From Conservative to Classical Educator
It is a very unfortunate fact about our society that young people are forced to identify with one of our two partisan political factions at a very early stage of their intellectual development. Almost before they figure out anything else about themselves, they figure out whether they are on the right or on the left, and this loyalty henceforward becomes a critical facet of their identity.
So it was that I found myself in college coming to think of myself as a conservative. The precise chronology of that process is lost in the fogs of history, but the immediate cause will always be unforgettable to me: I could not stand my professors.
Now this point needs some explanation. I don’t wish to sound querulous. But one thing must be understood about my character at this age: I adored literature. I thought literature was everything. I knew that it would always be at the center of my life. I used to go to the library and pull mounds of books from the shelves, and then ensconce myself in a corner somewhere reading for hours. I pored over the works of my favorite poets, and then for weeks afterwards affected behavior which I thought mimicked my idols (did I mention I was still a teenager?): brooding and morose after reading Byron, passionate and idealistic after some time spent with Shelley. I wrote sheaves of unspeakably atrocious doggerel, which has fortunately turned to compost by now. I was completely entranced by it all.
It was the most natural thing in the world, then, for me to declare as an English major upon arriving in college, and immerse myself in the study of literature. To direct me in that study, I was blessed with several outstanding professors - models of erudition, embodiments of sweetness and light, who clearly shared my reverence for literature, but who taught me how to channel that reverence into genuine scholarship. I will be grateful my whole life long for what I gained from these instructors.
But more commonly, I found myself in class with another sort of professor, the sort who obviously did not share that reverence. These professors only wanted to preen themselves on their own supposed cleverness by debunking the material they were teaching; by assiduously deriding any and all moral sentiments they found expressed there; and by inculcating the same attitude of cynicism and suspicion in their students through the tenor of their instruction. There was the professor of my American Literature course who scoffed and snorted his way through the Puritans. There was the professor of a seminar on the novel whose constant aim was to “problematize” any passage that so much as suggested a non-progressive view of human nature. Outside the department, I found much the same, like the professor in a required Cultural Anthropology course who railed constantly about what he took to be racist standards of grammatical usage. Vainly did I, a foolish young man in desperate need of wisdom, look to these people for aid in that search.
So how else was I supposed to respond to this sort of thing, given my youthful fervor for literature and the life of the mind its study entailed? What other sorts of feelings could I harbor towards a cadre of mediocrities who thought the proper facial expression for a person of learning was a sneer? Who believed the core function of literary study was to afford modern day persons the opportunity to deride past ages for their failures to be enlightened by contemporary progressive pieties? As I said, I simply could not stand them, and recognizing that they all identified in different ways with “the left,” I began to regard myself as “on the right,” only to signal my independence from them and everything they represented.
As time went on, I learned that leftists were the sort of folks who wanted to be rid of ideas like “the canon,” who chanted that “Western civ has got to go,” and in many other ways sought to denigrate and destroy our intellectual and cultural heritage. I loved that heritage, and hated those who wanted to destroy it. As far as I was concerned, then, to be a conservative meant being on the side of those who love our heritage, and antagonistic towards its deadly enemies. It meant, in a sense, belonging to the party of Shakespeare.
From the start, then, thinking of myself as a conservative meant taking a certain kind of cultural stand, or approaching a certain intellectual heritage in a certain way. More basically, it meant valuing that heritage and regarding its preservation and transmission as the sine qua non of civilized life. I never could understand, and never will understand, how anyone can imagine that civilized life can carry on absent a continual effort to replenish a people’s stores of virtue and wisdom out of the cultural resources passed on to them by their forebears. Nor could I ever conceive of a conservatism that was not, in some fundamental way, defined by the primacy of that task.
