Perhaps you have noticed that the educational system in America is a cultural battleground. Radical ideologues are implanting their worldviews into our culture through our various educational institutions. In Pennsylvania, nursing students’ grades are adversely affected if they do not offer preferred pronouns.[1] In New York, a state legislator has produced legislation that would require public schools to provide instruction concerning gender identity at age five and sex education for eleven-year-olds.[2] California legislators are also considering changes to their curriculum to “decolonize” American culture by rejecting whiteness and Christianity in favor of a Marxist-inspired cultural revolution, replete with prayers to the Aztec gods for power.[3]
American conservatives and classical liberals have rightly called attention to the alarming trends from these progressives. However, the critiques rarely offer a viable solution to the problem. Like Dennis Prager who recently suggested that “parents must . . . find a school that teaches reading, writing and arithmetic rather than America-hatred,” many conservatives are arguing for an education that is culturally neutral.[4] Yet this response fails to recognize that education is inherently cultural and always serves as a battleground.
As we educate our young, we inculcate the contours of our culture into their lives both formally and informally. The ancient Greeks’ recognition of this principle undergirded the West’s educational history for most of the past two millennia. By reintroducing ourselves to their thinking, we may find good suggestions for how we can go forward in our culturally contested moment.
Education, Virtue, and the Polis
The ancients thought much about education. God gave instructions to the Israelites about how they should pass on knowledge of the law and history to those who came after them. The Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians each had written languages that were passed down even if only to small portions of their societies. The ancient Greeks also valued education. Specifically, they believed that education should inculcate virtue for the benefit of the community.
For the Greeks, much like the Israelites, education is not so much about the “assimilation of facts or the retention of information.”[5] Instead, they sought to shape students’ moral character “in harmony with the laws and customs of the community” so that they habituated the mind and body to will and act in accordance with what they knew to be true.[6]
On the jagged hills and coastal valleys where the Greeks made their homes, the polis (the community) was the center of their culture and society. Every activity and value was grounded in the life of the community that gathered in the village square to engage in trade, settle disputes, and marshal for battle against other city-states. Thus Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, argued that virtue was civic responsibility: right action toward the community.
Plato articulated four supreme virtues, known as the cardinal virtues, which formed “a natural bridge between mankind and society”: temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice, with justice serving as an overarching framework for the other three.[7] These characteristics gave the individual the moral perception and strength to pursue excellence in every situation. In the Greek worldview, this sort of virtue was “the nonnegotiable quality of a citizen of the state.”[8] As the individual defended the state from foreign invaders and native tyrants, showed deference to community elders, and raised his own children to protect and follow the laws of the polis, such actions demonstrated his cultivation of these virtues.[9]
Temperance and courage, “according to Plato, [are] ‘formed in the soul in the course of time by habit and exercise.’”[10] However, wisdom and justice require intentional instruction. For Plato, man obtains knowledge by uncovering the eternal and universal ideas buried in his nature through the use of the dialectic process which challenges the “thoughts and observations originating inside and outside” the self until “the issues are resolved.”[11]
For the Greek rhetorician, virtue “grows out of the beautiful adornments of [doctrines].”[12] Solomon, king of Israel, also spoke of the value of words, writing, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” (Prov. 25:11, KJV). The Greek rhetorician Isokrates thought along similar lines, arguing, “The right word is a sure sign of good learning.”[13] Beauty was an essential companion to the truth and “learning to speak properly cause[d] the student not only to think but to live properly.”[14]
You may have noted that I have not mentioned careers or pecuniary rewards anywhere in this discussion of education. For the ancients, “[t]he life of virtue has nothing to do with one’s prospective pleasures, possessions, or practical affairs, but concerns the manner in which one is prepared to spend one’s leisure hours.”[15] Education, for them, was about making yourself a work of art as you learned to appreciate and then to imitate the best in the arts, letters, and sciences within the context of life, including your job. The more fully you realize this process, the freer you are from slavery to your own faults and inadequacies. As educator David Hicks has written, this kind of “life completes the individual, holding him against the warmth of the divine spark in his nature and making sense of an existence otherwise consumed by the infinite wishing of one thing for the sake of another.”[16]
