By PAUL KRAUSE
There is a war on excellence in America. Everything excellent, in this new dystopian woke universe, is a legacy of white supremacy, male privilege, and Christian bigotry. Look no further than recent assaults against private schools, grading standards, and academic selectivity which are guilty of all the “woke” sins. In the wake of these attacks, it won’t be long until the vandals turn their sights to Christian education.
The vandalizing war for equality is really a veil to mask rage, hatred, and animosity against the deplorable and irredeemable class: white Americans, Christians, and men (and any woman who supports the patriarchy and Christianity). Rather than improve the lives and standards of all, the “woke” shock troops aim to destroy the lives of those they despise while cloaking their hatred in the façade of virtuous progressivism and racial reconciliation. Humans, however, are called to greatness and not mediocrity, to gratefulness and not resentment.
America’s turn against private education, high grading standards, and educational merit should be concerning to all Americans, but especially for Christians. Our public education system is nothing more than an indoctrination center in the latest critical theory fads. While many Christian schools and universities have embraced the same propaganda with a sprinkling of holy water, many other Christian schools — especially the burgeoning classical school movement — are upholding the traditional ideals of education: excellence, freedom, and appreciation.
Education ought to be about excellence. Education is a time for growth, learning, and maturation, cultivating the life of the mind and the virtues necessary in intellectual excellence so as to prepare oneself for life in the world. We demand excellence, and excellence learned during one’s education helps inculcate that spirit of excellence that transitions into the real world wherever one goes and whatever one does. Countless studies have shown that language skills help people succeed no matter what they do in life.
Freedom, something that America has long been blessed with, but is in danger of losing — and rapidly losing — is also tied to the ideal of education. Freedom and education go hand-in-hand. As such, the corollary is true. Tyranny and (indoctrination) education also go together.
Classical education aims at freedom through excellence and mastery. Not by making students into replicas of Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, or Austen. But by exposing them to the excellence and virtues in all that is good, true, and beautiful with our cultural past. This spirit of excellence then shapes the mind and spirit of the student to achieve such heights as the great men and women of our cultural well.
Moreover, once we have mastered these studies, we have greater freedom to cultivate our own path through the examples of the past masters we learned from and emulated.
Cardinal Newman wrote that education should help the “cultivation of the intellect,” and the “cultivation of the intellect” is achieved not by substandard grading based on emotionalism and lack of wanting to hurt feelings but on exposure to the heights once soared by our forebears so as to encourage us onward to even greater heights up the mountain. Having mastered Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Austen, the student is now ready to take his own flight — the greatest freedom that there is.
Of course, tyranny and education — rather than freedom and education — is the new zeitgeist. Far from cultivating an intellect, education aims at the reproduction of a homogenous mass of sameness and blandness; thousands upon thousands of students who may look different but otherwise, think, feel, and believe the same thing. There is no freedom in mass conformity, and no intellectual uniqueness when a million twenty-year-olds shout the same words and slogans over and over again ad nauseam.
Lastly, education aims at love and appreciation. We ought to love and appreciate those who came before us so as to guide us to the lofty heavens that they were inspired by. Education, then, is essential in transmitting “the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience” to the next generation to continue to build and grow the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience.
Yet we all know the problem with this. “[T]he best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience” marginalizes the experience of whoever we deem to be the sanctified untouchables in society and continues to entrench all that is worst about what has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience. Oh the tired cliché of the supposedly creative and ingenious.
As (some) Christian schools remain steadfast — at least for now — in their commitment to academic excellence, merit, and the virtues of the past, they will increasingly become targeted for eradication since they will be perceived as the final bastions of bigotry, inequality, and all that is evil about the world and the United States.
Christians mustn’t give in. Squishy souls are the surest pathway to Hell. But excellence is always a light in the darkness and will attract, like moths to the flame, the weary souls starved for truth, beauty, and goodness. Christians, most of all, should never lose sight of this and never succumb to the false flame of “woke” hipness which doesn’t save. Christians must remain zealous guardians of all that is good, true, and beautiful — which calls us to the blessed realm of the white rose.
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