Education Is Always Political (Round 2)
Further symposium Reflections
In our Opening Salvo and Symposium, we argued that “education is inherently political” in both a joint statement of the members of AGOGE, as well as in individual mini-essays on the topic.
We now present more contributions from signatories of the AGOGE Statement that followed.
The titles of contributors are for informational purposes only; contributors speak for themselves, and not their respective institutions.
The growing classical education movement is a response to systemic failure in America’s schools. While critics of American education often focus on poor academic performance or the collapse of discipline in schools, at its root the problem of education in America is the problem of nihilism. The unwillingness to teach the principles of our civilization reflects a loss of belief in our civilization or even a hatred of it.
This crisis of the West, bemoaned by conservatives since at least the 1950s, is on offer in schools near you. Many decent people flee the nattering nabobs of nihilism. The decent arrive at classical schools, trusting that such schools will, at least, do no harm. There is something solid in the classics. There are standards. There is discipline and Great Ideas.
This defense of classical education vision has been around for more than a century. The paleocon half-brother of Levin, Tolstoy’s hero in Anna Karenina, speaks of Russians who turn to “those classical education-pills” for producing “the salutary virtue of anti-nihilism,” but then, he wonders, with a twinkle in his eye, whether classical education has “that salutary virtue after all.” (See Anna Karenina Part 4, Chapter 10).
Does it? That depends on what classical education is anchored to. Nihilists and identity-politics peddlers are at classical education’s door—or have already come over the threshold and sat down in the family room. Others, apparently more respectable, see classical education as a Conversation or celebrate its contributions to literacy or college prep.
Nihilists in tweed coats are still nihilists. A classical education that answers the challenge of nihilism begins with conversation but is ultimately and unapologetically grounded in natural law and Christian revelation. It is grounded in answers and in the ranking of goods. Classical education-pills can cure, but only if they are robust.
Scott Yenor, Professor of Political Science, Boise State University
Education is always political and in two ways. First, education is political since all schools are subject to political authorities; second, education is participation in a discussion over the nature of the good life, and that discussion is politics in the truest sense.
Putting these concepts together, education is political insofar as the end toward which one is led (e + ducere) in the process is a conception of a good human being as understood by a political community. This conception might be a productive worker, a devoted communist, a devout Muslim, or merely a compliant consumer. In a larger sense, one never leaves this school, for it includes all of society: whenever you are subject to a polity’s laws, school is in session, and you are learning. Particular schools in a polity with their particular pedagogies and curricula are not exempt from this political hegemony.
Consider this paradox. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives an account of education for a happy life understood as an individual’s rational pursuit of human excellence. Nevertheless, in the final chapter, he admits that such a rational pursuit is impossible for most people unless they have been reared from a pre-rational age to be well-disposed to certain virtuous habits and—more importantly—to revere pre-eminent exemplars as embodiments of those virtues. Education is thus paradoxically both an individual and a collective project, both rational and non-rational.
In his Politics, Aristotle describes this paradox this way: the good man as such and the good citizen are the same kind of person only in the very best regime. In every imperfect regime (which is to say every actual regime), a tension will give rise to a debate over whether the general, prevailing ethic embedded in the laws is the best or the right ethic simply. In that debate, private schools are granted a degree of toleration to order their schools toward a particular ethic (e.g., religious, elite, or technical), but the nature and scope of that toleration depends on the will of a political authority. For schools that are owned by the public, that debate is answered definitively by the politically legitimate authority, i.e., the state government through governing boards.
I believe that what I have written here is not an opinion about how education should be; it is an observation about how education is, whether it is acknowledged or not. Educators and schools should see in this observation not a stifling limitation but a noble opportunity to participate in the most important conversation, viz., that over the nature of the good life as such.
Clifford Humphrey, Edmund Burke Foundation
To order the soul in a particular way is, inescapably, to order the “polis” in a corresponding fashion. The political order, after all, is the soul writ large, according to Socrates. Any education that seeks to establish reason’s government over the desires forms a political hierarchy of the wise over the vicious in the nation no less than in the soul.
This, at any rate, is the argument of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics; indeed, such thinking underlies every significant western educational or political treatise between ancient times and at least the latter half of the 19th century. It’s why Martin Luther’s “Letter to the Christian Nobility” takes for granted that service to the state is one of the primary ends of education, It’s why Benjamin Rush’s Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools orients every aspect of American education towards the new republican regime.
