Classical education is hard.  I am not talking about the students’ reality–about rigor or high expectations or “too much homework”–but rather the reality that many of us now find ourselves in, after years of trying to teach or administrate within or cast the vision for this educational project we call classical education.  There are certainly days when I feel like all the cards are stacked against us–the three rivers of Productivity, Utility, and Competition overflowing their banks, fertilizing fields that have been planted with Ambition, Individualism, and Entitlement–all in service of the god of the harvest: Success.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it doesn’t help that our country was founded on the “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

David Hicks explores the problem in depth in Norms and Nobility.  This quote is rather long, but worth a careful reading and contemplation:

“Whereas virtue and piety extract many obligations from the individual, requiring a significant level of self-mastery and self-sacrifice, the political concept of rights implies a set of obligations owing to the individual.  Not only does the democratic-utilitarian education based on rights prevent the student from achieving self-awareness by blotting out two-thirds of his human identity, but it clouds the perception of his relation to others.  The student perceives his classmates and fellow citizens as his servants, owing him rights, rather than as his equals to whose rights and needs he owes virtuous and pious submission . . . It is in the performance of man’s duties to himself, to others, and to God that his rights are important to him.  Without a knowledge of these duties, his concept of rights will be selfish and extravagant, tending to enlarge his expectations, while limiting his sense of fulfillment . . . The democratic youth does not need his school to tell him what his rights are: they beckon him from every billboard, every television set, and every political soapbox in the land.  Nor is the school needed to advise him in securing his rights; indeed, this growing practice may signal the mutual breakdown of democracy and education.

“Nor will classical education be the natural choice of democracy.  The state and the marketplace, looking upon education as a means of ensuring a pliant and productive citizenry, will insist that the school offer a utilitarian education in keeping with their greedy desires; and the democratic youth, with his penchant for restless activity and easy gratification, will prefer self-aggrandizing ends to the self-transcending aims of classical education.  But once education surrenders to the will of the state, the marketplace, or the callow youth, democracy’s natural affinities will, in de Tocqueville’s phrase, ‘divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and the promotion of general well-being.’  An unruly, ungovernable citizen body, with each person set upon his own comfort and well-being, first at the expense of the state, and then of his neighbor, will unloose destructive forces that can only be held in check temporarily by a system of universal greed.  The transcendent aims of education and of democracy having been denied, the two lose their human value and vitality; man, exploiting liberty and learning to fill his belly rather than to find his salvation and to achieve his full human potential, inadvertently throws over his moral democracy for anarchy and tyranny.”

We might accuse Hicks of being a little dramatic or at least hyperbolic in his precipitous rush to “anarchy and tyranny.”  But for those who have paid any critical attention to the state of education in our country (or the state of our “democracy,” for that matter), Hicks is no doomsday curmudgeon; his elucidation of the current state of affairs resonates in our souls.

So, given this bleak outlook, how then shall we educate?  What’s the point?  Is there hope?  It is exactly this question that–in my mind–necessitates that education be a Christian project.  I am not necessarily advocating for more “Christian schools,” but rather exhorting Christians (and the Church) to reassume their responsibility and reinvest in the education of our youth.  And by “our” youth, I don’t mean just our own children.  In fact, “Christian education” will never really be “Christian” until Bob cares about Bill’s son’s education as much as he cares about the education of his own son.

But the implications of this way of thinking are radical and daunting.  In fact, if I’m honest, they make me very uncomfortable.  Because what we’re really talking about is a return to true community.  I’m probably least justified to talk about this–I like the fence around my yard, and I bought my own lawn mower so that I didn’t have to ask to borrow my neighbor’s anymore.  Why?  Because at core I am prideful, selfish, and I enjoy my “independence.”  If I am to truly examine my heart, I am afraid that probably–more often than not–I am “set upon [my] own comfort and well-being.”  The needs of the community are certainly not at the top of my list–it’s embarrassing, but true.

Wendell Berry further describes this problem, of which I am a part:

“Freedom defined strictly as individual freedom tends to see itself as an escape from the constraints of community life–constraints necessarily implied by consideration for the nature of a place; by consideration for the means and feelings of neighbors; by kindness to strangers; by respect for the privacy, dignity, propriety of individual lines; by affection for a place, its people, and its nonhuman creatures; and by the duty to teach the young.  Almost everybody now demands [this sort of freedom], as she or he has been taught to do by the schools, by the various forms of public entertainment, and by salespeople, advertisers, and other public representatives of the industrial economy.  People are instructed to free themselves of all restrictions, restraints, and scruples in order to fulfill themselves as individuals to the utmost extent that the law allows . . . But there is a paradox in all of this, and it is as cruel as it is obvious: as the emphasis on individual liberty has increased, the liberty and power of most individuals has declined.”

Perhaps it’s an oversimplification of the problem (and solution), but it seems as though we must first hope in the reestablishment of true Christian community if classical education stands a chance at thriving.  Only at the corner of Charity and Deference will we finally lay down the weapons of Competition and Individualism.  Only when we look around and acknowledge that we are all building the same Kingdom and working for the same King will the transcendent aims of education begin to take root and find life.  Only then we will begin to discover a freedom that is truly liberating.

I want to believe this reality is possible.  Lord, may your Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven.  Amen.