After I left college, and began to read various journals to deepen my understanding of current affairs, I naturally gravitated towards those on the right. What I found there reflected very little of my own sense of conservatism as a mode of cultural piety. To be sure, it was not uncommon to find indictments of academia’s progressive rot - screeds against “tenured radicals” and such. But even as a young man I recognized the limited usefulness of this sort of thing, and I certainly didn’t need any more convincing that the university was rotten. What I was searching for hopelessly among these journals was a creative cultural program that appropriated our heritage in ways that made it vital for our own day. I wondered why the left could regularly set their own programs in motion, embodying their own vision in a variety of media, curricula, and legal initiatives, but the right could never do such a thing.
Even less inspiring was what I took to be the nearly single-minded focus on policy among outlets on the right. I suppose I can best summarize my objections to this phenomenon as follows: if you had to select the section of the library to shelve contemporary conservative journals, they would clearly go in the political science section, but I thought a conservative journal belonged in the arts and culture section. In the pages of a typical right-wing journal, conservatism was construed as a mode of partisan strategizing, rather than the sort of broad cultural and intellectual program I construed it as when I first began to think of myself as a conservative.
And then there was the increasing fascination with popular culture among conservatives, which struck me then, as it strikes me now, with the kind of squirming discomfort one feels when a middle-age adult quotes Ariana Grande lyrics in the company of some tweens to show how hip they are. It smacked of an undignified desire to fit in, to say “we have gotten with the times.” But I did not want to get with our times. I struggled quite hard to avoid getting with the times. I fancied the finest epitaph I could have inscribed on my gravestone was, “He never got with his times.” What were conservatives doing idling among the baubles of pop culture, I asked myself, when our entire civilizational heritage was moldering and going to ruin?
I am painting in extremely broad brush strokes, to be sure, and I certainly do not mean to be wholly dismissive of the conservative movement’s contributions to American life. I only want to illustrate the way I slowly grew disenchanted with that movement as I came to understand that it never really aimed at the sort of encompassing cultural program I thought it promised, and which I saw as the only viable response to the crudities of our age. I do not think it is controversial to say this. I do not think it is controversial to acknowledge that whatever else American conservatism has been, it has never been the party of Shakespeare. It has never defined itself by the transmission and revitalization of a certain cultural heritage, from a certain perspective, entailing a certain kind of stand, or as an alternative way modern persons could live in a world beset with incivility and brutality.
The failures of conservatism in this regard struck me even more acutely when I began my career as an educator. I have been uncommonly blessed to work alongside some truly gifted teachers, men and women with a real calling to share their academic passions with young folk. Some of these teachers were even persons of a liberal bent, but it made no difference in my admiration for them; I held our common love of literature and learning to be of infinitely greater import than any disagreements we might have concerning political affairs.
Nonetheless, it was all too clear that the schools in which we taught were failing to pass along the civilizational heritage entrusted to us, and that the moral and intellectual development of our students was gravely impinged as a consequence. There are many, many causes of this failure, too many to go into here, but I can put the point as simply as possible by saying that American schools, by and large, lack any commitment to our cultural heritage, or to transmitting that heritage in any particular way. In other words, the failures of our educational system are by and large a consequence of their nearly complete divorce from the spirit of a true conservatism.
This means that conservatives ought to have regarded the decrepitude of our schools as the most urgent issue imposing itself upon the nation. More to the point, they ought to have recognized in their own tradition the necessary remedies for this crisis, and to have assiduously made the case to the public that this was so. Yet as far as I could see, the American right had no program to address the crisis of American education, and one could be forgiven for wondering whether or not any of its leading lights had an awareness of this crisis to begin with. Year after year, I had a front row seat to the spiraling miseducation of America’s youth, but besides some sporadic bromides against teacher unions and post-modern professors, I did not see much acknowledgment from right-wing commentators that this was taking place. I certainly did not see any proposed solutions, beyond the continued whining about the “the dumbest generation” and so on.
