Quote of the Day: Education is the Kindling of a Flame

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.-Socrates

Testing for (PC) Truth

by John Willson

Idiot, n.  A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.  The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but ‘pervades and regulates the whole.’  He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable.  He sets the fashion of opinion and taste, dictates the limitation of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

According to Richard Perez-Pena in the New York Times (All the PC News That We Can Print), colleges and universities are on the verge of having to fess up in public about whether they teach anything or not.  Ever since John Dewey’s “Teacher’s College” at Columbia got control of the vocabulary, idiots (see Ambrose Bierce’s definition, above) have set educational policy on an increasing number of levels, primarily through government mandates.  One mechanism of idiot control has been standardized “testing,” apparently now oozing its way into the ratings of institutions of higher learning.

Reinvigorating Culture

by Russell Kirk

Anyone who pushes the buttons of a television set nowadays [written in 1994, Ed.] may be tempted to reflect that genuine culture came to an end during the latter half of the twentieth century. The television set is an immense accomplishment of reason and imagination: the victory of technology. But the gross images produced by television are symptoms and causes of our civilization’s decadence: the defeat of humane culture.

The contrast between the success of technology and the failure of social institutions is yet more striking when we look at any large American city. Some time ago I spent a day in Detroit, once styled “the arsenal of democracy,” latterly known as “America’s murder capital.” I have known Detroit ever since I was a small boy, and have observed the stages of the city’s decay over the decades. Except for some financial and political activity, and a little surviving commerce, about the foot of Woodward Avenue near the river, old Detroit is a dangerous wreck. The length of Woodward Avenue, up to Eight Mile Road and beyond, one drives through grim desolation: Beirut in the midst of its troubles might have seemed more cheerful. One passes through Detroit’s “cultural center,” the Institute of Arts on one side of the avenue, the Public Library on the other. Immediately north or south of those splendid buildings, immediately east or west, extends the grimy reality of a broken and dying city. “Culture” has become something locked into an archaic museum.

Concerning Charles Murray's "Real Education"

by Christopher B. Nelson

I confess to having approached Mr. Murray's book with a little ambivalence. I imagined that I might be one of those educational romantics he described and wondered whether a certain kind of educational romanticism might provide, not an unkindly lie, but a noble spur to a better life for our nation's young. But this book strikes me as both provocative and compelling in its description of the ills of, and cures for, our so-called educational system. I say "so-called," because we do not have a single educational system in this country, though the threats and attempts to create one are certainly out there and are devoutly to be resisted. Mr. Murray and I agree on this.

I am neither a statistician nor a social scientist, and see little I can contribute to the findings Mr. Murray makes in his early chapters. I'm pretty much an amateur at diagnostics. But I am a citizen of this great country, and thought I might approach the question of education from a perspective I imagine to be important in all public policy discussions: What kind of education is necessary to preserve our liberal democracy? How should we educate our citizens to be fit for the freedom they ought to enjoy in our democratic republic?

Means and Ends: Education in a Secular Age

by Cleanth Brooks

The serious writer of today lives in a very much secularized world, a world of measurable objects, a world of space and time considerations, a world that must be studied not only rationally, but scientifically. Now, this situation did not suddenly come about in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has been developing since that time, and I think if we wanted to be very careful we could push it far back of the seventeenth century. But many people agree that a very important part of the process becomes evident in the seventeenth century.

An important man in this process is the French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes distinguished, you will remember, the mind from matter, and thus split the world into two different realms. On one side there was the realm of mental activity, the world of ideas, fancies, and all kinds of subjective things. And outside of the human head was the world of objects and things. God alone, Descartes thought, knew how to relate the two worlds, the world of time and space and the world of mental activity. And Descartes, it ought to be said, certainly had no intention of removing God from the process (he was a Christian), or of attacking a religion. Nevertheless, the dualism that Descartes set up worked steadily through the decades to clear the path for a more careful study of the world of things. It cleared the highway for the marvelous development of the so-called hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. They have grown magnificently, particularly in our own twentieth century.

Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education

by Mortimer Adler

Although the title of this essay is "Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education" and although it begins and ends with a consideration of liberal education, its main concern is with the distinction between labor and leisure. This is so because I have found it almost impossible, in my own thinking about the subject, to understand liberal education except in terms of what its end is. And the end of liberal education, it seems to me, lies in the use we make of our leisure, in the activities with which we occupy our leisure time.

