Classical Education Needs the Body
Editor's Note
America’s cold civil war is fought not only in courts and elections, but in the formation of the young. Every regime seeks to shape the imagination before it shapes the vote. A generation raised on screens and curated impressions becomes increasingly detached from nature, limits, and important consequence — conditions that make citizens easier to move through narrative rather than reality.
Classical education, writes Patrick Whalen, offers a counteroffensive. It insists that reason depends upon embodied experience and that imagination must be formed by contact with the real. Our struggle, increasingly, is over whether the next generation will live in the world as it is or in a managed substitute.
Book VII of Plato’s Republic recounts the famous allegory of the Cave, in which Socrates describes to Glaucon a people chained and immobile within a cave, their captivity passed in watching moving shadows cast on the wall before them. Not knowing any difference, they consider the shadows, the images on the wall, to be reality itself. Mistaking the image for reality is, in fact, one of the ways in which the cave dwellers can truly be called prisoners. They are chained by their own incapacity to recognize the real — trapped, if you will, in an epistemological cell.
If we can imagine, as Plato did, one prisoner escaping and making his way out of the cave, we would be watching the very act of education. True to the word’s etymology — a leading out — the prisoner’s education leads him out of the cave, where images masquerade as reality, into the broad light of reality itself. This is the work teachers in the classical renewal have undertaken to do, and it’s one of the biggest jailbreaks in history.
Aquinas and the Imagination
Even if you appreciate the analogy, you might yet protest that your students don’t inhabit actual caves, and teaching them is not as simple as dragging them into the light. How does this ascent from the shadows in the cave toward real enlightenment work in actual education?
For the answer to this question, I suggest we turn to Thomas Aquinas. Drawing on his Aristotelian formation, Aquinas offers a framework which yields an eminently commonsensical answer to the question of how we can help our students with their jailbreak from the cave of ignorance. Breaking their bonds requires directing their attention and appetites away from the false images which enervate and pervert the imagination and instead nourishing the imagination on the whole food of physical experience.
Yes, Aquinas proposes that a capable intellect is predicated upon a well-formed imagination. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas refers to the imagination as “a certain storehouse of forms received through the senses” (I, Q.78, A.4). He notes that “intellectual knowledge is caused by the senses” (QQ.84–85), which provide our “agent intellect” the raw material upon which to act. Once we have abstracted the forms from our sense experience, they provide the building blocks of reason, allowing us to construct definitions, to see likenesses between things, and to make distinctions.
Without the work of our senses harvesting real forms, our reason is left with only shadows with which to work — and shadows can be deceptive. Hilaire Belloc puts it this way:
“The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from books and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions (that is, impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or, what is almost always as good and sometimes better, the interpreting voice of a living man….Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they stand not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing the work which education was meant to do.” (“Reality,” in First and Last)
Without the discernment that comes from a rich physical experience, our reason lacks the capacity to distinguish between shadows on the wall of a cave and real things in the light of day. Simply put, we require broad physical experience to have a well-formed imagination. And we require a well-formed imagination to reason well.
But outside the frame of Plato’s allegory, is there actually a problem with an imagination formed by counterfeit impressions rather than real, sensible experiences? Yes, and it might be worse than you think.
The Danger of False Forms
Consider the consequences of an electorate whose political judgments are formed not by experience and the reasoned judgments derived from experience, but by a series of impressions curated by the phone or TV. Consider the capacity of an individual to make prudent judgments who might have seen something on TikTok a thousand times, but never encountered it in reality.
Take a horse, for example, or a gun. The safe, sterile, screen-bound versions of these things do not quite prepare one for their severe power or equip one to handle that power prudently. Consider the transhumanist movement’s gospel of infinite biological malleability, which dissolves under contact with the actual limits of embodied existence.
In each case, right reason is preempted from acting by the fact that it lacks an imagination full of authentic forms derived from sense experience of reality. The practical result of this move back into the Cave is likely to look like an electorate increasingly susceptible to “narrative” and incapable of discerning between true and false; the ascent of ideologies which are not responsible for justifying themselves in relation to nature and facts; an increase in raw expressions of emotion, violence, and hubris without the check of natural consequences. None of this bodes well for the harmonious activity of a civil society. And all of it sounds increasingly familiar.
When we consider that the average teen spends about seven to nine hours on a screen each day, that virtual reality, social media, and video games successfully create alternative “realities,” and that as the virtual expands, young people’s physical encounters with reality contract, we ought to consider whether our educational efforts are oriented toward the cave or toward the bright light of day. If the problem is an imagination stocked with false or deceptive images, the solution is to fill it with authentic forms.
Physical Education as Epistemological Foundation
A corrective — not a cure-all, mind you — but a corrective, is vigorous physical education (PE). While childhood is increasingly sedentary and screen-mediated, PE ought to be a crash course in primary impressions. PE provides direct sensory encounters: proprioception, spatial reasoning, force, and resistance. It gives children a direct experience of things before asking them to think about things. It begins to build self-knowledge by introducing effort, fatigue, capability, and limitation, all authentic forms which populate the imagination.
Far from a distraction or a way of “burning off” extra energy, PE is an epistemological partner with the rest of the curriculum. In mathematics, students practice abstraction from embodied spatial and quantitative experience. In rhetoric, they handle the human dimension informed by their own experience of passion, ambition, and limitation. The gymnasium and the playing fields become the laboratory where students encounter and experiment with the virtues they study in history, literature, and ethics. If nowhere else, at least in PE class, students should make physical contact with reality, thereby initiating the epistemological process of turning experience into forms in the imagination which then become the building blocks of reason.
If true education is like a jailbreak from the cave, we should be careful to lead our students toward the light of reality rather than simply into another cell decorated more to our taste. This means that our education renewal must engage the body through sense experience, building a strong epistemological foundation, or it risks serving students the riches of our intellectual heritage as mere shadows on the wall. We don’t want students who can parse Virgil’s Latin but have no experience of the striving, the weariness, and the achievement unfolding across his pages.
The call before us, then, is not simply to add PE to the curriculum or to devote more time to it. These are practical measures that may or may not follow from a proper understanding of its role in education. Physical experience serves as an essential epistemological foundation for the formation of human beings capable of encountering reality as it is.
When our students move their bodies through space, learn what their muscles can and cannot do, feel the difference between effort and ease, victory and defeat, and grapple with the innumerable complexities of team dynamics — they are not taking a break from learning. They are learning in the most fundamental way possible: through direct encounter with the real. The call, therefore, is not to settle for mere games and activities, but to implement a rigorous, meaningful physical education program that maximizes student experience of reality and is augmented by deliberate reinforcement of the virtues taught throughout the entire curriculum.
There’s a jailbreak underway, so roll up your sleeves. We have work to do.