What I saw instead were lots of debates about abstract nouns - heated conflicts about populism vs. meritocracy, integralism vs. libertarianism, nationalism vs. liberalism, carried on in complete insouciance to the fact that the interlocutors’ most cherished theories of governance stood no chance of taking root in the minds of a public so schooled and so formed. Watching conservatives ply their theories in total disregard for our nation’s cultural and pedagogical deficits gave me the same sensations I would feel watching someone try to weave the Unicorn Tapestries out of silly string. Certain kinds of parts just do not add up to certain kinds of wholes.
To any half-way observant person, the decline of our national character is the supreme political question of the day, and it is a question entirely bound up in the way we raise our children, teach our children, and acculturate our children. The persistent debates on the right over abstract policy descriptions signaled to me a general lack of urgency towards this superintending question, and over time, my disenchantment with conservatism soured into frustration, which deteriorated at last into disgust. There seemed to be at its heart a willful indifference to the only thing that mattered.
Such was the state of my thoughts when, some six or seven years ago, I discovered the classical schooling movement. I had the great fortune to visit some classrooms in a classical school, and was instantly struck by the extraordinary esprit de corps prevailing among both the faculty and the students. In one class, the students were discussing Macbeth, and engaging so fervently in a discussion of the Macbeth’s moral character that the teacher did not need to say a word. Here was a place where all parties were engaged - passionately, seriously, diligently - in the transmission of a certain cultural heritage, in a way that inculcated certain moral and intellectual virtues among those who both passed that heritage along and those who received it.
This initial encounter with classical education inspired me to learn more about the movement, and as I did so, I found a world after my own heart: educators in love with wisdom and beauty, who had received joy in their own lives from their encounters with art and history and philosophy, and who wanted to share that joy with those under their tutelage. I saw citizens concerned with the deteriorating state of our civic life, who were not merely complaining about that deterioration, but who were undertaking a difficult but efficacious remedy, through a commitment to directing the growth of young souls. I saw devout Christians intent not simply to pass along their faith, but to pass it along in a condition robust enough to be a genuine source of wisdom and hope to others.
One of the things that impressed me deeply about classical schools was the sacrifice that was obviously incurred by those involved in their creation. Groups of dedicated parents would spend years compiling plans, submitting documents, painting school rooms and building bookshelves, because they believed in the classical vision. Handfuls of students would gather in church basements, poring over the works of Aristotle, while across town, in the multi-million dollar monstrosities their parents’ taxes had just paid for, thousands of their peers would wander through vast hallways vainly searching for anything resembling that sort of authentic encounter with wisdom. Classical educators did not just teach virtue to their students; they modelled it through all that they endured for the sake of their students. My admiration for these people grew and grew, until I became quite eager to join their ranks.
This past year, I was lucky enough to do so. I was blessed to be entrusted with the guidance of a classical education program in a nearby Catholic high school, and it has felt like a homecoming for me. As a young man, I threw myself into the world of letters out of a soul-deep longing to know what I should be up to with this strange gift of a life that had been bequeathed to me. Now, I have the privilege to meet young people at a similar juncture of their development, and direct them towards the texts and practices that provided me with comfort and insight when I was around their age. I have the responsibility to show them - as so many of my professors never showed me - where they can discover the wisdom and beauty they hunger for. And I have the camaraderie of professionals and families across this country, similarly invested in this noble project, to turn to for insight and encouragement. At last, I am at home.
There is an obvious rejoinder to the case I am making here. Conservatism, after all, is a political movement, classical education a pedagogical one, and there is no reason to suppose that the goods secured through a pedagogical movement will be secured through a political one. At a surface level, this objection would seem to make sense, but in fact, the failure to apprehend the inseparability between the realms of the pedagogical and the political constitutes the fatal insufficiency of contemporary conservatism. As Irving Babbit makes clear in his Democracy and Leadership, the primary political question in the classical traditions of both the east and the west was how to shape the character of rulers so that they would be adequate to the discharge of their solemn duties, and, as a corollary, how to ensure that only those subjected to such a formative rearing would gain power. Plato, for instance, begins his famous disquisition on the just order of a polis by considering the right mode of acculturation for those bound to rule over that order. During the Renaissance, manuals for princes like Thomas Eliot’s The Book Named the Governor similarly dictated the manner of upbringing a ruler should receive if any virtue and competence were to be expected of him in office.