In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should like to proceed in the following order: first, to make some approximations to a definition of liberal education in terms of leisure; second, to try to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of this definition by examining more closely the distinctions between work or labor, on the one hand (I shall use the words "work" and "labor" interchangeably), and leisure, on the other; and, third, to draw from this analysis some implications or consequences for the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy like ours.

State of Education-Yes, Prime Minister

A wonderful commentary on the State of Education.

Autobiographical Kirk--from an Unexpected Source

by Bradley J. Birzer

Dear TIC Readers,

I’m roughly half done with chapter five—“Deconstructing and Reconstructing Liberalism”—of the Kirk book. At this point, I’m on my third or fourth title for the book as a whole, “The Age of Kirk.” As you can tell, I’m starting to lose count of titles, and I’m sure this title will fade into memory at some point, only to be replaced by an even worse title. I’d like to name the book something like “Sanctifying Mecosta,” but John Miller made me promise never to use “sanctifying” in a title again. I intend to keep that promise.

Chapter five explores Kirk’s full-out assault on the modern concept of liberalism (18th, 19th, and 20th century varieties), and his attempt to resurrect the proper and antique definition of the word.

I’ve finished the “deconstructing” part of the chapter, and I’m currently research and writing the “reconstructing” part. Consequently, I’ve had the great pleasure of re-reading—and, perhaps, reading fully for the first time—Kirk’s 1978 forgotten gem, Decadence and Renewal in Higher Education (South Bend, Ind: Gateway Books).

Much to my surprise, as I’ve forgotten much I once knew, the book is an autobiographical journey, using the declining standards of education as the hook. It contains some of Kirk’s best writing, especially in his very Platonic explanation of “moral imagination.”

Just to give you a flavor of the book, I’ve typed out what I consider to be the most important passages from the first seventy pages. As you’ll see, Kirk understood his subject well, and it’s somewhat glorious to follow his exact development of thought on this vital issue. He wrote the book, by the way, to fulfill a promise he made to T.S. Eliot, presumably sometime in the 1950s.

I hope you enjoy these passages as much as I have. Yours, Brad 

 

***

“To T.S. Eliot, who in 1955 asked me to write such a book as this.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), dedication page]

“I am an anti-elitist. I share whole-heartedly my old friend T.S. Eliot’s objection to Karl Mannheim’s theory of modern elites. I object especially to schemes for the governance of modern society by formally-trained specialized and technological elites.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), xvii]

“And being educated, they will know that they do not know everything; and that there exist objects in life besides power and money and sensual gratification; they will take long views; they will look backward to ancestors and forward to posterity. For them, education will not terminate on commencement-day.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xviii]

“Promptly upon being discharged form the army in 1946, I was drafted into the department of the history of civilization at Michigan State College.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xxi]

“I have been visiting professor, over the years, at various colleges and universities, never lingering longer than three months consecutively on any campus; and I have lectured on more than four hundred campuses.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xxii]

“Our trouble, instead, is that the people who run universities, though called presidents and deans, think of themselves as businessmen, often, and endeavor to apply ‘business principles’ to the higher learning. They talk of satisfying the consumer—that is, the student, or the student’s parents—and of cost analysis; they think of the university as a species of factory, turning out units efficiently; and their whole view is quantitative, not qualitative.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 3]

“When I was a senior, in 1940, there had been six thousand students; by 1953, there were some fifteen thousand.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal , 5]

“Increasingly politicized, the academic community was sinking into academic collectivism.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 12]

Liberal Education and Christian Humanism

By Bradley J. Birzer

A friend of mine recently told me about a banner she saw hanging inside the entrance of an American public elementary school. “You’re all number one,” the banner read. I must admit that my reaction to this was rather strong, if not downright irate. Two immediate problems sprang to mind. First, the message of the banner is a blatant lie. If each of the children is number one, then each child is also number 300 as well as being number 270,000,000 or even number six billion in our heavily populated world. Additionally, this lie struck me as heinously anti-western, in the sense that the West in each of its cultural highpoints—in the best of Hellas, the Rome Republic of Cato the Elder, Medieval Christendom, and the foundation of the American Republic—has always celebrated the differences of each individual person, especially in terms of abilities and contributions, as created in a certain time and place for an unknown but definitive purpose.

