Having written about education in general and classical education in particular for over 30 years, I have addressed one issue more than any other: what classical education actually is—what it is, what it is for, what it consists of, and how it is conducted. The question of whether someone’s definition of classical education is correct is one of those recurring questions in the movement, and it is one that will continue to recur. I have addressed it many times and so have many others.
But the question popped up again in another form the other day on my social media, and I wanted to share a few thoughts about it.
The specific question was whether what now goes on under the label of “classical education” these days is in fact classical. It is a question I have addressed many times (here, for example: “Classical Education is More than a Method”), as is the related question of whether what some call classical education is really classical.
On the one hand, I think that there are a lot of people who really don’t understand what classical education is (or, more properly, was, if we take account of the actual historical practice of it), including some leaders in the modern classical movement. These are mostly amateurs (and I use that term charitably, to refer to what are surely well-intended and mostly very devoted people) who really don’t have a deep background in any of the classical disciplines and are simply not familiar with certain historical realities. On the other hand, there are those who have at least a rudimentary understand of the historical realities and who want to impose one very specific historical definition and who are, in addition, intolerant of anyone whose definition differs from theirs.
The former are guilty of intellectual carelessness, while the latter often engage in a kind of tiresome rhetorical gatekeeping. I actually have a certain sympathy for both sides in this. But as I have already publicly addressed the former, let me now address the latter.
The catalyst for my thoughts about this was several posts on X, and one in particular from someone whose X account identifies himself as a retired researcher. Here is his comment:
My point was, the CCE movement is claiming to replicate education from the classical era, but at least in the Quad. it most certainly is not….but saying that it is. …few things flourish when their underlying structure is a fiction. There’s the problem. (@LiveOakPirate)
I agree with this and also disagree. If he is saying that there are some (many, even) in the movement who, due to a misunderstanding of what classical education actually consisted of, mistake what they are doing as being classical in any definite historical sense, then it is hard to disagree with. I have made that same criticism. These are largely people who have caught hold of an educational buzzword based on someone’s ill-informed definition of classical education and drilled down on it.
On the other hand, I think it is mistaken or at least oversimplistic to assume that classical education is some specific, static, immutable, uniform thing. The fact is that, as a historical matter, classical education has gone through numerous stages of internal debate and development about what it was and how it was practiced, as well as being subject to evolution over two and a half millennia.
Classical education is a genus, not a species.
Not only that, but classical education literally began in a debate over its own purpose and program: the debate between Plato and Isocrates over what true paideia was. Plato saw it as culminating in philosophy, Isocrates in rhetoric. These were two fundamentally different visions of education.
And if you read the texts that bear on the history of all this, what you find is that, while there is a certain general consistency in the course of 2,500 years, there are many and various emphases. H. I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity discusses it, and Werner Jaeger’s Paideia series ponders it, and Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition chronicles it (at least in literature).
So the question seems to be: what are the parameters within which we can properly call an educational philosophy or practice “classical”? But let’s just say, first, that the idea that you are going to find it fully correct and complete in one specific historical instantiation of it is just misguided.
I had an exchange a couple of years ago with one Catholic educator who disputed the approach my own publisher took, and at some point in the dialogue I realized that what he was implicitly asserting was that the only correct approach to classical education was the one he practiced at his school, which was based on the Ratio Studiorum of 1586. This was the single and only classical approach to education, and let any other education that came before or since be anathema. This, at least, seemed to be his attitude.
Are we talking about the classical education at Plato’s Academy? They taught in Greek, but they didn’t teach Greek as a foreign language, which is a very different thing. They didn’t teach Latin at all, a language which still needed centuries to develop the virtues later classical educators would see in it. Although Plato taught in Plato’s Academy, and there is some indication they read Plato’s dialogues there, at least some of them were probably yet to be written. They didn’t read Aristotle there, since he was only a student at the time. Nor did they read any of the works commonly included in what most would acknowledge was a classical curriculum.