The question, “how do we ensure right rule?” is so intimately bound up with the question “how do we cultivate righteous rulers?” that no sensible partition may be drawn between them, just as no vision of a sound order can be imagined that does not entail some conception of the proper acculturation of young souls. None of the political aims presently cherished by those on the right - from the strengthening of the family to the promotion of a more just economy to the preservation of basic constitutional rights - are the least bit conceivable in the absence of some prior restoration of civic virtue, and this is primarily an educational and cultural task.
One could almost define contemporary conservatism by its willful disregard of this relation. One could be forgiven for regarding the whole conservative project as one long attempt to secure the goods of a civilized polity in the absence of civilization. The contemporary conservative expects a regime that is hostile to fanaticism and respectful of immemorial political rights to emerge out of a citizenry who have never had temperance and piety inculcated in them. And he is shocked - repeatedly shocked - when these expectations prove delusive.
The recent events at the capital signify the terminal point of this chimerical project. More broadly, the state of turmoil and instability that has consumed the right over the last five years, and has grown particularly acute in recent months, is the direct consequence of failing to attend to “first things” in regards to civil society. Each of the respective factions reproaches their rivals with accusations of ineffectiveness, and each is justified in doing so, because none can attain their desired political objectives in the present cultural climate of the nation. The spiritual materials are just not in place to construct any of their political visions, and so failure brings on recrimination, which leads to more extreme proposals, with their own inevitable failure, because all are vainly struggling to erect their houses upon sand.
It just doesn’t matter to me anymore. The hopelessness of these debates has lost all interest for me. Becoming a classical educator has given me the opportunity to throw myself into work far more meaningful, because directed at causes far more fundamental than the latest political outrage. Throughout history, humane and intelligent groups of people, frustrated and disgusted by the various forms of incivility besetting them, have always responded in the same way: by going back to work on their character and the character of their contemporaries, and rummaging through their cultural heritage for all the resources that could aid them in this endeavor. A rejuvenation of the life of the mind and the life of the spirit has always been the most enduring mode of response to civilizational decay. At its core, the classical schooling movement represents just such a rejuvenation – arguably, the only such in our day and age. As such, it represents to me the best chance for deliverance from the evils of the times.
None of this is to say I am unmindful of the dire state of our political affairs, nor to deny the dread that fills me when I consider the ominous future lying on the other side of our present turmoil. If classical educators are assiduously laying foundations, it is in the certain knowledge that they are bound to be tested by earthquakes quite soon. But they have the merit of their work to buoy and console them, that confident trust in the fruits of a virtuous enterprise that alone deserves the title of hope. I have no doubt that, many decades into the future, the chronicles of our age will be replete with the record of its violence, its vandalism, its bitter divisions. But after all of these things are inscribed there, and all the destruction and suffering cataloged, I now know there will be something else written there, something that will sound a bit like this:
“Amidst these social cataclysms, which every week grew more portentous and engulfing, a few bands of decent people gathered to preserve the fragments of civilization remaining to them. Many of these were parents, anxious to save their children from the increasing toxicity of the culture which gathered around them. Joined to these families were devout Christians who feared for the prospects of their faith amid that same culture, along with scholars, artists, and lovers of learning of all sorts, who could find no other home during such an era. Together, they formed little schools, where children were nourished on the wisdom and beauty of the past. Ten students here, twenty there – in little enclaves out of sight of the prevalent culture, they invited young folk to participate in the life of the mind and spirit, and strived to inculcate in them all the virtues requisite to life in community. Their work was humble and laborious, yet effective, and over time it spread a civilizing influence amid a people desperate for relief from conflict, first through their students, and then through their students in turn, and then through theirs in turn. It is to their magnanimous yet patient efforts that we have inherited our civilization, and enjoy all the blessings of this, our flourishing age.”