Such a proposition as “you’re all number one” might also lead to the opposite conclusion: that “you’re all number zero,” worthless, and should be put up against the wall. Images of “The Killing Fields” rushed into my already angry thoughts. Ideologies, after all, which reigned throughout the twentieth-century, and unfortunately show no sign of abating so far in the twentieth-first century, wrecked incomprehensible havoc on humanity in four of the seven continents. Based on the finite minds of men and women, drowning in the two-dimensional unrealities of their own subjectivities, ideologues and their ideological regimes murdered—not through war, but through the gulag, the holocaust camps, and forced famines—nearly 200 million persons in past century. While American educational theorists have the best intentions in mind, we all know what paves the way to Hell.

Second, at its most basic level, a seductive slogan such as “you’re all number one” indoctrinates the youngest members of American society with an illogical falsehood. We might as well have “war is peace.” Aristotle has every right to roll in his grave. Since the War of 1812 and the Second Great Awakening of the early part of the nineteenth century, American society has continued to democratize, promote egalitarianism and nationalism to absurd degrees. Such public school pronouncements as “you’re all number one” reveal how far (and how low) American society has come in the past two centuries. We’ve dismissed the founding fathers’ understanding of virtue, natural aristocracy, and a layered republic as simply too elitist and, therefore, unacceptable in the modern world. The founders, after all, failed to believe every American was number one. As Russell Kirk, arguably certainly one of the most important social thinkers of the twentieth century, has warned, American democracy in its extreme form will not end in each person being equal, but in each person owning every other person.[1] After all, George Orwell’s Big Brother asks, isn’t freedom slavery?

These thoughts lead one to ask: what is the role of true education in twenty-first century America? During the Cold War, as the West was attempting to find and define itself in the early 1960s against our communist enemies, historian and social critic Christopher Dawson made a fundamental point. Culture, he argued along the lines of the great Anglo-Irish statesmen Edmund Burke,

is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of ‘folkways’ into which the individual has to be initiated. Hence it is clear that culture is inseparable from education.[2]

If one is to transmit the norms and essence of a culture, he must do so through education.

Education, though, takes on many forms, most of them informal and uncontrollable by society at large. The most important education comes in the family. Indeed, a child learns more between birth and the age of three than almost everything combined from the age of three to death (assuming a normal lifespan for the person in question). Equally important, most of a person’s character is formed by the time he or she is six or seven.[3] Both of these critical dates occur before a child becomes fully immersed in fulltime formal schooling. Education and character formation also occur with siblings and peers, at church, and, too soon, in the market place, bombarded by advertisers, marketers, and a variety of Willy Lowmans. In a sense, for any person, survival and success demand that one become at some level and in some way an autodidact, adaptable to a variety of new situations.

Education also, unfortunately, occurs in a multitude of other ways, most of them perverse and decadent, such as when watching the vast majority of television programs, reading the headlines in the grocery store checkout lines, looking at the quasi-pornographic covers of most fiction in airport bookstores, innocently searching on the web, and playing video games. Everywhere a person looks in this culture, he or she becomes inundated with images of adultery, sexual perversion, the bizarre, and the violent. All of this, the poet T.S. Eliot warned, is a product of nothing less than the “diabolical imagination.”[4] In our modern cynicism and decadence, we have left the moral imagination—that is, the use of one’s reason, rooted in the tradition of our ancestors, and anticipating the generations to come—to our great grandparents it seems, considering them hopelessly naïve, as we warehouse them and even their children in old folks homes. They are, to employ a true cliché, “out of sight and out of mind.” So, it should not surprise us, is their wisdom, locked away with their suffering.[5] And, hence, the tradition of the ages has failed to be passed down, and our culture, not surprisingly, turns to the faddish, the “improved,” the new, and the sleek. Continuity has turned to mere innovation for innovation’s sake.

From their outset, though, the first universities, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, attempted to capture the wisdom of the best of the Greeks and establish education on a moral and timeless foundation. Far from embracing the trendy and ephemeral, such as Socrates’ opponents, the Sophists, did, the followers and students of Socrates desired to uncover within the natural and human orders the true, the beautiful, and the excellent. Classical education in both the republican Greek City-States, the more sane polities of the Hellenistic period, and the Roman Republic and even the Empire, followed the model of Socrates.[6]

Kirk on Liberal Education, Part II (and final): 1945

By Russell Kirk (part 1 here)

. . . . The failure begins when children enter kindergarten. There are four sins of public education: equalitarianism, technicalism, progressivism, and egotism.

