The Great Books Aren't Enough

Few institutions have been fought over as much as education, and none have fallen to modern fads to the extent of the classroom. It’s been a total rout, with only a small subset of private schools and homeschool co-ops escaping the massive, hyper-standardized education juggernaut. History textbooks lost what little nuance they once had in favor of a bland, moralizing, Whig version of history. Bare excerpts have replaced long-form reading. New and poorly researched fads in pedagogy are developed and implemented every few years. Radical concepts of childhood development are mandated with no consideration of whether theory and practice mesh.

While academia pursues the latest craze, those of a more conservative bent are calling to return to the tried and true. Made history books patriotic instead of deconstructionist. Reinstate maligned drilling and memorizing dates. Instill classroom discipline. Make standardized tests more objective, run classrooms more like an imagined pinnacle of pedagogy in the 1950’s.

In recent years though, there is a push to go before Dewey’s educational framework inspired by the Prussian method became the standard. They demand a return to classical learning. Dorothy Sayers called these methodologies “The Lost Tools of Learning” in her famous lecture in 1948, more widely read now than when she was alive. The classical philosophy of education rested around three distinct developments in a child’s education: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The youngest focus on learning the rules of language. Later they move past memorization to analyzing the links between disparate facts and ideas, followed by the final stage where the student has the knowledge base to use logic, analytics, and poetic language to sway his audience. Contrary to rhetoric being frowned upon, the classics emphasize its necessity to transmit understanding by unlocking the audience’s senses and imagination. These deeply conflict with modern educational practices and philosophy.

While classical styles of learning have had resounding success in homeschool communities and are embraced by a small cohort of private universities, its influence has not extended far into secular education. As much as its ideology expresses love for pluralism and diversity of thought, its intrinsic respect for the Western tradition and its pursuit of “The Good, the True, and The Beautiful” is deemed too stodgy and, ironically, propagandistic in modern times. A prime example of this clash between the secular relativism of academia and the spiritual aspirations of classical education was the formation and eventual destruction of The Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) run by John Senior in the University of Kansas during the 1970’s.

John Senior would seem like a strange avatar for renewing classical education. A runaway who lived as a rancher, a dabbler in the occult and symbology similar to poets like W.B. Yeats, he had a restless soul that refused to live inside an intellectual box. Yet time and time again, his curiosity into the new and exotic left him with a deep, unfulfilled spiritual longing. It was only when he spent a long time truly studying the great thinkers of antiquity and the traditions of the Catholic Church that he felt a sense of purpose. After his conversion, to say he was opinionated is an understatement, and he constantly lamented how colleges espoused moral relativism and had nothing but contempt for the state of modern culture.

When Senior and his colleagues had the opportunity to run a “college within a college” focusing on the humanities, they took full advantage. They quickly recruited a couple dozen students that would soon balloon to three-hundred. The fundamental books of Western thought were studied, the entire works read before anyone else’s commentary. That meant no prefaces, no afterwards, no scholarly papers. They read the works and attended a seminar discussion where note-taking was banned. The purpose was to be engaged in the current conversation without worrying about remembering details or being corrupted by an “expert’s” opinion. They were to be awash tangling with the great questions, akin to being thrown in the deep end of the pool. Grading was simple. For the final exam, the students were given a blank notebook and 80 minutes to write an essay. The focus was not analyzing in an impersonal, academic manner, but truly wrestling with the works and implications to their lives. It was akin to being thrown into the deep end of the pool, but the students learned to swim.

The students had a set schedule of classes, allowing them to build rapport instead of seeing unfamiliar faces every semester. Outside of class, the students participated in stargazing sessions, poetry recitations, and extended seminars. The students quickly learned that “barbarism is a bore” and expanded even further, with many discovering ballroom dancing. The professors emphasized the importance of every sense being activated along with the intellect, instilling a love of creation to the whole man. Not only was the intellect formed, but their emotional well-being and connection to the divine as well.

The results were astounding, and the IHP soon became a victim of its own success. The professors were accused of brainwashing the students when many converted to Catholicism, with some even discerning monastic life. The university, while it didn’t bat an eye at students of conservative parents who embraced the sexual revolution, thought the professors were proselytizing, though investigations yielded no evidence. The IHP was soon suppressed by not allowing the classes to be tallied towards graduation, then slowly squeezing it of funding until it was disbanded.

While The Integrated Humanities Program was destroyed, its underlying philosophy did not. The program produced a bishop, a provost, an abbot, and several other notable alumni. The theory and practice of the college created spiritual offspring in the form of Wyoming Catholic College, a small liberal arts school with a great books emphasis, an extensive outdoors program, and strictly controlled internet policy.

