By PAUL KRAUSE
It is no secret that American education—and Western education, more broadly—is in the throes of a deep crisis.
This crisis is mostly self-inflicted and, to some extent, largely modern. Yet even in the 1960s and into the 1980s education still transmitted the treasury of culture and cultural consciousness to the next generation. Then began the nihilistic chants and iconoclasm at Stanford: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”
Education, as all honest people know, is not a neutral endeavor. Nor should we strive for a supposedly neutral educational outlook. The role that education plays in cultural transmission ought to be celebrated and defended. And precisely because of the role education plays in cultural inheritance, education was assaulted to destroy that rich patrimony and replace it with the void of pragmatism, politics, and critical theory.
Morality and education are intimately bound together. Read any classic of American literature, even well into the 20th century, and you will see the residue of the civic and cultural spirit of education.
For instance, when Aron and Cal go to school after having moved to Salinas in “East of Eden,” Steinbeck describes the echoes of the once prominent model of civic and cultural education that students—irrespective of social standing and geographic location—received: “The pictures identified the rooms, and the pre-Raphaelite influence was overwhelming. Galahad standing in full armor pointed the way for third-graders; Atalanta’s race urged on the fourth, the Pot of Basil confused the fifth grade, and so on until the denunciation of Cataline sent the eighth-graders on to high school with a sense of high civic virtue.”
Steinbeck’s seemingly insignificant description of Aron and Cal’s school is, however, a picturesque window into the loss of culture. Chronologically, Aron and Cal are attending school before John Dewey promulgated his ideas on pragmatic education. Yet the environment in which they are situated represents the best of Western culture and symbolism.
Galahad, the courageous knight of King Arthur lights the way with steadfast courage. Galahad was also one of the Grail Knights; he symbolized faith and courage and the importance of faith and courage for the next generation.
Atalanta’s race reaches back to Antiquity, Atalanta a virgin huntress steadfast in her purity who is challenged into a race by Hippomenes who cheats to win. Hippomenes, of course, later pays for his sacrilege—this symbolized our heritage from antiquity and the subtle message that cheating has consequences as it did for Hippomenes. Yet, in the midst of trials, we must persevere and race on.
The Pot of Basil is a Renaissance tale of fidelity, adapted by John Keats in his famous poem of the same name. Be faithful, in other words.
The denunciation of Cataline was, ironically, the high watermark of nadir of the Roman Republic; Cicero successfully outmaneuvered the scheming Senator Catiline who was planning to overthrow the republic and forced him into exile, temporarily saving the republic from destruction which would come only 20 years later with the dictatorship and murder of Julius Caesar. Nevertheless, the denunciation of Cataline conveyed deep patriotic sentiments and duties. We may not all be Cicero, but we can be great lovers of our country as Cicero was.
Aron and Cal, as we can see, were immersed in the culture that coursed through the veins of the young American republic at the time. Moreover, the very imagery and culture that swam in through school was something to cherish and embodied instead of scorning and destroying.
Not long ago any educated person in the United States would have known these stories and persons that Aron and Cal encountered in artistic form, whether mythic or historical. They formed the bedrock of Anglo-American culture and European identity. Christian, pre-Christian, and modern identities all collided in a spectacular aesthetic of roots and future.
Classical education, which dominated what used to be the very educational model used by elite schools and public schools, emphasized this rich inheritance through classical languages, rhetoric, history, and sacred scripture. One knew the mark of one’s educational standing by his Latin, familiarity with the classics, and conscious knowledge of the Bible. This permitted, of course, the student to read virtually anything before 1960 and know most of the references and allusions employed by the author. One cannot simply pick up Shakespeare or Melville and fully saturate themselves in those worlds without knowing Cetus, Jupiter, or the New Testament.
When this cultural inheritance is destroyed, precisely because education no longer transmits it, students are left awash in an abyss of chaos. Marxists, feminists, and genderist teachers enter the void and bring order to the chaos by imposing onto the students the fixed ideological narrative.
Without knowledge of the classics, or a hatred of them, the new teachers offer a deracinated and ideological education which makes students scorn their own patrimony while embracing the fads of the contemporary zeitgeist and whatever otherwise atrocious novel of propaganda has all the buzzwords, the accepted protagonist (some oppressed minority), and the necessary villain (a white male, preferably a Christian). As Bertrand Russell openly said, the task of education from the liberal point of view is to destroy “contentment with the status quo.” In other words, it is to destroy the very cultural spirit and inheritance that makes enjoyment of the status quo possible.
To this end Christian education has a most important role to play in counter this culture of nothingness and revulsion. Alas, many Christian schools—especially Diocesan ones—are just as truncated as the broader educational system in America. What is transmitted to these Christian students is a watered-down social gospel, or as I like to think of it: socialism sprinkled with holy water and the idea of Jesus as a revolutionary activist.
But classical Christian education, though small, offers that robust guard and rich dwelling in our patrimony. This, then, leads to the inevitable question of how to teach classics to Christians; what do Christians make of the violence of Homer and Virgil? the obvious paganism of the Greek tragedians? or the inaccurate representation of Christianity by Nathaniel Hawthorne?
Christian teachers must remain steadfast in the truths of the faith and the revelations revealed to the Church. We share a common human nature, Christian and pagan alike, and have the same heart and same wants though we are not clad in the same grace. To love God and love neighbor is the highest calling, and here, the Christian is given a great tool in redeeming the classics.
Take Homer, for example. I profess a great love of Homer. While not minimizing the violence of Homer, it is also evident that Homer does not celebrate violence but laments it. The rage of Achilles is brought on scorning and lose of love, that rage is subsided by his loving embrace of Priam and his bestowing peace and forgiveness unto his avowed enemy whom he had just earlier sworn to kill.
Homer’s grand epic ends on a note of peace, peace brought forth by an act of loving forgiveness. “The Odyssey,” too, is a tale of two flesh becoming one, reunited in love for each other. Penelope, above all, is to be praised for her fidelity. The fidelity of Penelope is just as essential to the reunion as Odysseus’ journey; for as Agamemnon tells Odysseus in the Underworld, adultery wrought death to him and all in his household.
The Christian can, and must, transmit the wonder of Western culture to the next generation while always directing the good to be found in those sources to the Ultimate Good which nourishes our soul.
This is also the impetus of what writers from T.S. Eliot to Russell Kirk have understood as “the moral imagination.”
Without the moral imagined formed and protected by the truths of Christianity the transmission of earthly culture from an earthly city ultimately destined for destruction has the same end of the nihilistic pragmatism, Marxism, and socialism of the present educational establishment. The transmission of Western culture and the good in it to the Greater Good that is God not only redeems the pre-Christian past and the present but beautifies it and carries it into Paradise. It is something to build from and build up.
Like Dante, we are tasked with hauling 3,000 years of culture on our backs as we ascend Mount Purgatory but are cheered on by the conversations and rhetoric of Homer, Plato, and Cicero; Shakespeare, Milton, and Dostoevsky; Plutarch, Melville, and Tolstoy. And here, we see, how we travel with the richest garden possible to the greatest garden of them all. In that garden, a culture will flourish and enter the gates of eternity.
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