That leveling spirit, that democratic movement which, although often termed particularly American, really is the spirit of this age throughout the world, is not to be resisted. Although there is much confusion over the terms “democracy” and “republican” and “freedom,” and much foolish talk of the infallibility of the demos, this soldier and his contemporaries are democrats. It is to be hoped, however, that our democracy has become mature enough to begin to level up rather than down. We have long been tending to reduce our educational problem to the lowest common denominator. In our anxiety to make equal those whom God created unequal, we have been as industrious, although not as successful, as was Colonel Colt. We have tried to explain the learning of the ages in terms comprehensible to the dullest little boy from the East Side; that little boy is unable to understand Homer; so Homer is not taught. A prejudice has arisen against brilliant teachers deserving the satire of Swift; a teacher, it is said, must not rise above the level of his pupils, or they will not understand him; therefore a teacher must be found as dull as the dull little boy. Now all this is most generous toward the dull little boy; but too often he is not sufficiently appreciative, and remains dull as ever, while his classmates, out of boredom, descend to his level. It does no harm for a teacher to lecture in a tone somewhat lofty for his average pupil; the dull student gains something, the average student is stirred to curiosity, and the intelligent student is pleased. This soldier never learned anything from men who came down to his level; admiration of knowledge, followed by emulation, is more effective. We talk of education for leadership; but actually we educate for mediocrity. It is better to increase the knowledge of one average boy by ten degrees than to increase that of two dull boys by one degree.

Carlton Hayes: America’s History Teacher (Part III)

by John Willson (part I, part II)

Part III:  Western Civilization (1946-1964)

Hayes said in his presidential address before the American Historical Association that it was important for Americans to avoid a messianic triumphalism in the aftermath of the war.  “The American Frontier--Frontier of What?” was on one level a lament that Americans had forgotten that they were Europeans.  The Turner Thesis, which had dominated the training of American historians since 1893, was an important but limiting idea, Hayes thought.  It led to a kind of “intellectual isolationism,” a “babylonian captivity” of the historical imagination.  It fostered the kind of nationalism that threatened to “strengthen our people’s missionary and messianic impulse,” an attitude that, in the absence of a clear and “realistic knowledge of other peoples and their historic cultures, may lead to the most dangerous consequence for the United States itself.”

He was not susceptible to the sappy internationalism of one-worlders, however.  Hayes had a proposal for Americans that was based upon the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Germanic origins of the West; but given the reality of communist domination of much of that West, he proposed “Atlantic Civilization,” a middle ground between “myopic nationalism” and “starry-eyed universalism.”  This was nothing less than the intellectual construction for what became NATO, an idea that has lost much of its appeal in the post Cold War era, but which was central to the survival of western culture after 1946.  From a cultural point of view this speech/essay, widely circulated in academia and the media, was nearly as important as George Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”

As his teaching career wound down--he would give his last lecture at Columbia in 1950, a half century after he entered as a freshman--Hayes spent most of his last two decades gathering honors, urging the United States to come to grips with strategic realities regarding Spain, bolstering Catholics colleges that were trying to maintain the faith, and defending Western Civilization.  The United States and Spain, An Interpretation came out in 1951, both a plea for Western culture and for recognizing Spain’s geopolitical importance, uncritical of Franco, with a dash of liberal-bashing; it pretty much ended his reputation as a tolerant and “moderate” Catholic.  That was all right with Carlton Hayes, who had never in any case backed down from his beliefs for the sake of popularity.

Carlton Hayes: America’s History Teacher (Part 2)

by John Willson

Part II: Spain (part 1)

When the Brits flew Francisco Franco home from Morocco to take command of what would become known as the “Nationalist” forces to fight against the “Loyalists” who supported the constituted government, Hayes probably thought he was the last person who would get caught up in it.

The Catholic Church, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany backed Franco; everybody else pretended to be neutral, but everybody took sides.  When the fighting ended in 1939, Spain had lost about 4% of her population, a higher rate of slaughter than the American War Between  the States and approaching even that of the forming of the Soviet Union, 1917-20.  In the eyes of liberals and socialists everywhere it seemed to be a contest between fascism and democracy, with the evil ones coming out on top. 

The irony was not lost on Hayes that his Church supported the “Nationalist” side, given his critical work on the subject.  Hayes himself tried to stay neutral.  He well understood what most American liberals did not--that the “Loyalist” or “Republican” side was early taken over by communists dedicated to the foreign policy objectives of the Soviet Union.  Hayes remarked several times that the choice in Spain was never a Western-style democracy, but between potential fascist or communist government.  As bad as either would be, he felt, communism was slightly worse.

