AMERICAN THINKER ARTICLE ON A CLASSICAL LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION:

 

What Good Is Education without the Classical Liberal Tradition?

By Marion Gabl

August 7, 2011

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that every person is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Which are you?" This is what I asked my seventeen-year-old students during end-of-the-year oral exams. Many smiled and responded quickly; others seemed distressed at the prospect of having to choose a favorite. What a great question, I mused. These students, enrolled in a small Classical Christian school, are lucky to have the opportunity to seriously study philosophy.

Thinking back to my own secondary school days, I doubt that I could have offered anything about Aristotle, except that a law professor quoted him in Legally Blonde. And Plato might as well have been colored clay for children. My memory, rather, recalls classes like "Career Preparation & Exploration," a course which consisted of monitoring responses to computer modules and an obscene amount of "group work."

There's more than enough anecdotal material about bad schooling, and the American public is well aware that problems exist. Public leaders in education plead that we purge schools of bad teachers, scrape up more funding, and reform pedagogical models. The real problem, however, is less tangible -- but more fundamental -- than monetary deficiencies or methodological barriers or even droves of incompetent teachers. Rather than attributing flaws of the modern education system to administrative or structural variables, we should examine the true source: that, paradoxical as it may sound, American education lacks a culture of learning, without which technological invention and billions of dollars are insufficient to cure the lapse of learning among American youth.

Education requires a resurgence of the classical liberal tradition, which treats a pupil as a human --whose hope for magnanimity lies in the proper training of his habits -- rather than as a jukebox, tinnily emitting the same unimaginative tune over and over again for a quarter. Not only is the richness of the classical tradition largely lost today, but students do not acquire the intellectual humility that will allow their own minds to be continually tried and formed anew. And this is problematic both for individuals and for the nation.

The American Founders understood. Even Benjamin Franklin, the pragmatist of the lot, preferring modern language over the classical and exploring models for trade schools as well as for liberal colleges, wrote Samuel Adams in 1750:

'I think with you, that nothing is more important for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men, are, in my opinion, the strength of the state; much more so than riches or arms, which under the management of ignorance and wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of the public."

The Founders' classical notion of education has not been wholly lost on modernity. Russell Kirk writes that "liberal education" is "an ordering and integrating of knowledge for the benefit of the free person -- as contrasted with technical or professional schooling." Education allows humans to "achieve some degree of harmony within themselves." This harmony creates a "philosophical habit of mind," a Platonic notion that Kirk attributes to John Henry Newman. Liberal education, as Newman understood it, cultivates in individuals the attributes of "freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom." Likewise, Socrates's music and gymnastic education hoped to achieve the four virtues of wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage by attaining a similar "harmony" of the soul.

We owe much to the classical understanding of virtue. The classical-liberal tradition supposes that the purpose of education is to introduce an ordered moral framework to young minds. When first the seeds of these basic virtues have been planted, individuals then possess the moral devices to pursue specialized studies and to impart their ideas and innovations to the sundry fields.

Moreover, Kirk suggests that the education system in today's republic ideally has "a social purpose, or at least a social result," forming a clan of leaders who "leaven the lump" of ruggedly un-philosophical America.

But Kirk also saw the reality of the twentieth-century intellectual class. His critique of modern education excoriates the products of the system as "a series of degree-dignified elites, an alleged meritocracy of confined views and dubious intellectual and moral credentials, puffed up by that little learning, which is most truly described by that mordant Tory Alexander Pope as a dangerous thing." The intellectual class that Kirk observed was far from the paragon of virtue for which the Founders hoped.

What's ironic about a Kirkian estimation is its initial resonation with the ideologically disparate left. A leading figure of the far left is Noam Chomsky, whose critique of the intellectual coterie -- though distinctly more biting -- sounds almost like Kirk. Chomsky reports in an interview with David Barsamian, excerpted from Class Warfare, that "[a]s far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I shouldn't. I expect it. But I do find it irritating." Like Kirk, Chomsky also uses the terminology of a "confinement" of an elite class of isolated intellectuals.

In a 1992 Rolling Stone interview, Chomsky explains that America's subversive education system creates this elite class:

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.

Kirk and Chomsky unsurprisingly diverge here. Chomsky's campaign against capitalist classism clutters his argument with a distracting conspiratorial tone. But even when we look past Chomsky's insistence that the primary purpose of (what he terms) "mass education" was designed "to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production," we find his solution a faux-humane ersatz for Kirk's plea for "humanely educated" youth. Chomsky, just like Kirk, sees the flaws and conceives of the vacuity of the current system. But lacking Kirk's comprehension of the moral complexity of the person, he can only spout vaguely psychological terms to define the problem: the educational system inculcates "obedience and passivity," he says, and is designed "to prevent people from being independent and creative." Thinkers on the left insist that the student requires a personally tailored education that will liberate and allow him to pursue his own preferences and achieve an actualization of the Self. Where the classical-liberal school recommends moral discipline, progressives prescribe increased autonomy and self-shaping -- a recommendation that will only exacerbate the ill.