Thus education, for the ancients, served an essential “cultural purpose as well as an intellectual one.” They invited “the student to adopt for himself his civilization’s highest moral and aesthetic values” while simultaneously embracing “the rules governing a universal process of inquiry.”[17] This concept of education meant that it could be spread broadly. As biographer and scholar of Renaissance Italy, Iris Origo, has written, “Not everyone is obliged to excel in philosophy, medicine, or the law, nor are all equally favored by nature; but all are destined to live in society and to practice virtue.”[18]
Educating for the Chief End of Man
Notwithstanding the Greeks’ emphasis on the polis, it is an insufficient foundation for a worldview—as Socrates found out to his great suffering. The polis is not the chief end of man; loving and enjoying God is man’s chief end. Renaissance scholar Anthony Esolen rightly argues that we cannot successfully educate students if we do not know what man is and how he relates to the God from Whom he takes his form.[19]
In our current culture, Stratford Caldecott argues that we have been “educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.”[20] This utilitarian approach to education was a capitulation to the “temptation to make education a preparation for the practical life” during the Industrial Revolution. Thus our education tends to focus solely on “science” and changes all other “studies into sciences” producing an education system that nominally prepares students for “work rather than for leisure, for the factory rather than for the parlor, [and] the school itself came to resemble the factory.”[21] This approach wrongly teaches students that their ultimate meaning in life is a career; however, careers, for all the good that they can accomplish under the sovereign care of the God who calls us to our vocations, are, in themselves, fleeting and insufficient to meet man’s deepest needs.
Unfortunately, Christians have struggled to swim against this cultural tide. Most of our arguments about education focus on how well it does or does not prepare us for careers.[22] This fact is a crying shame, because, as Gordon Clark reminds us, “Christianity . . . makes its appeal to the whole man.”[23] Thus the purpose of education for us as Christians is not ultimately the benefit of the polis, although the polis often serves some penultimate aim in God’s plans. Rather, we have set out “to make Christian men, men transformed by the renewing of their minds after the image of Him who created them.”[24]
Yet if we diverge from the Greeks, we can learn several lessons from them. As Clement of Alexandria wrote in The Stromata, we “will not shrink from making use of what is best in philosophy and other preparatory instruction.”[25]
For the Greeks, the good of the polis was a key goal of education, but for us it is the love of God. We need to meditate on how the various areas of knowledge relate to and encourage our love of God through which we serve our neighbors through our careers, in our communities, and so forth. How does learning reveal more of God’s infinite nature and character that is on display in creation? Further, when we understand education in light of God’s general revelation, we will see that all disciplines are interrelated to each other. Caldecott explains that when we approach education in this manner, “everything becomes interesting. There are no ‘boring’ subjects—nothing can be ugly or pointless unless we make it so, turning our backs on the Giver of Being.”[26]
If all subjects of study have become beautiful and worthy, our approach to education will be changed as well. Plato’s four cardinal virtues remain important for us. Temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice bear on our understanding of literature, law, mathematics, science, and history. But Plato was limited to the virtues revealed through God’s created order. We have the benefit of the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) revealed in Scripture. As Dante realized, the theological virtues “see more deeply [than the cardinal virtues, and] will sharpen and instruct your mortal sight.”[27]
Lastly, the Greeks were right to understand education as a means of passing along a culture. We should not be afraid of bringing students up “as persons, born . . . in certain localities, among certain people, who bear a certain history, and who claim our love and loyalty.”[28] Our educational efforts should reflect the uniqueness of our theology, philosophy, and community. Further, we should not be surprised that those who reject Christianity and its cultural manifestations are attempting to build an educational system on their opposing worldview, but neither should we capitulate. Rather, we must advocate for a distinctly Christian cultural education through homeschooling, private school, or even in a more diverse type of public school system like the kind developed by Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth century.[29]
Conclusion
As we face clear and intentional attempts to destroy Western thought and culture through the education system, we need not become discouraged. The world of philosophical conflict, sexual confusion, and racial division presents us with a challenge no more difficult than that faced by the Athenians as they fended off the Persians or the Christians in the disintegrating Roman Empire. By reclaiming the best of the past, we can better chart our course with courage through the present stormy cultural seas, looking with hope and faith for calmer days ahead when temperance, love, and justice will be more fully realized in our educational system and society.
