More Thoughts About Classical Education

Over the past week or so, I have been reading some articles in a classical education catalog I receive monthly from Memoria Press called The Classical Teacher.  In it, there are two articles by Martin Cothran, a noted writer and classical education proponent, that got my attention.   The first was an interview that he did about what classical education is, and there are a few notes I wanted to comment on based on that one first.

Cothran's thesis proposes that there are three diverse strains in Western Civilization that have shaped and formed it, and we'll talk about those first.  The first Cothran calls "Athens," and the term is representative of ancient Greek culture which has such an enormous impact on our contemporary civilization.  The Greek culture as represented by "Athens" is one of a speculative microcosm, meaning that speculation is the catalyst for seeking knowledge, and thus leads to philosophical inquiry.  The Greek culture was obviously not perfect, in that it asked the right questions in many cases, but did frequently come to the wrong conclusions.  Thanks however to supernatural grace (more on that later), the Church produced great thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas that did lead us to the right conclusions.

Cothran's next diverse strain he notes is what he calls "Rome," meaning the ancient civilization of the Roman Republic and its successors, notably the Roman Empire and Christian Byzantium.  The best way to describe "Rome" is that it is a political microcosm, meaning that order and law were prime components in the shaping of its society.  It was noted for being innovative and constructive in building infrastructure and an administrative network to govern its massive domain.  Part of this is a major emphasis on the practical.  To add some of my own thoughts, Roman culture was the skeleton of Western Civilization, in that it had a continual legacy even into the earliest decades of the 20th century.  Let me elaborate on that.  Naturally, the Roman legacy was carried on by the Byzantines, whose political power lasted almost until the year 1500, when the last Byzantine kingdom, the Empire of Trebizond, fell to the Turks around 1475 or thereabouts.  This Roman legacy was likewise shared by Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, the later Hapsburg domains, and Czarist Russia under both the Rurikids (my own forebears) and the Romanovs.   The tragic end of this legacy, for me, came at the end of World War I, when many of those great empires disappeared, and with them a whole legacy of Western Civilization.  And, the remainder of the 20th century, as well as the 21st century that followed, have been marked by a tragic decline in Western Civilization.  Thankfully there are enclaves though which are preserving the best of this legacy, and I hope to be one of them.

The third diverse strain Cothran notes is what is called "Jerusalem," and in many ways it was the Jewish legacy that made the survival of Rome and Athens possible.  Ancient Hebrew culture could be described, based on the reading of the historical books of the Old Testament, as a spiritual microcosm - the king (when there was one) was to be an instrument of God, and he was as accountable for his actions as the priest, and they shared an authority that was ordered by God Himself.  The big lesson here is how divine intervention shapes and plays a role not only with individuals, but with nations as well.  One of my own spiritual mentors, the late Fr. Eusebius Stephanou, once wrote that rather than just one "Chosen People," God had two - the Jews and the Greeks.  And, through Rome, God allowed for a platform to institutionalize and later integrate the Judeo-Christian legacy into Western Civilization and its heritage as a vital part of its total identity. 

This is where the Church fits in.  The Church inherited this entire rich deposit, and like the inherited remains of a deceased relative, the Church preserved the best of this deposit while discarding the bad aspects of it.  And, the Church was able to do this through the phenomenon of supernatural grace, which is defined by both Aquinas and Bonaventure as healing, elevating, and perfecting Nature, both the individual human nature of each of us as well as the nature of the environment around us, and supernatural grace is endowed by God through the Church - specifically through individual Christians acting in accord with the Church's historical deposit of faith - and thus the Church should be at the center of Western Civilization, preserving the best of its legacy and healing the imperfections that have afflicted it over the centuries.

That leads now to the second article of Cothran's, which defines what a classical education is and how it is set up.  There are seven interrelated disciplines within a core classical curriculum, and they are divided into two groups.  The first, called by the Latin term Trivium, is primarily focused on the language arts - the three disciplines this entails are grammar, logic, and rhetoric.   The second, called by the Latin term Quadrivium, is more centered on mathematical and quantitative reasoning.  It has four disciplines entailed - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.  Now, what we have here honestly is a simplistic model, as obviously there are more things entailed than these.  They are more expanded, for instance, and also there is this Judeo-Christian worldview that should be incorporated into both groups of disciplines.  That naturally would also incorporate theology and philosophy (faith and reason) into the equation as well.  But, these should bind together the others, and be a catalytic force for a more wholistic education.

