, my friend Michael who sent me this article in puzzlement in the first place. We owe our children and our Forefathers much better than this. Thanks for reaching out.
Steven, thank you for the compliment. Our youngest son goes to a small, Catholic classical school in upstate NY. I was certain that in the wake of the pandemic our little school would see a significant increase in enrollment if for no other reason than the school is open this fall and teaching “in person” 5 days a week. I further – naively, it turns out – thought the strength of the curriculum and obvious bias and weakness of the public school curriculum (rooted in the truly inadequate Common Core) would be enough incentive. I was sorely mistaken. We must continue to fight the good fight in the arenas nearest to us. I will continue to support my classical school and continue to promote it as opportunities present themselves. I don’t make a habit out of engaging in comment boxes, but even here I feel compelled to offer feedback when I think a person is receptive. I hope Dr. Beier is thoughtfully considering all the comments here.
Nerina,
We have more in common than I at first thought! Our youngest is at WCC and we are pretty thrilled with it so far. I hope your son is where Dr. Esolen is. It is the rare PhD. who will thoughtfully examine his assumptions. I have spoken to so many professors of whom I can say I know three I trust to be academically and intellectually honest, not that there aren’t multitudes more, I just don’t know them. The chickens are coming home to roost, even if academia ignores it or celebrates it, the losers will be us citizens and our children and grandchildren. Best wishes to you and your family. I hope there are many families like yours out there! Pax Christi vobiscum!
I must say that it was with a sigh of relief that I read the critical, thoughtful comments beneath this article, for even I picked up on some of the New Left / Marxist ideas contained within the framework of the innocuously-titled essay. While there was much truth in it, and it was well-written, the reading of this powerfully reminds one that the Academy — including even Classics Departments apparently — is in desperate need of an overhaul, or should I say, more aptly, it is in need of restoration.
Yes sir Andrew! I have spoken to many good souls in Academia, and the vast majority of them are unaware of this need for reform, even at flagship schools like Hillsdale- I can think of less than a handful who are fully awake, good men like Dr. Anthony Esolen. The list is short- the small percentage of conservative professors play too much into the agenda of the liberal left by conceding the wrong ground from which to argue- I would call your restoration “reformation” and say it revolves around 3 things- a proper anthropology, the nature of reality (with a recovery of the word “nature” from the naturalists) and the nature of human learning. As far as I can tell, this is a little outside the vision of even the good professors. Remember what Screwtape said in letter # 27 “Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.” Desperate need indeed!
I genuinely appreciate this approach to the problems and questions raised by maintaining fidelity to a certain canon of thought while nonetheless finding strategies for preserving these traditions as living traditions, and not merely a shallow repetition. As a philosophy educator at a Catholic university, my principal task is not to tell anyone what to think, but to show them how others have thought and to provide examples of moral courage, intellectual fortitude, and conviction based on the power of true ideas. It is because we can hold up the example of courageous individuals who thought against the grain that we can offer an alternative to both the leveling tendency of a highly media-saturated consumer society as well as a narrow, presentist moralism which is unable to situate itself in a history of moral and philosophical perspectives.
There is a kind of cynicism and relativism that has become pervasive not only on ‘the left’ but also on the right, both of which are symptomatic of a breakdown in learning and the abandonment of a commitment to genuine self-cultivation that is the heritage of every great philosophical and literary tradition, from Athens and Jerusalem and Rome, to early modern rationalism and German idealism, but equally in classical China and India. Its present in the Black radical traditions as well, from Douglass, down through Du Bois and Malcom X.
The spirit of individualism is one that must be anchored in conscience, in thinking with and against others, which can draw upon the whole history of thought as a resource in shaping the individual character, to understanding our duties to one another and to live according to principles of active citizenship.