Classical Education, ED, and the Ends of Schooling

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And what has the Department of Education to do with the classical education movement? For Tertullian, the second-century church father, the question was whether Hellenic culture and philosophy might divert Christians from the truth revealed in scripture and the incarnation. Of course, as reflected today in classical education itself, historical Christianity has long used the tools of Athenian wisdom in the work of theology, as faith seeks understanding. But the tension remains, between man’s rationalizing and the gift of faith. 

The contemporary classical education movement was birthed in renunciation of all the Department of Education stands for. Indeed, nothing about the timing should be thought of as merely coincidental. The ED was signed into law on October 17, 1979, and began operations the next year. As I discovered during my year as a Novak Journalism fellow researching the history of the classical education movement, the earliest schools we can put in that category were founded around exactly the same time. 

In January of ’79, National Review reprinted Dorothy Sayers’s “Lost Tools of Learning” (1947). The essay inspired John Schmitt to establish the Trivium School in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in October of that year and Douglas Wilson to found Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, in 1981. In between, Cair Paravel Latin School was independently established in 1980 in Topeka, Kansas. And in 1981 — imitating Schmitt’s Trivium — the Trinity School at Greenlawn in South Bend, Indiana, opened its doors. 

So it must seem strange to look to the movement these four schools started for inspiration when considering reforms of ED, representing as the department does all their founders sought to escape. But today, more than four decades on for each, classical education has grown into a great force of cultural revival in this country; while ED has, like the cancer cell, only grown for growth’s sake — a failure. One enlargement may, in fact, have something to teach the other, in particular about the end of formal education.

We must bring our aim a little lower than the reader likely hopes, in line with a closer target than the ideal universal public education of the American people. The Department of Education, as part of the administrative state, is an effort at the rationalization of human life and centralization of civil society totally at odds with the highest aspirations of contemporary classical schools. One cannot be made into the facilitator and manager of the other. What ED does, and what it is, is totally modern. What the classical education movement seeks to do, and what it is, is a postmodern project of recovery and construction — dwarves on the shoulders of giants — bringing a pre-modern inheritance forward to the present, past a century of positivism and progressivism. 

Moreover, we must acknowledge that the classical appellation is a contested one, that this movement and project is alive with debates internal to itself as it seeks its own essence and more fully developed excellences — classically, virtues. Even if ED could be made a fit vehicle for the spread of “classical schools,” it would only elevate this lively conversation into policy negotiations among bureaucrats. Classical education is not a method. 

At the simplest, some argue, classical education is an acculturation, familiarizing ourselves (Americans, Westerners) with that which was familiar to our ancestors: Latin and Greek, classical literature and history. Perhaps it is also, derived from Latin studies, apprenticeship to the trivium: the grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric of language and therefore of intellectual knowledge and thought. It is a liberal education, fit for free people, and so, in the American sense, democratic. Yet the humanist tradition it springs from finds its roots in hero worship and the schooling of princes, and so is aristocratic, too. Is a classical education essentially Christian? It is necessarily political. Do classical schools form hearts as well as minds? They are, in many ways, still far too modern. 

All of this and more like it makes up the vital ferment that shows that “classical education” is in fact a movement, that the growth and multiplication of the schools that claim that title is something alive. How different is discussion of our public schools. But there is one more theme — not a dichotomy, but a matter of emphasis — which could be taken up whole by any future secretary of the Department of Education in administering the nation’s schools. The pioneers and principals of classical schools often speak of two academic purposes for their institutions: they offer a “terminal education,” and they aim to shape “lifelong learners.” Taking only the tools already at its disposal, with some modest construal, so too could ED. 

What do the classical school educators mean by this? A terminal education describes a complete formal education; it recognizes that schooling must end, even if education never does. And so schooling must include everything necessary to equip students to live a virtuous life without the guidance of their teachers. A terminal education is ordinary. Lifelong learning, then, is what follows from a complete formal education; a student makes his way through life adding to his education, incorporating new knowledge into that which he carries with him. It is limited only by the capacities of the individual—his abilities, his continued wonder, and his desire to know. Placed on top of basic schooling, lifelong learning is extraordinary.

The task of the public school, and thus the task of the Department of Education, is this same task. To have a functioning republic, in which political equality is upheld by law and social practice, the normative public school must provide an ordinary education that is sufficient for living the life of a just citizen. The standard K-12 program must set out to be enough, terminal, an end of its own. The expectation that every student apply for college, let alone go, has been a disaster, as, on the tacit expectation of remedial courses later, it has freed teachers and school systems of their obligation to give pupils the building blocks of a decent life. 

Perhaps, too, the only way to end the so-called school-to-prison pipeline would be to take the idea of compulsory education, standardized testing, and public schooling at face value, to treat this fundamental education as not just limited but limiting: A student cannot and will not graduate — will not be freed from truancy law — until a certain competency is demonstrated on a standardized test, marking this terminal education’s completion.

All lifelong learning is extraordinary in that it goes beyond the basic standard. ED and the public school teacher have an obligation to the extraordinary student, too, as they prepare for higher education and an intellectual life beyond that, too. While tracking is inimical to the formative spirit of a classical school’s terminal education for lifelong learning, under the quantitative management of a government department it is the tool ready at hand. Moreover, it is the only instrument fit to the preservation of the civic equality or democratic ideal that public education is meant to protect: unless even the poorest brilliant student can test out of the chaos of the common classroom, only the wealthiest zip codes will provide a public school that readies its students for lifelong learning. 

Even with conservatives returning to power in Washington, the intellectual and spiritual chasm between the classical education movement and the Department of Education is in no danger of closing soon; it is the product of essential divisions not only in our national political culture but in our historical epoch. That being the case, far more likely is that fissures split along similar fault lines among the institutions of classical education, as people grow complacent in the countercultural aspect of cultural renewal. But maybe, still, Athens can learn something from Jerusalem.