Many educational traditionalists have latched onto IHP’s example, seeing it as a template to follow in getting education back on track. Most important in this mode of thought is the insistence to tangle with what has been deemed The Great Books. While many individual works are open to debate, the core works of Plato and Aristotle, the medieval scholastics, and the enlightenment thinkers are given space, letting the student digest the formation of new ideas and mindsets to see the world. In order for the student to grasp the great questions, he has to be acquainted with the giants who came before him. They are tough works, and to even comprehend them at a basic level is far beyond the capability of many students. It’s a way to really challenge a student with hard material, and a way for him to understand the roots fo Western Civilization.

However, for all the grandstanding and conservative’s antipathy towards modern secular education, they have a mercenary mindset, a focus on immediate practicality just as vapid as the progressives they despise. While they often spout platitudes about respecting the great historical thinkers and having values greater than material comfort, in reality they see education as largely a practical affair. Even the Great Books are used in this manner, and far too many espouse reading them for the challenging prose and familiar value system rather than wrestling with difficult questions. Worse, it’s often used as a “safe” form of learning that protects the reader from the problems of modernity. Instead of seeing them as a gateway to understanding the human condition, it is a blanket to hide under while pretending to be educated, a cocoon to wrap oneself in to avoid battling the current cynical age.

The last two decades of conservative media have blasted that youth should go into STEM or enter the trades to find a well-paying job and become a useful member of society. Discrediting the humanities as being progressive and hopeless, it’s been widely mocked and denigrated as, at best, a waste of time. In the last decades, significant cultural ground has been ceded. Far too many conservatives surrendered the humanities in the hopes that they will work to get “real jobs” and out-earn the gender studies majors. Now, conservatives have neither the money nor the culture. While many inroads have been made in recent years in supporting the arts in education, it’s based far too much on a different form of striverism, almost as corrosive to the young mind as the worst modern pedagogy.

What’s lost in educational discourse is the faulty core premise of modernity. Both progressives and conservatives pontificate on how they want to teach the child how to think, as varied as their techniques are. What’s lost is that before you can teach a child to think, you must teach him how to wonder. A child who is incapable of awe will be just as robotic whether he reads preachy and progressive modern works or Aquinas. How is a child going to relate to the Ingall family from “Little House on the Prairie” if they’ve never smelt a horse stable? How is a child supposed to understand the trials of David Balfour of “Kidnapped” fame if he never explores on his own?

Last winter a snowplow ran through a local parking lot, leaving the spaces bare of snow but forming massive mounds of snow in its wake. My son, along with his visiting cousin, was immediately attracted to the sprawling white mound, grabbing their gloves and sleds and sprinting out the door. This instinctual drive in young boys goes beyond reason, beyond the mechanics that define modern-day life. That rush of life was the biting wind whipping around their faces and the snow creeping under their gloves to bare skin. When they saw the boulder at the top, practically begging to be freed, they spent the next hour grabbing shovels and digging underneath, straining their muscles against the obstinate mass. They tested their young bodies to the limit, battling against an immovable foe for dominance. Once they were locked-in, nothing could cull their determination. After ceaseless effort, the boulder broke free, and they watched in satisfaction as the boulder tumbled into the concrete below.

In striver culture bent on optimization, such behaviors are seen, at most, as a reprieve from their real education. From books and studying. Maybe such activity is a treat after getting their math homework done. Some would say how the children were actually using the scientific principles of physics with levers, force, and kinetic energy, just like every toy now how to show its practical educational value. The focus is how the particular can be abstracted, how personal experience can be formalized into a general framework. This systemization is assumed in our technocratic society. Very little value is put on the experience itself, the interplay of the individual with his environment, the instincts and deep understanding formed that can’t be abstracted away. These exhausting, coddling, and stodgy schoolmarms infest both sides. In removing autonomy and real adventure in favor of simulacra and dry classrooms with mundane lessons, we’ve destroyed wonder.

While even farm-boys in the 19th century could grasp the ancient conception of honor in The Iliad, recent generations have found such works imposing and confusing. Even at the college level, many boys have never been in a real physical altercation to understand battle with another foe. Our strict social codes make personal honor an anachronism. Worse is trying to mold such ancient concepts into modern moral categories, trying to box in Achilles as “toxic masculinity” or making a weak commentary on the horrors of war instead of understanding the minds who lived in a wildly different culture. The constant attempts to flatten the difficult thinkers into a more palatable category shows the paucity of minds and the scourge of hyper-moralism while also espousing relativism.

