Education Is Always Political
An opening salvo
Agoge is animated by the understanding that education is inherently political. By “political” we mean something broader than partisan politics.
Education is political because it shapes the civilization of the future through government and law, through institutions of culture and social life, and through the shared stories and symbols that give our country its distinctive character.
Classical education as a modern movement is at odds with modern education not just in terms of method or outcomes. Above all, classical education is at odds with modern education politically. If our movement, and our civilization, is to survive, educators must understand the political nature of their task, and we must reject those accounts of education that would subvert classical education from within in deference to modern liberal pieties and the pretensions of the corrupt present.
In this opening salvo and symposium of Agoge, some of its members reflect on the meaning of education as political. The titles of contributors are for informational purposes only; we speak for ourselves, and not our respective institutions.
-AGOGE
It's a common misreading of the cave image in the Republic that we're meant to free others from the cave, that this is somehow what “classical education” is. This kind of freedom is possible for a very rare few, who can come to see things from the standpoint of nature, not convention.
But for all of us in any case, the cave is the enveloping atmosphere of opinion and received wisdom. It is the regime. It can be healthy or harmful, but it is the almost inescapable human condition. Even though or if we have had a glimpse at the sun and at being itself, we would nevertheless descend to the cave and teach amidst the world of becoming.
Classical education is not and should not be about the attempt to escape from the cave; it is the cave. It is a better cave than the parochial and fanatical devotion to one’s own, but better still than the false promise of escape offered by those who would universalize the tradition, sanitizing it to assuage modern guilt and placate contemporary neuroses. Homer, Cicero, Shakespeare, the Latin language, etc.: these are the particular forms and shapes through which we see the world, and we revere them because they are ours and because they are particularly excellent. This is why one cannot simply 'broaden the canon,' and universalize classical education. It is education in a particular regime, and a regime which is now at odds with the ruling regime.
Classical education is not in great danger from those who attack it openly, for it has emerged already hardened in opposition to the established institutions of American education. Rather, classical education is in danger from within, from those who would defend it on the grounds that it is not a threat to the orthodoxy of the present regime. In making this case they would also make it non-threatening.
I assert, on the contrary, that classical education is a threat to the spirit of the age. Those who brought about the corruption of education to which classical education is the response understood, as the ancient Spartan founder Lycurgus did, that education is “the best lawgiver”; they sought to effect a new order through the transformation of education, and succeeded. We can only oppose and defeat them by restoring and renewing the authority of Western—and American—civilization, the old regime for a new century.
John Peterson, Director, Classical Education Graduate Program, University of Dallas
Every educational endeavor more-or-less consciously and more-or-less intentionally shapes its students in accord with some more-or-less explicit anthropology, or account of humanity. Modern educational schemes assume one or another iteration of modern anthropology, and thereby equip their students to be coddled and managed, at school and in life, by the bureaucrats and experts credentialed by the dominant educational institution of our present regime: the modern secular research university.
A classical education worthy of the name would self-consciously, intentionally, and explicitly shape its students in accord with classical anthropology, formulated by the Greek philosophers and affirmed by Christian tradition.
We are naturally rational rather than merely emotive; we are free rather than determined by our social and historical conditions; we are body–soul unities rather than so many ghosts in so many machines; we are social rather than isolated; we are religious rather than atheistic; and we are inevitably, as well as for the sake of our natural perfection, political rather than capable of living well without the customs, traditions, structures, and way of life of a particular patria.
The classical education movement rightly has returned to premodern sources (Biblical, classical, and medieval) to recover traditional tools and texts. A more complete ressourcement would take into account the fullness of classical anthropology. Students who are well-formed in accord with classical anthropology will be equipped, inter alia, to be citizens of a free nation. In this respect, they will be ill-fitting subjects of our present managerial regime.
Pavlos Papadopoulos, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Wyoming Catholic College
An overlooked feature of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man is the clear-eyed political nature of its argument, as regards education. He contrasts a Roman father teaching his son piety for his country with a “conditioner” who holds that all values are fundamentally equal. The former is a grounding in a political tradition which through the laws constitute the family to which the child was born. The latter is only imaginable in an unmoored and rootless politics which is destined to destroy the people who adopt it as a way of life.
We do not live in the world to which Lewis was speaking, nor do we live in ancient Rome. The question before us is: How we should educate our young? What do we hope to pass on to them? Who are we hoping to form them into? And, if we are leaders of educational institutions, what are the political things we hope to pass on to our children?
These are the questions which Agoge answers. Educational leaders in America should work to form Americans. America was founded by a people who were deeply read in Christian scripture. They believed in God’s providence and in the primacy of His word for all aspects of their personal and public lives. As they moved west in the era of American expansion they brought and taught the scriptures with them, often as one of the only books in the home. The Christian scriptures should not merely get a hearing for inclusion on great books lists, but be placed in the seat of honor in all classical educational institutions. The Bible is the book of books. And classical schools should be forming students in scripture as well as giving them the tools needed to discern and interpret and enjoy the depth of wisdom found therein.
The contemporary education system and its advocates implicitly acknowledge the political nature of these statements by cutting all prayer, and all scripture, from the curriculum which is taught to the young. They see the Bible as a threat to them. It is.
The Bible offers a particular political formation to the people who seriously wrestle with it. It offers a shared language for moral reasoning in public and that language is in danger of being lost. Only by being honest about this, and by being proud of our heritage as a Bible-believing people, can we ever hope to measure up to the excellences of our great national history. There is no education without politics, and there is no American politics which can connect our present to our founding, without God’s word.