There is also a noted differentiation between Classical and vocational education, as they are two different systems.  Vocational training, for instance, has as its purpose to train people to do certain things well.   On the other hand, classical education teaches a set of academic skills (called the liberal arts) and a body of cultural knowledge (Western Civilization) that has the purpose of training people to do anything well.   However, I would expand upon Cothran's premise by noting that vocational training is not something to be slighted, and although I don't in any way believe Cothran would do that, there is a danger in doing so from some readers who may misinterpret his intention.  To expand upon what I say, vocational training should go hand-in-hand with Classical education and when that synthesis occurs, the results are always good.  The academic skills and cultural knowledge gained from the Classical curriculum, for instance, would aid in a more practical application via vocational training.  Therefore, unlike many models of vocational training today, which seem to focus on dollars and not intellectual growth, a true model of synthesis of the vocational and the Classical would make one's education more interdisciplinary, and thus would incorporate more vocationally-oriented skills such as culinary arts, the use and familiarity of technology, and other practical basic skills with a deeper aesthetic sense that transcends just getting an education to make a big salary only (although that would no doubt also happen).  The vocational training of the past was often accomplished in two ways - either by compulsory conscription into military service or assignment to a professional guild of some sort by apprenticeship.  These didn't diminish or exclude classical education, but rather often both Classical education and this vocational background were required to make men responsible citizens of their nations who aided in productivity and stability.  The vocational aspect would also instill a regimen of discipline and routine in order to make studying a Classical curriculum more productive as well, which means both of these went hand-in-hand rather than in opposition to each other.  It was only Enlightenment-inspired secularism that divorced the two, much as it also did faith and reason, and thus this disconnect between the academic and the practical led to an inevitable decline in society that we see in full force today. 

Language cannot be underestimated either, as both the studies of Latin and Greek were always traditionally considered the best way to master the discipline of grammar.  Latin as a language is regular, highly grammatical, and has rules in place that can be universally applied to any language.  Today, it is the root of 60% of all academic English, and is still considered the language of science and learning.  If you study law or medicine, for instance, Latin terms come up frequently.  However, Greek as well plays a major role too that should not be underestimated, and of the remaining 40% noted above of all academic English, Greek plays a significant role in the percentage.  Therefore, this sort of supplement's Cothran's assertion regarding Latin. 

In the second article of Cothran's which he authored himself entitled "The Living Order of Education," the opening thesis is that a benefit of knowing Latin is that it gives one the ability to understand more fully what English words mean, even when there has been no previous exposure to such words.   More importantly, it gives one the ability to better understand a word that one may see thousands of times on a daily basis, and may even frequently use.  There is now a part of the article that Cothran calls the concept of "Destruction," and it deserves some attention as well.

"Destruction" is the combination of two Latin words - de meaning "to undo," and struo meaning a structure or bulwark if you will.  Its literal meaning then is "the undoing of structure."  The implication behind the Latin terms that make up the word is of a shattering, crushing, and explosion of something.  But, underneath that is a more banal and less dramatic implication - it forcibly takes away a thing's structure, as well as its intrinsic organization and order.  So, we now turn to society today and see how we witness this.

Beginning with the most fundamental aspect of any civilization, there is the impact upon the family.  The dismantling of the family structure - brought about in this case by many so-called "progressive" policies such as the legalization of "same-sex marriage," the open advocacy for legalized murder via abortion and euthanasia, and the rise of a corporatist "crony capitalism" that doesn't embody true capitalism in that it seeks to subvert the productive small business and also impose a "cubicle culture" on the average American - has ultimate and inevitable negative affects on the individual. An individual without a supportive family structure loses a lot, in other words.  In education likewise, the urge to destruction has had catastrophic consequences.  For example, the dispensing of the orderly operation of the classroom by so-called "enlightened" or "woke" teachers who spout agendas that make them activists rather than true educators has caused a "dumbing-down" of younger generations.  Also, the avoidance of an orderly approach to academic subjects has produced a restlessness, distraction, and lack of focus in the classroom.  Of course this is symptomatic of a greater problem Cothran notes, which we will elaborate on now.

The current modern (or post-modern) world is at war with order.  In education, it is responsible for the disordering of classrooms and curriculum, and both of those in turn contribute to the disordering of young minds.  One casualty of this war on order in education is the modern aversion to teaching phonics.  It also has affected negatively the teaching of memorization and it is behind a refusal to emphasize formal grammar.  As an end result, it leads to ultimate destruction, as lack of education starves a civilization of its true progress.   And, Cothran's observations lead to a few of my own now.

