What the classical education revival is missing

The gains made in classical education in recent years are truly encouraging. Students are once again learning great names and great stories, and they are encountering primary texts that invite them to participate rather than be passive observers.

But while the classical academic program is teaching our children the names of virtues long out of fashion, we should ask whether we have created the conditions in which those virtues can truly take root and flourish.

Students need raw contact with nature so that virtue is exercised with cold hands and aching backs, not merely batted around the seminar table as an abstraction.

In the “Cyropaedia,” Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’ formation and adventures before he ascended to Persia’s throne, Xenophon describes the paideia, or the process of formation whereby young men become statesmen. Xenophon’s Cyrus grew up with rigorous discipline: combat, cold exposure, fasting, and the austere corrections of men hardened by war.

His education was a series of experiences fashioning him for military service, accustoming him to privation, and schooling him in the unapologetic art of justice.

What Xenophon sketches out, in the main, mirrors the Greek historian Herodotus’ description of the education of noble Persian youth in “The Histories.” They were sent away to spend time with military commanders on the empire’s frontiers.

Far from the corrosive luxuries and intrigues of the court, the young learned to “ride, shoot the bow, and speak the truth.” Only when sufficiently hardened were they considered fit to return to the seats of power and take their place in the political life of the empire.

Both Herodotus and Xenophon depicted an ideal education that prioritizes exposure to nature, the cultivation of martial virtue, and the use of simple, manly rhetoric consisting of straightforward, honest speech — rather than the forked-tongued parlance common in the halls of power. This, both Greeks report, is education that forms kings.

Unfortunately, this is far removed from our modern approach to education. You won’t find anything like the kind of education depicted in the “Cyropaedia” in public, private, or STEM-focused schools — or even most classical schools.

To help us take seriously what Xenophon and Herodotus say about education, especially where it is at odds with contemporary practice, we should enlist the aid of John Henry Newman, a theologian who wrote luminously about education. In a series of sermons, Newman criticized the nearly homogeneous-in-form book learning we call education today.

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In a sermon on the state of innocence before the Fall, Newman argues that our reason is just as fallen and corrupt as our passions. He asks, “What then is intellect itself, as exercised in the world, but a fruit of the fall, not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost but tolerated in the Church?” He continues, noting that after the Fall, “passion and reason have abandoned their due place in man’s nature, which is one of subordination, and conspired together against the Divine light within him, which is his proper guide.”

Newman acknowledges reason as a gift from God for which we should be grateful. But this hardly contradicts his call for us to refrain from idolizing it, whether at the expense of the passions or not.

In another sermon, Newman exhorts, “Now the danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right.” He continues: “The refinement which literature gives, is that of thinking, feeling, knowing and speaking, right, not of acting right; and thus, while it makes the manners amiable, and the conversation decorous and agreeable, it has no tendency to make the conduct, the practice of the man virtuous.”

This sounds like bad news for a culture whose educational practice consists almost entirely of sitting, reading, and thinking.

But we might object that reading about heroic characters can inspire us to emulate their virtues. So too can vicious characters warn us off their path and help us to see patterns of evil as they develop. Without rejecting literature-based education entirely, Newman plays out a likely scenario involving the breakdown of character when it has been reared on affect rather than its rougher cousin, reality:

For instance, we will say we have read again and again, of the heroism of facing danger, and we have glowed with the thought of its nobleness. We have felt how great it is to bear pain, and submit to indignities, rather than wound our conscience; and all this, again and again, when we had no opportunity of carrying our good feelings into practice. Now, suppose at length we actually come into trial, and let us say, our feelings become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice, shall we therefore do our duty, quitting ourselves like men? Rather, we are likely to talk loudly, and then run from the danger. Why? — rather, let us ask, why not? What is to keep us from yielding? Because we feel aright? Nay, we have again and again felt aright and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright; and though there was an original connexion in our minds between feeling and acting, there is none now; the wires within us, as they may be called, are loosened and powerless.

“Loosened and powerless” is a sad substitute for what Newman suggests we ought to demonstrate instead: “hardy, rough-handed obedience.”

We now find ourselves back with Cyrus on the frontier, where reality itself is the teacher and the lesson is not optional. Even students in the best classical schools today spend too much time in purely intellectual arenas, where they can separate feeling from action, sentiment from reality — arenas where talk is as cheap as it is plentiful.

Fortunately, there is a corrective. But be warned: It is as rugged and as demanding of adults as of the young. It will require many in education who are accustomed to the relative comfort of lecture halls and seminar tables to relearn the feel of callouses and the inevitable alternation between sweating and shivering that the unmediated life provokes.

The corrective, simply put, is robust physical training in fitness, athletics, or the school of the outdoors — camping, climbing, and diving. Students need raw contact with nature so that virtue is exercised with cold hands and aching backs, not merely batted around the seminar table as an abstraction.

They need hard, physical work — tilling the soil or caring for animals — that teaches patience and responsibility and impresses upon them the limits of human will. They need to willingly forgo modern comforts that obscure the lessons contained in God’s book of nature.

Hard labor and self-mastery learned through challenge can no longer serve as mere supplements to education. As long as we treat them as such, we should not expect our children to demonstrate the “hardy, rough-handed obedience” that Newman argued is the hallmark of citizens of great nations.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.