Make Education Roman Again

Today’s universities are increasingly self-destructive, hell-bent not only on deconstructing the Western canon in the classroom but on dissolving the American nation itself. Conservative reformers can’t be satisfied with turning the clock back to the 2010s—or even the 1950s. The classical education tradition that formed the American Founders was repudiated long ago. But there is hope that it can be restored and, with it, our constitutional republic.

As we argue in a new report, progressive schools and the administrative state have worked in tandem since the Progressive Era to remake America. Progressive educational reformers followed the playbook put together by their originator, John Dewey, who hoped to detach education from the past to form subjects suited for bureaucratic rule.

Americans are now awakening to the radicalism of both projects and are pushing back against administrative conquest in politics while reviving (non-Progressive) classical education in schools.

Both the Founders and the progressives recognized the political and civilizational stakes of education. They agreed that certain kinds of schooling prepare students to be citizens of a republic while others incline them to be members of a centralized state ruled by expert administrators; they disagreed on which goal was desirable and, thus, which educational scheme should be preferred.

The local, classical education that characterized early America, that formed most of the American Founders, and that many Founders prescribed for the new nation reinforced the principles of a free federal republic.

Classical colleges taught Americans that human nature was fixed and purposive; that human beings perfect their nature in and owe profound obligations to their familial, political, and religious societies; that the masterworks of classical Greece and Rome, the teachings of the Christian religion, and the heritage of European civilization are part of our birthright and are indispensable aids in cultivating the moral, intellectual, and theological virtues as well as securing the safety and happiness of our nation.

In part because they acknowledged that men are not merely parts of the state, but members of communities that precede and transcend the political community, such classical colleges prepared graduates to be citizens of a limited republic.

The classicism of the Founding Fathers differs from later Great Books approaches. The Founders gave greater attention to political history, biography, rhetoric, and the Roman Republic than did the 20th-century programs that emphasized philosophy, literature, and the Greeks.

The Founders’ approach illustrates the intimate link between civic education and liberal education. The cultivation of virtue through the liberal arts benefits the person both as individual and as member of family, nation, and religious body. The Founders’ orientation—favoring Roman political history, biography, and rhetoric—reveals their view of education as inherently formative toward a particular political community. The classics helped cultivate virtue for the person and the polity. Roman examples supplied models of republican virtue, duty to the res publica, and resistance to tyranny.

Classical educators today, forgetting the Founders’ vision, often accept a strict bifurcation between the private and the public, corresponding to a “liberal education” that would benefit their students as individuals, understood to be in tension with a “civic education” that is tantamount to ideological indoctrination or partisan activism.

The Western tradition—including the American Founders and the Roman authorities to whom they looked—never accepted such a bifurcation. On the classical view, we are social and political creatures by nature rather than isolated individuals who choose to construct our social and political relations. Any classical education that fails to cultivate what Joshua Mitchell calls “citizen competence” in its students is unworthy of the name: It is instead an emphatically modern education, assuming modern premises about the ultimately individual essence of the person and the merely artificial character of social relations, and will only perpetuate dysfunction in the personal and public lives of its graduates.

If classical education is to equip its graduates to meet the constitutional and civilizational crises of our time, it must become more like the education of the Founding generation that established our Republic.

In so doing, it would become more Roman, more civic, and perhaps more authentically Christian as well. To be worthy of the name, a classical education ought to form its students in accord with a classical understanding of the human person: naturally rational and free, naturally social and political, naturally embodied and religious.

Classical education must be conducted with a sense of public responsibility, a sense that is manifested in its very curriculum. Classical education must prioritize Latin, political history and the biographies of great statesmen, moral philosophy and the principles of government, and rhetoric, the ultimate skill or art of the classical, educated, republican citizen.

A recovery of a more fully classical education—and, thus, one more like that of our Founders—is desirable. A truly classical education will prepare the next generation of Americans to live both more happily in their personal and private lives and more responsibly as citizens. It will infuse them, better than any other form of education can, with the courage required to restore what needs to be restored, the fortitude to preserve what can be preserved, and the prudence to discern how to do so.

Above all, a truly classical education will remind Americans that Western civilization, as it formed America and as it was realized in America, belongs to them as their birthright to receive, to preserve, and to hand on to their children.

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Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

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