They might have read the Greek playwrights, and possibly some of the Presocratic philosophers, but Homer was problematic for Plato, at least if we can believe his statements in his Republic. Maybe they read, a little later, Plotinus, but that great mind is not read today in any classical school I know. And Plutarch came much later.
There was no Virgil’s Aeneid; no Ovid’s Metamorphoses; no Marcus Aurelius or Cicero or Herodotus or any of the books or authors the purists would now say should be part of a truly classical program today. Their authors had not yet been born.
The curriculum of the Academy therefore will not do as our model. Nor could Aristotle’s Lyceum, for similar reasons.
Maybe our model should be Roman education. This system would be able to look back to Greek culture: Homer and Hesiod, Thucydides and Xenophon, Apollonius of Rhodes. And, of course, Plato and Aristotle. But then what about later writers who we would say today are an essential part of the tradition? What about Boethius? What about the Venerable Bede? The Arthurian legends, Chaucer, Beowulf, and Shakespeare?
No, a Roman education will not do either.
We could also look for our ideal school in the Middle Ages, but many of the purists who champion Classical Education (the copyrighted version) would find much there not to like. It was severely theological, which to many such critics would be unsuitable. Latin, not Greek, was the universal language. And, quite frankly, the wax tablets, still in fashion since Roman times, were very awkward.
Likewise the Renaissance, with its re-emphasis on Greek, which had taken a back seat to Latin in the Middle Ages, allowed the reading of Plato and Aristotle in their original language. Science and geography were conducted through Pliny and Copernicus. It also involved the revival of emphasis on the classical mythological works such as Ovid’s. And Donatus and Priscian were used to teach grammar.
The Platonic ideal of a classical education, it turns out (and this is a recurring problem with Platonic ideals in general), cannot be found on this earth.
The fact is that not one of the purists who now critiques modern attempts to revive classical education could identify a single instance of a classical program during the classical or even medieval period that he would say was the correct, complete, and idyllic model.
Not one. Except possibly the gentleman previously mentioned who was a little over-enamored of the Ratio Studiorum.
So in what does a truly classical education program consist?
We can’t find exactly what we want in any actual and specific historical instance. It is literally impossible. We can’t do precisely what they did. But what we can do is do the kind of thing they did. We need to search for the elements of our own model in the scattered history of classical education. Somewhere in the midst of all the various practices we loosely call “classical” there is what we might call the soul of classical education, an essence that would be the same on the inside, but that looks a little different on the outside in each rendition.
There is a final cause or telos to what the various versions of the old classical educators were attempting that we could take and imitate almost as it actually was: the passing on of civilization and the approximation of some ideal humanity in each student. But the elements of the curriculum would have to be adapted, as would the programs. We might also take advantage of some pedagogical techniques (but perhaps forsake the use of a stick as a motivation for learning).
I am a co-founder of Highlands Latin School in Louisville, KY, which was founded in 1998. So, of course, I am quite enamored of what we do there. It seems to me to be among the most reasonable and practical approximations to the classical ideal possible in a contemporary context.
Our own model was that articulated by R. W. Livingstone in his book A Defence of Classical Education, written in 1917, just as the progressives had begun to take over English and American schools. Livingstone’s was a rearticulation of what classical education was in good English schools at the turn of the twentieth century. In the book, he defends classical education by extolling the virtues of learning the Greek and Latin languages, studying the greatest works of Greece and Rome, and imbibing the body of works we call the “humanities,” which would include classic works of the modern era.
A reasonable definition of the word “classical” in the expression “classical education” therefore is going to be necessarily equivocal. It’s going to have to expand and contract to accommodate the realities of our own situation while at the same time retaining enough of the original elements of the older versions of it in order to reasonably qualify.
If we are going to engage in classical education today, in the 21st century, we are going to have to look back and make a distinction between the elements of education necessary at the time and those educational elements necessary to all times, and leave to others the things that are not. And also take advantage of all we can learn by seeing classical education in all its many historical forms.
This process should take the form of a discussion, not a quarrel.
