Classical Education: The Good-news Solution for Attacks on Our Children
This issue of The New American exposes the myriad ways that government and culture wage war on our kids. It is ironic, cynical, and evil how progressive elites treat adults like helpless children, while simultaneously burdening the youngest kids with very dark and adult issues, including climate change, transgenderism, LGTBQ advocacy, and critical race theory. During the long arc of American education, there was one bulwark that helped insulate young minds from such pernicious assaults: classical education.
It is absolutely true that the origins of American public schools were steeped in statism, socialism, and rank psychologism. Nevertheless, for a significant period of time, students were exposed to a classical curriculum that taught them to think critically, to read the great books of Western culture, and to experience a wide and pluralistic spectrum of worldviews. This one great gift helped keep the country more or less grounded, preparing educated citizens to understand the nation’s origins, triumphs, and struggles; to admire our enduring and ever-tested idealism; and to think critically about those aspects of our civilization that required change — all without throwing out the cultural baby along with the progressive bathwater.
English author, philosopher, and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton once observed that “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” This is the most succinct and accurate description of classical education to be found. The very good news — and one of the most hopeful beacons of light in the darkening twilight of Western culture — is that classical education remains robust, time-tested, and accessible. The great works of Western art, literature, history, philosophy, and economics are but a click away on the internet, stocked in bookstores, and shelved at public and private libraries, uncensored and available for universal consumption and consultation. The embers of this once-great educational conflagration still glow hot and bright, waiting to be stoked into a blaze that will sustain our nation, if we choose to rekindle our interest in and take control of our children’s schooling. Equally encouraging is the fact that the intellectual heat and light of classical education flickers brightly in many private academies and Christian schools, select universities and colleges, and especially the burgeoning homeschool movement. How thrilling that in the early 21st century, millions of homeschool parents have rallied around a form of classical, home-based education that gave rise centuries ago to the generation of thinkers who founded this country and secured its many liberties.
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