What this means in practical terms is that schools do not get to choose whether their education is “political” in the classical sense of the word. Understood in this light, pedagogy is policy. That is, every pedagogy assumes not only a particular view of the soul, but consequently of the polis or nation as well.
The only choice educators and schools have is between consciously and unconsciously chosen political ends. They can intentionally form students for a truly “good life” —grounded in logocentrism and a hierarchy of moral ends — in service to their nation, or they can unwittingly outsource this job to the latest progressive fashion-setters.
Any Christian school that is “classical” in a meaningful sense will draw on the wisdom of the western tradition and order souls that are able to govern both themselves, and therefore their fellow citizens, in accordance with the dictates of prudence and right reason, for the safety and happiness of all.
Nathan Gill, Fellow, Beza Institute
We ignore politics’ inescapable presence in life and education at our own peril. The word political, however, has been robbed of its meaning, now equivalent in connotation to “partisan” or “cynically ideological.” This narrow understanding of politics also proves a too frequent fact of education, but the word means much more.
Politics in its most capacious sense comprehends all arts and sciences, standing as the head under which everything else has leave to operate. Aristotle described politics as “architectonic,” the schematic beginnings, the fountainhead of the arts and sciences. In this basic sense, education is political by default. But even more than this, education is the conscious act of raising the next generation.
A regime with laws mandating education, like America, compounds the political nature of the enterprise. Education itself is political, but public education—both in the institutions erected for providing it and in the requirement to obtain education of a standard established by the government, administered by some approved source—is concerned specifically with the formation of the population of a particular regime. This cannot be anything other than political.
Of late, the US’s peculiarly political system of education summarizes its goals in “apolitical” nostrums like “universal literacy,” thereby exposing its decayed roots.
Public (and much of private) education in the United States does not seek to serve the public good of the nation; or, perhaps stated more accurately, public education in the United States implicitly redefines the public good. The populace is made in the image of its educators. If the educators lack a positive vision beyond the likes of a generic “literacy,” they will fail to even clear that low bar, to say nothing of what education ought to be doing.
Reacting to these problems—along with obvious, more cynically partisan attempts at propaganda—so prevalent in public schools, Americans seek alternatives. Charter, private, and home schools are on the rise. Many of them seek actively to distinguish themselves from their public counterparts, particularly in the “classical” school movement. In most cases these institutions do admirable work. However, they often reflexively, with no malice aforethought, default to the same vacuous aims as public schools.
Classical schools must acknowledge the political nature of education or suffer the same fate as the public schools. Only in this way can they articulate with sufficient clarity and power a positive vision for the ends of education, informed by a clear concept of what it means to be a citizen of the United States. Without these, no school is exempt from contemporary education’s inexorable hollowing out, usurpation, and decay.
Ted Richards, Visiting Assistant Professor, Declaration of Independence Center at the University of Mississippi
Education is inescapably political, and pairing it with the adjective classical adds an allegiance to the universal principles of the western tradition. Education always affirms an ought; we aspire for students to live lives of integrity, which suggests that living immoral lives is possible but not desirable. We want the next generation to value the principles that have made western civilization a place of flourishing: rule of law, constitutional order, a mostly free market, correspondence between promises and deeds, ordered liberty within community.
In raising up the next generation, classical education seeks to inspire students to look at the great tradition, perceive it with love, and curate it as they steward their intellectual inheritance. This kind of education is concerned with the greatest political questions: what is justice? What duty do we as human beings owe to one another? How ought we to live? Classical educators are heirs of Socrates provoking students and families into living the examined life.
Our moment is harmed by conflating of two key terms: political and partisan. The American experiment is a fundamentally political experiment. European settlers came to the New World seeking religious freedom, economic opportunity, and the ever elusive western frontier. Our country was founded out of the need for a “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” As Wilfred McClay notes, America imperfectly realizes her aspirations towards liberty, yet we hold those aspirations dear.
In the midst of that political experiment, the founding generation recognized the danger of partisanship. Washington warned that the new Republic should avoid political parties because, he argued, parties would seek their own interest rather than the common good.
Classical education is not partisan; it is neither a Republican nor a Democratic model of education. But it is a fundamentally human model of education, and as such it leads to conclusions that may align with a given party at one time or another. But the political questions, the methods of engaging those questions, and the sources we take students through, remain the same. We are engaged in forming people who are able to fulfill their potential to live well and do well. Our hope for a better future depends on shaping students who perceive the good, the true, and the beautiful and live in alignment with the universals.
Josh Herring, Professor of Classical Education, Thales College