The agony and the horror and the great sadness that was Spain made it the ideological litmus-test of the late 1930s.  Within the United States government a quiet struggle began, roughly along liberal/conservative lines but including a goodly dose of ant--Catholicism, over the “problem” of Spain.  When Franco’s forces won in 1939, many liberals in the State Department, executive offices, and Congress dedicated themselves to his removal, or at least his isolation.

  

American Founding -- John Adams (Part 3)

by Gleaves Whitney

Why the Fame? (Part 2 is available here; Part 1 is available here.)


Given John Adams's liabilities -- his prickly personality, several career setbacks, and the inconvenient fact that his presidency was shoehorned between that of eminent Virginians -- it is hardly surprising that his revival came so late -- 200 years after his retirement from public life. I'd argue that it is not justifiable to give all the credit to David McCullough and HBO. It is true that Adams needed people to plead his case before the bar of public opinion, but there was a good case to champion because of the man himself. Adams himself deserves the fame that Americans now accord him because of his decisive response to the challenging times in which he lived, as well as because of his good character, hard work, intelligent writing, ability to judge character, and vision for our nation. Let's examine these half-dozen elements in more detail. 

birthplace of Abigail Smith Adams

1. The grand stage  It's a truism that's lost none of its truth: "the times make the man." A person is more likely to be famous if by accident of birth he lives in heroic times and if by accident of geography he is close to the action. The American founding was a threshold in the human experience, changing the human estate forever. Adams was born in 1735, near Boston. He was nearing forty years of age when hostilities commenced at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, near Boston. Harnessing his considerable moral and intellectual virtues, Adams seized opportunities to lead during the crisis with Great Britain. The accidents of history and geography put a man leaving his youth and entering his best years in the cockpit of revolutionary tumult then gripping Massachusetts.

I cannot help but add the "accident" of a great marriage to those of time and place. The Adamses were exceedingly fortunate to have found and married one another.

Adams, like Jefferson, read Plutarch's Lives in the original Greek

2. Classical education  Adams's lifelong reading of the classics also prepared him for fame. His teachers were Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Jesus, and St. Paul. Each ancient teacher grounded him in the understanding that fame is a social state that is not inherited but earned. If earned, it should be based, above all, on the fineness of one's moral character. Honorable living, courage amid danger, prudence in decision-making, temperance in the face of temptation -- all these virtues are the result of a lifetime of moral discipline.  They become more evident when living in challenging times, and when life-and-death decisions have to be made.

Adams knew that fame could be fickle, and he knew not to confuse fame with celebrity. He would be appalled by today's celebrity culture that has confused celebrities with heroes. Adams would have scoffed at the way people seek to break into 24/7 media coverage with 15 seconds of insipid notoriety.

John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence," in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, captures the moment when the Second Continental Congress begins deliberating on the language of the famous document (thereby telling the world about the July 2 vote for independence). Adams, appropriately, is the delegate in the middle of the picture -- on the left among the five founders who are submitting the Declaration of Independence to the chairman. Jefferson is the tallest of the group, and Franklin is on the right.

3. Ambition  Adams was ambitious to make something of his life. As a young person he thought he might be happy as a farmer. But the more he learned about himself, the more he set his shoulder to the wheel of ambition. His rise from humble beginnings was impressive -- from the Braintree house to scholar at Harvard, to teacher, to law apprentice, to small-town lawyer, to delegate to the Continental Congresses, to diplomat, to constitution maker, to Vice President, to President of the United States, to elder statesman. At each stage in his career he performed his duties with integrity and intensity. In the Continental Congress, for instance, he served on 90 different committees -- more than any other congressman -- and chaired 20 of them. His work on behalf of our country meant long periods of time when he could not be with Abigail and his children, or tending his farm in Braintree. His diligent study and hard work insured that what he said and what he did made genuine contributions to his country. In Paris, his hard work probably saved him from many a temptation [McCullough 236-37]! More, his sense of duty made him stoical in the face of difficulties. He wryly observed that, "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it."

The Great Tradition: Reading Ourselves Back to Cultural Sanity

by Robert M. Woods

If you surveyed one hundred “educators” to define education, after the initial shock, and painfully long pause of silence you would probably be given the most recent acceptable version of educationese. Some would offer a definition by way of describing outcomes, assessments, goals, objectives, torrential techniques, maddening methodologies, and pet pedagogies but, that is not what, thankfully, Dr. Richard Gamble does in The Great Tradition.

“Readers looking for up-to-the-minute advice about innovative teaching methods and classroom technology, or about how to prepare students for the ‘real world’ and tomorrow’s top-ten careers, will be gravely disappointed” (xvi).

