With every day, it seems, the classical schooling movement grows by leaps and bounds. More and more schools open across the country, with ever increasing variety and excellence in their offerings, and the promise of real cultural change resulting from the work of classical educators becomes more and more palpable. With this growth has come an increased public awareness of all that classical schools purport to offer, and all that makes them unique. Inevitably, like all things in an era of marketing and publicity, classical education has become a brand.
As with any brand, a network of associations and presumptions has attached itself to classical education. The name has come to stand for certain things. At the most basic level, I think it is fair to say that what it stands for is a genuine alternative to the predominant modes of schooling in present day America. Whereas the typical American school aims to equip its students for college and career readiness, the classical school attempts to prepare young people for the whole range of roles and responsibilities they are bound to confront in their adulthood. Whereas the typical school tries to impart skills, the classical school strives to inculcate virtue. Whereas the curriculum of the typical school has become infected with a range of ideological agendas, the venerable course of study in a classical school is rooted only in an encounter with truth, goodness, and beauty. These aims and ideals of classical education, articulated repeatedly to inquirers about our schools, have convinced families across the country that a classical school is a place that offers their children something substantially different than they will find elsewhere.
There is a kind of promise, then, in the name of classical that we have a duty to respect. Truth in advertising demands that we provide children with the true alternative that their parents are seeking. A conscientious classical school is an institution that will constantly be examining itself to ensure it is providing its students with an educational experience that matches up with the expectations of the families that sent them there because they wanted something better for them than other schools could provide. It means taking parents’ concerns seriously, seeking to understand the true causes of their discontent with rival educational options, and making every effort to ensure that we do not simply replicate the same problematic dynamics of the standard American school behind a façade of classical learning.
On the whole, classical educators tend to ascribe too much weight to the theoretical end of things. Ask your local classical educator what discontents him with the typical American school, and he will launch into a disquisition about John Dewey and the fundamental importance of the trivium. But ask a local parent, and the concerns you are likely to hear will be far more basic. A general lack of order in the halls and classrooms, a school-wide culture that is morally and often physically harmful to their children, a failure to impart to their children even the rudiments of linguistic or arithmetical facility, a kind of institutional futility resulting from unwillingness to hold students accountable for their academic or behavioral demerits – these are the things that appall parents about their children’s schools, and send them to us in the desperate hope of finding something better.
Fair dealing with our families means establishing schools in which these fundamental expectations are seriously addressed. If our claim is that the classical school is different, then it must be different in those areas that are of primary concern to parents. We have an obligation to establish orderly schools, where an edifying culture prevails, where the environment allows for the focus and attentiveness required for genuine study, and where clear standards are held up before the students as part of the formative process. Anything less is deception practiced upon a school’s constituents.
We have an obligation to our parents to do these things, and we have an obligation to ourselves to do these things. None of the purposes which we set for ourselves as classical educators – not the fostering of virtue or the encounter with truth, goodness, and beauty – come to genuine fruition without first doing the hard, humble work of getting the school’s foundations right. Just consider the structural issues implied in the most common sort of lesson we offer to our students. Imagine a humanities class engaged in a discussion of the Allegory of the Cave. What every one of us classical educators wants to say about the ends of such an activity is that through their encounter with this text, some new avenue towards understanding their presence in the world might light up in the minds of the students, and that through a conversation about the text, their powers of dialectical reasoning are strengthened and expanded. Surely, no higher ends could be set before young people.
But the attainment of these ends presupposes certain behavioral expectations shared between the teacher and the students. It is assumed that the students arrived in class having read the requisite passage in The Republic, and this in turn assumes that there is some kind of meaningful consequence when students fail to do the reading. It is assumed that students are, on the whole, engaged in the conversation, and this in turn assumes there is a large gap in assessment between students who are so engaged and those who sit inattentively. It is obviously assumed that none of the students is actively disrupting the conversation, and that any students who have shown a routine inclination to act in such disruptive ways have already been compelled to change their classroom comportment, or removed from the classroom altogether. Again, this is a simple matter of institutional honesty – if you say you are teaching your students Plato, but almost none of those students are reading Plato or engaging constructively in the conversation about Plato, then you are not teaching your students Plato.
It does not matter if the daily commotion in a school’s hallway unfolds under posters of The School of Athens rather than posters covered in corny inspirational sayings. It does not matter if students are routinely resorting to the Sparknotes for Hamlet rather than the Sparknotes for The House on Mango Street. It does not matter if a student refuses to do his math homework out of Euclid rather than refusing to do his math homework out of Pearsons. It does not matter if a student’s disrespectful conduct continuously interrupts a lesson based on Livy rather than interrupting a lesson based on the 1619 Project. In either case, real learning is not taking place. It is only a tinsel of classical pedagogy strewn over the identical futility that differentiates the former cases from the latter. The label of classical education is only being used in those cases as a brand to disguise the same disorder and same low standards as can be found in any non-classical school.
If we are being candid, there are more classical schools than we would care to admit who have adopted the classical brand as a marketing ploy, without any institutional commitment to performing the hard work and making the hard choices required to bring the classical vision of things alive in an authentic manner. Such schools are not honoring the promises they have made by presenting themselves to the public as alternatives to our troubled educational system. In fact, they are often embodying the very same problematic trends as that system. They are going through the motions, every bit as much as the schools they purport to rival.
When I first learned about the world of classical education, what struck me immediately was the way the people involved in this world spoke thoughtfully about the ends of humane education, in contrast to the cliché-ridden patois of modern educators. I was impressed with the way they evinced a genuine concern for the flourishing of students, and brought a breadth of learning and experience to bear on the questions of how best to enable that flourishing. The distinctive thing was obviously the sincerity of the whole enterprise. Classical education meant doing the real thing, as opposed to the standard American school that aimed to be nothing more than a conveyor belt on the way to degrees and employment. That was the promise that first drew me to the world of classical, and the hope that sustains me. I will never be able to entertain any other conception of the enterprise. The true note of classical pedagogy will always be a commitment to doing the real thing. Everything else is just a marketing campaign.
Like you, I'm deeply drawn to the classical movement for its promise. However, I worry that it is currently not more than a particular facade placed on an otherwise christian private school. Yes, our curriculum slightly differs and the people we attract are usually of a particular sort, but the learning environment we provide faintly differs from those in private or public schools. That is, we are functioning in the same paradigm.
To achieve classical should not require teachers to constantly strive against the boundaries of the modern paradigm assumed by their school. As such, our schools fall into "going through the motions" because our we 'assumed' those motions in establishing our schools. We would be served much better from developing an inherently 'classical' paradigm whose motions move us even when we are at rest and whose rhythms we would be proud to "go through."
There's much more to say, but that's enough for one note. Always happy to talk more. Thanks for the article.