In Catholic thinker Plinio Correa de Oliviera's seminal work Revolution and Counter-Revolution, he gives this destruction a name - the "Revolution."  He notes that this "Revolution" is a series of multiple aspects that stem from a crisis of contemporary mankind, and he notes that there are five defining characteristics of this crisis:

1.  It is universal - meaning that it ultimately affects everyone with some negative impact.
2.  It is a single crisis with multiple manifestations - meaning that all of the symptoms of the crisis, like those of a terminal disease, are interconnected.
3. It is total - this means that in due time, the crisis will engulf every aspect of life and the problems it generates will lead to the destruction that Cothran notes in education in his article, just for one example.
4. It is dominant - at the root of every problem is a dominant mindset that drives the whole thing.  These things do not develop out of a vacuum, in other words.
5. It is processive - This again means it didn't appear out of a vacuum, but the seeds were sown possibly centuries earlier.  My hypothesis points it back to the thinking of people such as William of Ockham, Marsilus of Padua, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Descartes, and others. 

If one were to synthesize Professor de Oliviera's and Cothran's observations, one would see a picture forming that notes that this crisis we face now - the "destruction" of Cothran's thesis and the definition of "revolution" that de Oliviera has put forth - is referred to by both as being the same thing but in different disciplines.  One of de Oliviera's students, John Horvat, notes on page 17 of his book Return to Order that the issues that Cothran notes in the destruction of education can directly be attributed to something called "frenetic intemperance," which Horvat defines as "a restless, explosive, and relentless drive inside man that manifests itself in modern economy by first seeking to throw off legitimate constraints and then gratifying disordered passions."   Cothran and Horvat are saying the same thing in other words - post-modern society is driven, in my words, by an "appetite for destruction."  Cothran and Horvat are talking about different areas (Cothran addresses education, while Horvat primarily is addressing economics) but they come to the same exact conclusion that they express in their own individual ways, and it is a conclusion I also agree with.  Taking de Oliviera's fifth characteristic of the "crisis," Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker also note this disturbing trend in theology (in particular how the Bible is interpreted) in their extensive volume Politicizing the Bible, as they also note that some of the same people I mentioned above were responsible for the current decline in their own way.  It also extends to other contributors - in philosophy, for instance, we see Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and others.  In music and the arts, we see the rise of both "rap music" and rock music, as well as their permeation into other genres, and also the bad post-modern art of people like Andy Warhol.  In education, it is Horace Mann and John Dewey who are the culprits, while in economics the openly-homosexual John Maynard Keynes is the implementer.  In science there are several - Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, as well as a plethora of eugenics and transhumanist people such as Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Warwick, and Nick Bostrom.  In sexual ethics and morality, there are some blatant ones - Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Simone de Bevoir, just to name a few.  In theology, we see Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr, Cone, Moltmann, and Hauerwas, as well as liberal Protestant "Emergents" such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.  Then, in politics, you have Marx, the Fascists, and people like Saul Alinsky.   Today, that legacy of destruction is being effectively carried out by the Silicon Valley "Billionaire Boys Club" of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, as well as the CEO's of Google and other big communications monopolies, not to mention a host of activist politicians (primarily Democrats, although Republicans have their fair share of these as well).  In place of teaching solid academics and proper grammar, activists masquerading as "educators" now pump "political correctness" into kids' heads, and Classical education is often seen as "racist" and the symptom of a phantom strawman no one can clearly define called "White privilege."  When the question has changed from "What is a pronoun?" to "What are your pronouns?" due to the fact these agents of destruction are promoting agendas that include classifying 700 imaginary genders that only exist in the addled minds of lunatics and are not scientifically confirmed, we have a crisis in education that is also reflexive of the general crisis in contemporary society.  A well-grounded and well-rounded classical education, incorporating as well a balanced vocational curriculum, would easily correct this course in a generation.  Alas, though, not many are listening.  So, we have a culture of death and destruction, and thus a "revolution" that is characterized by excess and crisis, a revolution that is against fact and reason. 

I could go on with this, and perhaps at another time I can find time to share more in specific areas, but for now you get the idea.  Education is in crisis, but it is a crisis that is a symptom of a larger problem that endangers our civilization.  Only proper education and guidance can reverse this destructive course, and thanks to people like Cothran, there are roadmaps in place to make that happen.  If more catch on and are enlightened to the truth, there is a possibility for true change.  Let's pray it happens.   Thanks again, and will see you next time.