Perhaps as far as education goes, the disillusioned Chomskys of the nation could benefit from an alliance with old-school liberalism. Both share repugnance for what the educational system of today produces and whom it creates. We have, however, first to agree that a human is a being whose character must be shaped and disciplined by an education that comprehends not only his immediate desires and interests, but also the high and low parts of his nature.

i Abraham Blinderman, Three Early Champions of Education: Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster (Bloomington: The Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1976), 11.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/what_good_is_education_without_the_classical_liberal_tradition.html

 COMMENTS:

Wayward Son • 3 years ago

I agree with you 100%, but the “Classical Liberal Tradition” is entirely Western. Since the West has become multicultural, and is now made up from people from all over the globe, we are to believe that we cannot teach our children in the classical western tradition without non-western children being made to feel inferior (we‘re not allowed to ask why they would feel inferior, that wouldn‘t be nice). As a result, Western education focuses on denigrating Western culture, from Greece to modern Europe, in order to prop up the sentiment of foreigners. The tool for this is called cultural relativism. For this reason, I read such articles as “Dinga-the Legendary Cattlemen of Africa” and learn how advanced and in touch with nature they are by allowing cattle to urinate on their heads (how can Western man compete with that?) . For this same reason, the penis-gourd tribes are given equal status and legitimacy to Aristotle and Plato. Solution-get the Marxist out of education, and get the non-Westerners out of our schools! 

DVG • 3 years ago

A modern education is like a modern movie. It's full of glitz, but hollow.

GeorgiaBoy61 • 3 years ago

Re: "Not only is the richness of the classical tradition largely lost today, but students do not acquire the intellectual humility that will allow their own minds to be continually tried and formed anew. And this is problematic both for individuals and for the nation." Very well-said. The classical liberal arts education has largely been eliminated in favor of politically-correct tripe. Dinesh D'Souza documented this problem years ago in his book "Illiberal Education," and the problem has only gotten worse since then. It is now possible, to name an example, to acquire an advanced degree in history without having read Tacitus, Gibbon, Durant or Toynbee. The canon of western civilization has a very direct link with our shared identity and notions of morality, governance, and how life ought to be lived. Pour out the vessel holding these traditions, and what comes next in their place? Whatever it is, it probably won't be pretty.

Gloria • 3 years ago

One of the great advantages of the kind of education you describe is that it provides a sound framework for the education of both believers in God and non-believers (agnostics and atheists). Such an education is especially needed today when we live in a society containing very large numbers of non-believers. (I'm an atheist.)

You rightly advocate "the proper training of his habits" and I suggest that such training provides for both cognitive development and moral development. Why? Because the virtues a person acquires during learning become the good habits needed in the rest of life--paying attention, being patient with oneself and with others, working hard, learning to transcend one's own ego by investing in the subject matter or skills being learned, etc. These virtues are taught in Christian texts and teachings on the one hand and also taught in the non-religious classical writings of our civilization. In the end, does it make any difference whether a person acquires virtues from religious teachings or, on the other hand, from the Greeks like Plato and Aristotle?

hightide • 3 years ago

Tragically, most "educators" and "teachers" in the govt. indoctrination centers will have no real acquaintance with the people you discuss, nor with what you are talking about. Today, it seems that ignorance, like water bubbles, float upward. More's the pity.

Nancy+Tannenbaum • 3 years ago

The agenda of government schools is not to educate or encourage students to think. It is to indoctrinate. They don't want independent thinkers. They want automatons who won't question the system or who are capable of thinking logically. The current "president" was elected by brainwashed useful idiots who have no comprehension that they are brainwashed and no conception of the damage they have done with their vote. And they will vote for him again.

dtsnipes • 3 years ago

As a tutor in a nationally known classical, Christian homeschool program who taught in public school for 15 years and private, Christian for 9, I can tell you exactly why the classical tradition will never be welcome in our schools: classical education includes the teaching of formal logic, which teaches students how to think for themselves. The education system in our nation cannot have a populace who can think for themselves. They need "sheeple." This also includes taking the study of grammar out of our schools and replacing it with "creative writing" so that we as a nation we would no longer be able to comprehend our own founding documents or even the King James version of the Bible. We are to be dependent upon others for understanding everything because if we could do it for ourselves they would have no power over us. In teaching my students formal logic last year and debate, whose end was Mock Trial in a real courtroom with a real judge and jury, I came to see how hungry my students were for this knowledge, but also how they became mature thinkers almost overnight. These were nine 7th-9th graders.

I have to say that I am jealous of my own students and of the education of which I was deprived. That is why I am a tutor: so I can get my own classical education I wasn't allowed to have. We have all been robbed in this country, of what had been our national tradition. Look into the history of public education and you will see that it was intended to train obedient sheeple who would man the factories. Why? Because the common man didn't deserve the classical traditional education. That was only for the special, the rich. Well, today, all over America, due to the program with which I am affiliated, and many other wonderful classical programs, our kids are being educated using the classical, Christian model. They are learning about goodness, truth, and beauty. They are learning how to think. They are being stretched mentally at the high school level as most of us weren't stretched even in college. They are doing hard things. These are the students that I pour my life into because they are the students, along with others like them across this land who may save us from ourselves. That is my prayer. That is my passion because America needs them.  

Edouard • 3 years ago

I've waged this argument with the local school board for a long time. Their state/federally mandated idea of edu-care is actually hamstringing students from being able to think, analyze, weigh and make decisions and continue a lifetime of learning. Mandate Greek, Latin, classic mathematics, years of grammar and etymology and proper construction of correct usage of English. Effective thorough History, the Classics of literature and philosophy and, as above, why Plato and Aristotle matter.

Said another way, Teach Them How To Think. Once they really understand the symbols of language and math they will need for the rest of their lives neither government nor advertising nor cultural forces nor political weasels will as easily fool them into stupid decisions. We need graduates who can think and critically analyze. You can't do that with a public education. The best you can hope for is to kneel before credentialed bureaucrats and receive your handouts.

Cindy Simpson • 3 years ago

Hillsdale College in Michigan (which maintains its independence by accepting no tax subsidies) strives to achieve the very kind of classical liberal education that this writer describes. Also, Russell Kirk was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Hillsdale for many years. Hillsdale's publication, the Imprimus, featured many of his articles and speeches.