Reclaiming Classical Education
Last week I was in Warsaw for the launch of Reclaiming Classical Education, a book I edited with my colleague Richard Fodor while I was a Visiting Fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium. It will soon be available to order in the UK on Amazon. The Preface, reproduced below, gives a good sense of the book.
Preface
Education is at the heart of what makes us human. Through the person of the teacher and the institution of the school, wisdom amassed over centuries is passed from one generation to the next. At school, children gain knowledge that cannot be accrued through lived experience alone. The curriculum, divided into subjects, introduces children to mankind’s scientific, artistic and humanistic achievements. They come to know the abstract, the theoretical and the beautiful. As humans are born into an already existing world, a fact the philosopher Hannah Arendt describes as natality, knowledge of the past is each generation’s intellectual birthright. Its possession allows society to advance, as old knowledge is critiqued and new knowledge is accumumulated, but mastery also permits continuity, as traditions are understood and maintained and common threads bind citizens together. In this way, teaching is more than imparting facts, it is a project of socialising children into the wisdom and values of civilisation.
The focus of this volume is classical or liberal education; that is, a content-rich, subject-based approach to teaching that honours ancient knowledge and introduces children to what British poet and school inspector termed ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’. The authors, educators from countries across the globe, share a concern with the current state of education. We came together in Brussels in early 2024, as part of an initiative organised by Mathias Corvinus Collegium, with the aim of reviving an interest in classical education. This book is a product of that endeavour with 16 authors with different academic backgrounds from 6 European countries and two states of the USA Among the contributors, readers will find university professors, academic researchers, policymakers and writers who left academia to find new paths to their visions.
Contributors to the first section of this book trace the origins of classical education from Ancient Greece, through to the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment right up to the present day. Gibelin acknowledges the importance of this historical tradition, noting that classical education ‘marks the continuity of European civilization since the dawn of Greece and shows us the legacy of humanity’s past rather than mirages of the future.’ This grounding in the legacy of the past preserves ancient knowledge and traditions in the minds of a new generation. The intention is not, as Sehgal-Cuthbert, makes clear, to present the past as dogma. Instead, she argues, classical education ‘is based on the belief that an ethical commitment to maintain and develop our intellectual tradition is a necessity for originality, not its obstruction’. Górecki emphasises the importance of classical education to character formation. ‘The primary goal of classical education is the mental and moral fitness of man’, he suggests, ‘the efficacy of his mind and will, leading to control over his emotions.’
In Part Two, authors consider the enduring significance of classical education, for individuals, nations and humanity as a whole. Schilt argues, ‘our identities are rooted not in discarding the past, but in embracing it with open arms.’ The focus of classical education, ‘on the transmission of the inheritance of a people, its culture and civilisation,’ notes Tate, is vital if children are to identify with a nation. He contends that ‘the nation and nation state should be at the centre, not the periphery, of our concerns as individuals and citizens and at the heart of our objectives as educators.’ Yet today, with the demise of classical education, children are taught to problematise the past and the future. Standish claims the emphasis schools place on decolonial theory and the climate crisis is ‘undermining the value of disciplinary knowledge traditions in curricula, leaving pupils without an objective perspective from which to view contemporary social and political issues.’ The upshot, as Williams indicates, is that ‘new generations meet an adult world divided with conflicts between school and home.’
As Part Three of this volume explores, in moving away from classical and knowledge-based education over the course of a century, schooling has been hollowed out and separated from the intergenerational project of transmitting an intellectual and cultural inheritance. As the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote in 1930, schools that do little more than ‘instruct the masses in the technique of modern life’ leave children with ‘no feeling for their great historic duties’. Teachers become pedagogues rather than subject experts and children are perceived not as resilient, capable young scholars but as emotionally fragile beings who need protection from challenging content and the stress of high expectations. The classroom becomes a site for therapeutic interventions. Hayes notes that ‘Teachers in the UK and Europe are too willing to see their primary role as working with students’ emotions because they believe there is a “mental health crisis”.’
When separated from the legacy of the past, schools become institutions in search of a moral purpose. The direct transmission of values, in classes covering topics such as comprehensive sexuality education, fill the intellectual vacuum. Williams points to, ‘the introduction of new subjects onto the curriculum, the transformation of traditional academic subjects, and the emergence of the teacher activist’ as contributing to the ‘shifting the purpose of schools towards concerns with social justice’. Children are taught ‘correct’ ways to think about a range of issues from climate change to gender and race. As Butcher contends, ‘Families are faced with the pervasive - and pernicious - influence of left-of-centre special interest groups such as teacher unions and gender activists with radical, Marxist views on economics and culture.’ Waiton considers how this process has played out in Scotland: ‘the ethos within schools encourages a diminished and degraded sense of the world, creating a form of ‘disaster education’ that loads adult/political concerns onto the shoulders of young children.’
How do we turn back the tide of so-called progressivism that has hollowed out our schools, robbed teachers of their true purpose and left children rootless and culturally alienated from older generations? The final section of this book offers a way forward. Ludwin provides an example of classical education in practice at the Collegium Intermarium University in Poland. ‘Classical education fits well with legal studies and is beneficial for students and future lawyers,’ he contends. Constantinovits explores the importance of instruction in the ancient art of rhetoric which, he writes, ‘can serve as a guide for students of generation Alpha in classical knowledge, values, systems thinking, avoidance of manipulation and social interaction.’ Lánczi, meanwhile, makes the case for teaching philosophy, a subject, ‘vital in the quest for truth; a quest which has fallen out of fashion in modern European culture.’ Part Four concludes with Snyder’s call to arms. ‘It is time for academia to rediscover and recommit to the core, Judeo-Christian principles and understandings on which their institutions and America’s founding documents were based,’ she argues.
We end this volume with the Declaration on Classical Education, inititiated by MCC Brussels and MCC Learning Institute. Our hope is that teachers and educators from around the world will join us in arguing for this approach. Children deserve so much better than indoctrination, basic skills and therapy. They deserve knowledge of the best that has been thought and said, not set in aspic but as a meaningful intellectual inheritance. Only armed with knowledge of the past can they make the world anew.