It also diluted the alien-ness of the culture in favor of a crude deconstruction instead of taking the virtues of the ancient world at face value. Hyper-moralizing and focus on modern works make it difficult to understand those who didn’t play by modern rules.

It’s ironic that as the American population has classroom time than ever, they are less educated with every passing generation. They are awash in symbols and abstractions while having a paucity of experience. They know what cold is in the abstract but never experience the pain of near-frozen hands thawing under the sink. They know the concept of a forest but have never spent idle hours wandering through its organic logic. While complaints of this sort are often blamed on the ubiquity of electronics, the issue has much deeper roots.

Several generations ago, people like John Senior had the foresight to realize the up-and-coming generations never really lived. While redirection to better pedagogy and clear standards is an improvement, it still lies victim to the technical optimization mindset that permeates modern thought. It relies on quantifiable tests, tests that are by their nature designed to be optimized for. While there is commendable effort to replace the faltering SAT and ACT with alternatives such as the Classical Learning Test (CLT), you’re replacing one set of optimization parameters for another. While it might optimize for a slightly better world model and skillset, it still obfuscates the core meaning of education, to raise a man’s soul.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with reading The Great Books. Everyone should read them. What’s flawed is construing them as an endpoint in themselves to digest instead of a tool to be wielded by competent hands. The students at the IHP did not expand their world simply by reading, but through the passionate and formidable personalities of the professors directing them. It was an encounter with another human being who gently led the neophyte into different ways of being. Even if the class was an introductory Latin class, the professors put their hearts and souls into it. Just like a master musician gently going over how to read notes to a child, the professor introduces those naive students into the great conversations of history.

John Senior was such an inspiring man that his former students often visited him, even as his heart issues made teaching at the University impossible. He was an opinionated and often cantankerous man, but every student could sense the life and will emanating from him. The quaint-looking philosopher was a force of nature, a wellspring of wisdom one could only experience in person.

If, by some miracle, the current useless and haphazard pedagogy of the academy was overturned and classical learning was reinvigorated, many of the same problems will be present. They will probably write better and learn more in less time. They will likely have less contempt for their ancestors, but the boredom will remain. Reading a textbook does not immediately instill pride in one’s culture and wonder. Words on a page will not, in themselves, instill culture. You need another human being to interact with. You need to intentionally grapple with the world’s current manifestation together. You need a guide to understand the glory of the stars above, the joyous subtleties of the dance floor, and the otherworldly smell of the cathedral. None of these visceral experiences will increase test scores, nor will it directly improve your career prospects. It’s not “useful” in the direct sense, but they instill the character and virtue that makes one’s culture worth fighting for,

As educational academies have gone from useless to actually damaging, many aspiring educators have been turned off, leading to an overwhelmingly uniform teacher base. Even if one wanted to read the Great Books, the amount of elders with this knowledge a child has access to is dwindling to nothing. The child’s parents aren’t familiar, and internet classes don’t have the same powerful intimacy as face-to-face learning. There are few John Seniors to learn under today. Luckily, alternative institutions are sprouting forth, whether from classical private schools or homeschool co-ops. My children are learning from recent graduates regarding the great thinkers of every age and earn peanuts for their efforts. They do it anyway because it’s important, a vocation. The current institutions are willing to lionize their teachers and artists, and the social prestige makes the low pay more palatable. Traditionalists need to do the same.

The only way to destroy meaningless careerism, studying for the test, and the incessant rat race of credentialism is to refuse to play. The only way to re-invoke the sense of grandeur over the world is to let go of it. Not every Great Book needs to be read, but the ones traversed need to be read well. It’s more important to let one’s senses be awed by grand architecture than to deconstruct and analyze it. Once the awe comes, such scientific details can be attacked with rigor. A cynical mind is a poor learner. Teachers have to let go of immediate practicality for the higher cause of forming the full man. Those doing “worthless” pursuits in the arts should be given leeway to create their works, even if they never are financially successful. In our age, our most important tasks as educators are re-instilling what has been lost by modernity: Enchantment.

The world is filled to the brim with educators flashing their master’s degrees and doctorates, and yet are barren of those who can instill awe and joy in a child’s heart. Our sanitized world is safer than ever, but only capable of forming passive and risk-averse adults that never adventured from their mother’s skirt. The wisdom of the ages, from antiquity to the modern marvels of science, is there for anyone to study, but the relentless striverism has sucked awe from our vocabulary. The future will not be won with simply a better curriculum. A different form or being, a different form of teacher that has the will as well as the agency to stray outside the platitudes of modern textbooks, from the technocracy of modern pedagogy.

We must remember the IHP’s Motto before all else: “Let them be born in Wonder”

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