Colin Redemer, Executive Director, The Davenant Institute
It is altogether good and natural to recoil from the arrogance of modern schools, whose students are taught to be world citizens with an airy allegiance to humanity in general and no one people in particular, in which the past is condemned as a long reign of darkness only just recently interrupted by enlightened and modern sensibilities, in which young college students are taught to become world-changers and take degrees in things like “public policy” and “international relations” yet know next to nothing of American civics, the history of the world, or foreign languages. This is the state of the current and rising elite in America.
The classical education movement is a worthy response to this deplorable state of affairs. But the classical education movement must not react against the bad politics of modern education by shunning politics and wrapping itself into a cocoon of imaginary nonpartisan safety. Education cannot really be apolitical; even if it could, attempting such a thing would completely miss the point of classical education. Why bother forming your students with the best that has been thought and said if they are not going to go do anything in particular afterwards?
“Let shame fall upon the bookish recluse,” Cicero said, “who is unable to deliver the fruits of his learning to the city.” Let not Cicero’s opprobrium fall upon classical educators! Instead, let us take up his challenge. A country ruined by bad leadership can be saved by good leadership. The solution to a bad elite is a good one.
The classical education movement can and should attempt this rescue mission. That is why we have adopted our name from the ἀγωγή, as a tribute to the Spartan system of education.
For as the great French humanist Michel de Montaigne wrote of the Greeks, some “used to go to other Grecian cities in search of rhetoricians, painters, and musicians: the others came to Sparta for lawgivers, statesmen, and generals.”
It is our hope, at Agoge, that the classical education movement will do for America what Sparta did for Greece.
Ryan Hammill, Executive Director, Ancient Language Institute
“He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.” So said Solomon, as copied by Hezekiah’s men in the 8th century B.C.
Three centuries later Socrates, too, as Plato records in The Republic, taught that the rule of the soul and the rule of the city are alike, so that there are as many types of cities as there are types of men.
And later St. Augustine, after some 800 years in which Rome had risen to glory and God became a man, wrote that citizenship in history’s two cities is found in that which we have learned to love. The formation of souls is the formation of cities—in no sense then can education be said not to be political.
The growing classical education movement must, therefore, either recognize its place in the agon of earthly and heavenly cities or lie to itself, and so wither and die. Like the United States of America, this distinctly American movement is a modern act of construction on ancient foundations of tradition. It sets out to imitate, and so to recreate, the formation of the great men who made the West, made Christendom, and made America.
This humanist education was itself an act of initiation by way of imitation, for though it did study the book of nature, its main subject was ever the true, the good, and the beautiful in the words and deeds of noble men. By way of language and canon, its object was to teach students to love the right, and to abhor the wrong, within a civilizational account of what it means to be a free citizen and virtuous person. Thus they would be prepared to apply their own well-ordered souls to rule or membership within their political order.
To do this, at its heart the classical education movement in America must love its tradition, which is Western civilization as we in the United States have inherited it, and must inculcate this love in the hearts of students, too. The task has always been, whether for Hezekiah in ancient Jerusalem, Plato in Athens, Augustine in Hippo, or John Adams in Boston, to receive that which has been given, to hold and study it in humility, and to transmit it to posterity.
If those who continue this work today do not stand guard against the spirit of the age, which having set itself in ungrateful judgment over its teachers would add and subtract, raise up and tear down, proud as the morning star, then this transmission will be broken, and their students left defenseless.
Micah Meadowcroft, Research Director, Center for Renewing America
In 1786, Benjamin Rush, a physician who signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the new American Republic required an education tailored to its form of government that would succeed in producing virtuous and religious citizens who could maintain that republic. Declaring that “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice … in favour of our country,” Rush looked to the policy of the ancient Lacedaemonians (Spartans) as an example. That insular and formidable society, nestled in the Pamisos Valley in Messenia on the Peloponnesus, took special precaution to educate their children in patriotic and martial valor without corrupting influences from abroad.
Like the Spartan idea of the “beautiful and good man”—the gentleman—devoted to his city and willing to die in battle for her, Rush envisioned American education as “nurseries of wise and good men” that would engender among American citizens deep ties of affection, obligation, and mutual benevolence.
Today, however, classical education in America, with its emphasis upon Great Books and universal truths, aims not at a patriotic education in love and devotion to one’s own, but a philosophic education of cosmopolitan humanoids who proclaim themselves “partisans of humanity.”
Our founding fathers understood well what a fool’s errand this is, for no political community had or ever could be composed of nothing but philosophers: “But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected, as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato.”
A patriotic classical education will not only necessarily be political but will stand a better chance of habituating beautiful souls that incarnate the virtues of courage, justice, and faith in God—virtues that cannot exist apart from a people and place to love and call one’s own.
Ben R. Crenshaw, Visiting Assistant Professor, Declaration of Independence Center at The University of Mississippi
Politics educates. If you manage to enchant yourself into believing otherwise, pausing to consider the seismic changes that have rearranged human values and beliefs throughout history should be enough to break the spell.
We consider slavery morally evil in principle, but it was not always so. Slavery was once commonplace and taken for granted. How did this happen? Politics educates.
Leaders wield power and influence in such a way that they can reshape society and even our understanding of human nature. Nowadays, our leaders do so despite being entirely devoid of rhetorical excellence. It would be unwise, then, to have no care concerning their formation. For our leaders will, in fact, be educated.
There are some who would domesticate classical education into an ostrich, obstructing its eyes with the sand of wise-appearing words: classical education is not political, or classical education is at risk of becoming political. It would not surprise me at all if these same warnings came from those who are vocally committed to cultivating the virtues proper to human nature, who in a moment of erudition quote Aristotle saying, “Man is by nature a political animal.” The contradiction is blatant.
Rather than being enchanted into becoming an ostrich, the classical education movement should consider its charge to form the virtues of leaders and citizens.
Jonathan Roberts, President, Ancient Language Institute