The Great Tradition, masterfully edited by Richard Gamble, is a unique anthology best described in the term given by Mortimer Adler years ago—conversation. This dynamic dialogue reaches from the ancient to the early nineteen seventy’s about the aspirations, needed learning environment, and the meaning of the most authentic education. The excerpts are all given the historical context with notes about the author and the specific reading. Approximately sixty writings on genuine education are generously provided. The wonderful movement from information about the author and the times, to knowledge about what is to be expected in the reading, and then to the ever present wisdom in the readings including Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Eric Voegelin.

Obviously among this list anyone who knows anything about the history of education also notices who is not a part of the conversation. The educational utilitarian calling for “practical” education and “job training”, also not invited are the educational Romantics with a deeply flawed view of human nature, and last, the offer of joining the group was not extended to the all too present “Progressive”. One reason they may not have been invited to the conversation is that many could not understand the others at the table, but mainly because this ill-informed indoctrinational presence reigns supreme in education departments in state, private, and even religious institutions.

As with any good conversation, there are points of dissent, but solid reasoning is provided. In addition, with all great conversations there is a convergence of truth and wisdom that is fine tuned and clarified by the ebb and flow, tone and tenor, and conclusions reached with others in the conversation.

Different from many books about education written in the past few decades, in particular, liberal education, is the tone of this volume. While authors from the ancient world to the present bemoan various ills of the process, content, teachers, and students, the vast majority are hopeful in tone.

The Real Meaning and Value of a Liberal Arts Education and Saving Our Cultures

by Robert M. Woods

Yes, it is cultures in the title, and I am proposing that a true Liberal Arts education can help us save our cultures.  By cultures I am referring to the most impressive and insightful book by John W. O'Malley, The Four Cultures of the West. Couple that book with a most extraordinary article by David Lyle Jeffrey The Pearl of Great Wisdom: The Deep and Abiding Biblical Roots of Western Liberal Education and we are on the path to the nature of our cultures and the ways of saving them.  The truth is that the Liberal Arts that could help save our cultures need saving.  My strong suspicion is that if the Liberal Arts are saved, it will be by Classical Christian Schools and Home school families.  A few years ago I would have held out hope that select universities under the banner of Christ would have helped.  That day has passed due to a misguided sense of priorities inherited from the dominate American culture.  Priorities of consumption and pragmatism have become triumphant.  While it was an older occurrence that Behemoth University lost its way decades ago, the Christian University was bound to eventually catch up, since much of what it did was ape the worldly institutions. 

On a most positive note, I have a sense that while some academic institutes are in decline, we are seeing a Renaissance  among Classical Christian schools and Home schoolers.  We are probably just a few years away from seeing the birth of Classical Christian Universities. I am hopeful. 

As particular people, even outside of institutions, we can all get a quality Liberal Arts education. Start with the article and book mentioned in this article.  Then start a Great Books reading program or take classes that offer a Great Books curriculum.  Another helper is found in James Schall.  His Another Sort of Learning is delightful and instructive.

Dr. Robert M. Woods is Director of the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University. This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

Carlton Hayes: America’s History Teacher (Part 1)

by John Willson

    The American Historical Association, which once was a guild of pretentious professionals and is now a massive organization dedicated to political correctness, has had only one serious presidential election in its century and a quarter of existence.  In 1945 young liberals tried to prevent Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes from ascending to its symbolic high office.  Despite the fact that their alternative candidate turned down his nomination in no uncertain terms, Hayes “won” the election by a vote of only 110-66.  He had recently returned from Spain, where he had served as the American Ambassador to the hated Franco; and perhaps worse, he was a Catholic.  It is hard for contemporary Americans to remember a country in which Spain was a metaphor for international morality, and wherein anti-Catholicism was the most widely approved prejudice.

    Hayes responded with one of the most notable speeches in the history of History in the United States:  “The American Frontier--Frontier of What?”  Even his enemies, the Schlesingers (father and son), for example, applauded its content.  It would become one of the great intellectual building-blocks of the American victory over communism, the true spiritual crisis of the twentieth century.

Part I:  Catholic American (1882-1935)

    The irony of Hayes being singled out for attacks by the progressives in his profession was that his life up to 1941 was a uniquely modern American life, and he had achieved a prominence granted to few history teachers.  His textbooks on modern European History had educated literally generations of college students.  His widow, Evelyn Carroll Hayes, told me in 1966 that his income from the books had been well into the millions of dollars, and that she was still getting royalties in six figures even after his death.  He was, in important ways, America’s History Teacher.