[1]Ben Zeisloft, “Required Penn Nursing Class Deducts Points if Students Don’t Introduce Themselves with ‘Preferred Pronouns,’” Upenn Statesmen,March 10, 2021, https://upennstatesman.org/2021/03/10/penn-nursing-preferred-pronouns/, accessed March 13, 2021.
[2]Mary King Linge and Susan Edelman, “NY Lawmaker wants Sex Ed for Kindergarteners,” New York Post, March 6, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/03/06/ny-lawmaker-wants-sex-ed-for-kindergartners/, accessed March 13, 2021.
[3]Christopher F. Rufo, “Revenge of the Gods: California’s Proposed Ethnic Studies Curriculum Urges Students to Chant to the Aztec Deity of Human Sacrifice,” City Journal, March 10, 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/calif-ethnic-studies-curriculum-accuses-christianity-of-theocide, accessed March 13, 2021.
[4]Dennis Prager, “Most American Schools are Damaging Your Child,” Daily Wire, March 13, 2021, https://www.dailywire.com/news/prager-most-american-schools-are-damaging-your-child, accessed March 13, 2021.
[5]David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), 20.
[6]Ibid., 21.
[7]Michael J. Anthony and Warren S. Benson, Exploring the History and Philosophy of Christian Education: Principles for the Twenty-first Century (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 60.
[8]Ibid., 57.
[9]Ibid.
[10]Ibid., 60.
[11]Hicks, 24–25.
[12]Ibid., 26.
[13]Isokrates, in Hicks, 26.
[14]Hicks, 26.
[15]Ibid., 22.
[16]Ibid., 21.
[17]Ibid., 19.
[18]Iris Origo, “The Education of Renaissance Man,” in Hicks, 22.
[19]Anthony Esolen, “Foreword,” in Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education by Stratford Caldecott (Tacoma, WA: Angelico, 2012), 4.
[20]Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education (Tacoma, WA: Angelico, 2012), 11 (emphasis his).
[21]Hicks, 23.
[22]Entertainer and folksy defender of the blue-collar workforce, Mike Rowe, serves as the best example of this mentality. Though Rowe maintains that he does not oppose liberal arts education at a reasonable price, he does not always articulate his point with care. As a result, he often comes across as supporting only that education which has a clear connection with a career. See Jordan Davidson, “Mike Rowe: I Don’t Want to Pay for Your Useless College Degree,” The Federalist, December 16, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/mike-rowe-i-dont-want-to-pay-for-your-useless-college-degree/, accessed March 13, 2021; and Mike Rowe, “Mistaken Stance on the Importance of a College Education,” July 17, 2017, https://mikerowe.com/2017/07/otw-mistakenstanceonimportanceofcollegeed/, accessed March 13, 2021.
[23]Gordon Clark, A Christian Philosophy of Education, 2nd rev. ed. (Jefferson, MD: Trinity, 1988), 143.
[24]John W. Robbins, “Foreword” in A Christian Philosophy of Education by Gordon Clark, 2nd rev. ed. (Jefferson, MD: Trinity, 1988), viii.
[25]Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, in The Complete Ant-Nicene and Nicene and Post Nicene Church Fathers Collection Philip Schaff ed. (Catholic Way, 2014), Book 1, chapter 1.
[26]Caldecott, 15.
[27]Dante Alighieri, Paradiso in The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (1970; repr., New York: New American Library, 2006), Canto XXXI, lines 110–11.
[28]Esolen, 5.
[29]See James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, Library of Religious Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
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