Re-educating America: Classical Schools and “Old Ideals” Can Bring New Success

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals,” wrote philosopher G.K. Chesterton in 1910. “They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” Really, though, what gives worthwhile “old ideals” their value is not that they’re old — it’s that they’re eternal.

So many in our time exhibit chronological chauvinism, the idea that something new is better simply because it is new. Of course, Covid-19 was new in 2019, and the Black Plague was new in 1347 Europe. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything new we can’t live without. Yet necessary for both life and health, physical and spiritual, are many ancient things, such as water, food, shelter, Truth, and love.

This could come to mind with a movement back toward the eternal in American education. That is, rejecting modern schooling, with its bells, whistles, and wokeness, many parents are embracing “classical education.”

This isn’t your father’s schooling; it may not even be your grandfather’s. But it very well may be your great-grandfather’s. As Grok AI explains:

Classical schools in the U.S. focus on a traditional liberal-arts education: Western history and literature (often “Great Books”), phonics and grammar, Latin (sometimes Greek), math and science taught as coherent subjects, and training in the trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The stated aim is forming intellect and character — truth, goodness, beauty, and civic virtue — rather than job skills or the latest pedagogical fads. Many are Christian … ; others, including some Hillsdale-affiliated charters, emphasize an American civic and Western tradition without being church schools.

Where the Education Is — Not Just the “Schooling”

Note here that just as stay-at-home moms were once simply “moms,” “classical schooling” was once simply “schooling.” It should be that again, too, more Americans are realizing. As The Detroit News reported relatively recently about the phenomenon:

Classical education now spans more than 1,500 public, private and charter schools serving nearly 700,000 students, with Fordham reporting 264 new classical schools since 2019. In many communities, families are crossing town, joining waitlists and making sacrifices to choose models built around [traditional educational methods]…. They seek uniforms, teacher-led instruction and a clear answer to the question of what an educated child should know.

The difference is immediately apparent, too. As the News also informs:

The first thing you notice in a classical school is often the order of the place. A school leader stands at the front door, welcoming each child by name and shaking every hand before the day begins. Walk toward a classroom and a student meets you at the threshold. They look you in the eye, shake your hand, and say, “Welcome to our classroom.” They are the class greeter that day, a small responsibility that rotates through the children. It does not take long to see that something here is very different.

Inside, the morning begins with habits older than most modern education debates. The children stand and recite a poem they have committed to memory, perhaps Stevenson or Longfellow. They run through the sounds of the language, the rules of arithmetic and the names of the states and rivers. None of it is filmed for a dashboard. None of it produces a data point that a state accountability system scores. And it is precisely that ordinary, deliberate work of forming a mind that hundreds of thousands of American families are now seeking.

Listening to the Wrong People

They’re seeking the aforementioned because American education is under the control of nattering nabobs of newness. In chronological chauvinism’s grip, our government schools spend millions yearly on new pedagogies. (In reality, these are generally old mistakes and, occasionally, new ones.) An example is the Pacific Educational Group’s offerings. It has itself made millions of dollars teaching “white privilege” peppered with Marxist dogma to America’s schoolteachers. It complains that hard work and planning for the future are “white” cultural traits and touts “collectivism.”

This error of bias toward the new, while not tried and true, is actually not new itself. As Chesterton also wrote in 1910 (in What’s Wrong With the World):

The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea.

Common Sense (Not Common Core)

Prioritizing the “old” is only common sense. It’s also something reflected in our behavior. Among the newest of us — kids — some of the most favored foods and sports are quite old; e.g., pizza and basketball. When ameliorating a child’s headache, it’s unlikely we’ll administer some new drug with no track record. We’ll more likely give the tyke aspirin, invented in 1899. And when my mother was in the hospital some years ago, looking very young, it was her then-mid-90s self who became a star. Medical staff visited her, curious about her “secret” to longevity and vibrancy. They wanted to know what she ate and how she lived — they didn’t thus query a 20-year-old.

Likewise, there’s often a reason “old” ideas didn’t die as new ideas: They were valuable enough to become old. This is always true when they’re eternal ideas.

This brings us to the chronological chauvinism. A prerequisite for believing in “eternal” ideas is understanding that Truth — which transcends time, place, and people — exists. You then realize that old ideas can be valuable because they transmit Truth. Yet most people today are moral relativists/nihilists; they fancy virtues to be mere values. To such people, “old” ideas are just that — old. They can never be eternal, only outdated. They can never transmit Truth, universally applicable, only tastes, wholly provisional. So then classical education, with its greater basis in the eternal, doesn’t appear a positive, but as yesterday’s news. These people’s feelings tell them they want the latest iPhone — and the “latest” educational ideas.

If educational ideas don’t transmit Truth, however, they don’t belong in schools. And if educators don’t believe in Truth, neither do they.