    Carlton Hayes was both a country mouse and a city mouse.  He grew up in Afton, New York (population 836) in the home of a country doctor, attended the local Baptist church, and was educated at the Afton Academy, one of those old country schools whose standards were high, both academically and in terms of discipline.  Afton is on the Susquehanna River, the main branch of which rises in Otsego Lake in nearby Cooperstown, and which Hayes would as an adult canoe down all the way to the Chesapeake Bay.  Hayes would never entirely separate himself from Afton, keeping the old homestead and writing there many summers, and even founding a little Catholic church in his middle years.

    But when he went off to Columbia University, another place he never left, Hayes became devoted to New York City.  This was not unusual in that age of change.  Several members of my own family made the transition from country to city life, rural New York to the big city, in the same generation.  According to Mrs. Hayes, Carlton was equally comfortable in Afton and in their large apartment a couple of blocks from Columbia all the days of his life.

Hank Edmondson on the Evils and Legacy of John Dewey

by Bradley J. Birzer

Several years ago (January 2004), I had the privilege of meeting Hank Edmondson at a Liberty Fund colloquium in Arizona on the thought of C.S. Lewis.  Hank and I found we were kindred spirits, immediately.  We’ve seen each other several times since, and we’ve maintained a correspondence since then, sometime purely out of friendship and sometimes out of academic alliance.

Hank is Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Georgia College and State University as well as the literary executor of the estate of Flannery O’Connor.  He also directs the Center for Transatlantic Studies. As might be obvious (or should be), Hank is a really, really interesting person.

His most recent book, not surprisingly, is equally interesting to his own renaissance-style life.

In 2006, ISI Books published his excellent intellectual biography of the infamous John Dewey, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning.  Yes, this review is five years late, but I just had the chance to read it this week.  Frankly, it’s brilliant in its take, and it’s stunning in its many insights.

Really a prolonged essay—or series of essays—John Dewey and the Decline summarizes with great skill the rather elusive Nietzschean, progressive, pragmatist, and nihilist thought of Dewey.  Indeed, on almost every page quoting Dewey, the reader of Hank’s book feels the syphilitic ghost of Nietzsche swirling the Abyss.  Dewey, in Hank’s solid take, becomes a prudish, American version of the mad 19thcentury philosopher.  Frankly, though, it would be hard for any reader of TIC not to choose Nietzsche over Dewey, should one be forced to make such a nasty choice.  Nietzsche, after all, at least reeked of manhood and individualism.  Dewey’s effete qualities, by contrast, promote not the exaggeration of personality, but the destruction of it through permanent experimentation in the classroom.  If Nietzsche’s world is found in 1984, Dewey’s is found in Brave New World.

. . . . and, of course, in many modern American classrooms.  Because of Dewey, Hank contends, American classrooms lack seriousness, purpose (beyond the immediate), integrity, honor, benevolence, and, most importantly, mental, physical, and spiritual discipline.  Because of Dewey, in large part, teachers mistreat their students, regarding them as mere material to be molded and shaped, to fit the social needs of the moment and the tyranny of the subjective.  Because of Dewey, public education, mixed, strangely, with a perverse nationalism and a desire for the anti-objective and anti-transcendent, embraces the worst aspects of western civilization, promoting the Sophists rather than Socrates.

As such, Hank notes with great effectiveness that Dewey influenced the past century of educational theory (or lack thereof) through William H. Kilpatrick at Columbia’s Teacher’s College.  One can find Dewey’s continuing influence in the shape and thought of Schools of Education as well as throughout most of our primary and secondary schools.  The right and the left, dominated by the unthinking conformists of our post-modern world, embrace Dewey and Dewey’s ideas, mistaking, as Albert Jay Nock noted in 1931, that which is truly democratic for that which is merely accessible.

True to his own form and essence, Hank’s wit comes through in a number of ways in John Dewey and the Decline, sometimes so powerfully that my guffaws spilled over into the hall next to my office.  Believe it or not, in some of my reactions, I was louder than my colleague, Burt Folsom (this is not feint praise; Burt has, possibly, the world’s loudest laugh).  For example, Hank notes that any opponent of Dewey is often dismissed by his disciples as simply not having properly understood Dewey’s thought.  In another example, Hank mocks Dewey’s extremely poor writing style, noting vividly that the education philosopher never could explain any of his thought with any effectiveness, repeating his incoherence over and over again, in every book he published.

‘Tis the season for commencements

by Andrew Seeley

‘Tis the season for commencements: collegiate, high school, elementary school, even kindergarten. Some are silly, some cute, some respectful, some tedious, some beautiful. On Saturday, I was blessed to attend one which, more than anything, was deeply joyful. The school was St. Augustine’s Academy in Ventura, California, which combined high school graduation with eighth grade promotion. From the hugs given by seniors to the eighth graders as they symbolically handed them their certificates to the evident affection and pride expressed by graduates, teachers and administrators, I couldn’t help but wish that I could say to a relativistic world, “This is all we want for you – love God, strive for goodness, excellence and self-control, sprinkle charity over all, and you can have joy!” When I returned home, I read this reflection of Pope Benedict’s, inspired by the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles ("There was great joy in that city."):

"We are deeply impressed again and again by this expression, which in essence communicates a sense of hope, as if saying: It is possible! It is possible for humanity to know true joy, because wherever the Gospel arrives, life flourishes, just as an arid terrain that, irrigated by rain, is immediately verdant."

The first senior address expressed it all. Delivered by a beautiful, natural, confident young woman, in whose face shone mirth and gladness as she spoke wisely, seriously, and, above all, joyfully, her speech moved us deeply. The perfect blend of heart and head spoke more powerfully than any possible advertisement for the intellectual and moral strength of the school community in which she was nurtured.

Why don’t we as a society turn to such models, desiring to discover the secret of their success so that it might be shared with the young throughout the land? Alas, such models are too rare; many have never even heard that this is possible, so they never look. Others might hear people like me shouting, “Here is the real deal!” But not experiencing it for themselves, their impoverished imaginations twist all they hear and return our offer with sneering and mockery. Finally, the daunting commitment to the life of faith and discipline that makes such joy possible makes many turn away.

Christian Humanism in Our Schools

by Tony Williams

I really enjoyed reading the excellent essay by Brittany Baldwin on Hillsdale College and the incomparable job that it does “educating for liberty.”  Through my participation in teacher seminars at the Hillsdale College Center for Teacher Excellence directed by the brilliant Dr. David Bobb, I became acquainted with the love of permanent things through rigorous discussion and study of primary sources in a liberal education that is occurring among students at Hillsdale and teachers at the Hillsdale CTE. 

I am also honored and privileged to be teaching at a diocesan Catholic high school in Virginia that is pursuing the same mission of a liberal Christian humanist education within the boundaries of the Roman Catholic faith and tradition.  I have come to appreciate that fact not merely by reading the school’s mission statement or classroom syllabi but through daily experience with the students, parents, faculty, and administrators of the school. 

The Most Kirkean College Experience

By Brittany Baldwin

The American Studies program embodies the mission and tradition of Hillsdale College in a way that no other program does. Through a study of American literature, history, and political philosophy, students in this program immerse themselves in the liberal arts tradition that has remained at the center of Hillsdale’s education. This intermingling of the three disciplines allows students to study the American character from three different vantage points in order to then discover the threads that connect John Winthrop to the Constitutional Convention to James Fennimore Cooper to Mark Twain and so on. In an organized and serious fashion, it provides an opportunity for students to study and examine what the “We the People” really meant in 1787, and how the people have shaped American culture since then. The students in the American Studies program also understand that “We the People” at Hillsdale college are “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from civil and religious liberty,” and they devote their college years to understanding those liberties so that they may defend them. The program not only “develops the minds” but also “improves the hearts” of students, for as they study the Founders and writers and leaders of the American tradition, they become acutely sensitive to the themes that rooted this nation and that continue to nourish it. These themes of rights paired with duty, of education paired with leadership, of property paired with stewardship, of wealth paired with generosity, of individuality paired with Christian morals, resonates with the hearts of students as they live in their little platoon both on campus and in their home communities. On graduation day, the American Studies graduates have accomplished massive amounts of reading, studying, and writing for an undergraduate student, and while the object of it all was to learn for the sake of knowledge, they walk across the stage with an understanding of the duty they have to their family, their community, and their country. Whether through teaching, politics, writing, or many other avenues, they understand that it is their duty to preserve the permanent things that are so vital to nourishing the tree of ordered liberty.

I think it is evident that Dr. Kirk helped shape this major, and I am grateful that our own Dr. Wilson and Dr. Birzer have played such instrumental roles in carrying on the Kirkean tradition through their teaching, writing, and more than anything their exceptional character, which moves and inspires so many students. Thank you both for carrying on the myth, and thank you for living it as well.