American Education: What It Was and Can Be Again

Replanting Heirloom Seeds

This essay is a form of a presentation I prepared for the Great Hearts Symposium on Feb. 25, 2026. It reads like a speech…I will be updating this essay (with footnotes and additional content) in the weeks to come, so some of you might want to revisit it. In a week or so, it will also be posted at the Substack hosted by Great Hearts called On Classical Education.

The wealth of past experience is like wealth hidden in a mine—of service only to him who digs it out, and then only insofar as he know or learns how to use it.

—W. Kane, An Essay Toward Education

What Is That We Are Seeking to Renew?
I am going to speak to you about the history of classical education—challenging to do because history contains everything up to this moment. The founders like Jefferson and Franklin who helped craft our Declaration were inheritors of history and a tradition like we are. We have come to speak about our work as the renewal of classical education, and classical education is a tradition. It is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, so we ought to try and define it. Like Augustine said about time—I think I know what it is until I am asked to define it.

If we are in the midst of a renewal of classical education, what is it that we are trying to renew? This is a question we are asked every day by those who learn of our schools; and if we are honest, it is a question we keep asking ourselves, trying to answer it better than we did yesterday—especially when we realize we don’t really know what we are doing: trying to give to our students what we haven’t received ourselves.

Asking What is classical education? is like asking What is democracy or monarchy? What is medicine or health? What is religion, Christianity, politics? It is big, long, deep, and broad—because it is the formation of a human being. We might as well ask for a pithy definition for how to raise a family. It can’t be that hard, right? Do you think there is a satisfactory one-sentence answer? Do you think there is a satisfactory lecture that will fully answer the question—like this one? Is there a sufficient conference? Is there a sufficient book (well yes, The Liberal Arts Tradition, published by Classical Academic Press).

You might–at first–think it can’t be that hard. After all, you were educated and you turned out okay. But then why can’t you even name the liberal arts? And if you can name them, why can’t you define them? How is geometry different from astronomy? Why is music considered mathematics? And why is it that you don’t know how they came about and for what reason, and don’t know why they are called liberal or why they are called arts? And why is it that you say you love literature but cannot recite a single poem? Or why is it that you teach science but don’t know when it was that scientists weren’t called scientists at all but philosophers—natural philosophers? Why did Newton call himself a natural philosopher and not a scientist? And why is it that you know that philosophy means the love of wisdom, but you cannot easily define wisdom, or distinguish it from prudence? And why is it that you pride yourself in speaking well but don’t know the difference between a preposition and a predicate, or a figure and a trope—and can’t name the rhetorical figure I am using right now? And why aren’t you curious about the language behind your language—your grandmother tongues of Greek and Latin? And why do you confess to others that you are not a math person, when clearly if you are a human, you reason with number and delight in number—which is why you love music, the incarnation of math—but why didn’t you know that? You say you love Shakespeare—or do you pretend to because you never really got Shakespeare?

I could go on berating our ignorance—an ignorance I share. In many cases we don’t know what we don’t know, and yet we presume to be teachers.

If you think you have been well-educated—even if you have been—something is off. Something is off morally. You should have long ago encountered one of the first paradoxes of learning: the more you learn the more you become cognizant of your ignorance. As the circumference of your learning grows, the boundary of your ignorance expands accordingly. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Socrates articulated this 2500 years ago; Solomon put it this way: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—but even Solomon (some say the wisest who ever lived) regarded himself as always a beginner, and if you doubt that, read Ecclesiastes.

The educated person does exist, but he or she is always someone besides yourself. Interview that educated person—he will tell you that he is still a beginner. If you think him wise—and he really is wise—he will contradict you and tell you he is not. This is a primal paradox of education. Our greatest teachers—whom we hold up—regard themselves as perpetual students. How about you?

If we are to successfully restore classical education, we will have to be so wise as to think ourselves fools. At the very least we must regard ourselves as perpetual students, and shudder to be called an educator of the young. Socrates preferred the terms gadfly and midwife.

Socrates said his wisdom was his knowledge that he had not any. And yet for all this paradox contains, we confess that we seek to cultivate wisdom in our students and that this is the chief aim of classical education. And so the paradox doubles: we who cannot think ourselves wise must be models of wisdom to our students. This is reality. It is the way of human growth and education; it is the model of Socrates, the model of Solomon, the model of Christ. The humble must be our teachers, for the humble have seen more greatness than we—such greatness that they must always regard themselves as small.

If you encounter a classical teacher who boasts or insinuates that he is well-educated and wise, you should find another, for he is not truly a teacher in the classical tradition. He has not truly been in the grand museum that would have made him small; or perhaps he has turned the museum into an emporium for picking up snacks—like a quick run to the convenience store. He thinks he is present to bless, when he is not blessed himself. Of the many virtues he may have, he lacks the core virtue that is always a sign of deep learning: humility.

It is likely for these reasons that the epistle of James warns, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” And we all remember the bit about millstones thrown around the necks of those who mislead the young. Anyone who would stand in front of a class of young students and teach should do so as Socrates, Solomon, or Christ.

Anything Good Can Be Corrupted
Anything good can be corrupted–including classical education. Anything corrupt retains something good–including progressive education. Somewhere in the Kristin Lavransdaughter trilogy we read, “All fires die out.”

Things don’t get better on their own or with the mere passing of time. When I leave my backyard hose alone, over time I find it a tangled knot. I don’t find that Tuesday is better than Monday because it came after Monday. Sometimes it’s worse. Herein lies the tension between tenets of entropy and evolution. If evolution is happening by natural selection, it is a process so slow we cannot observe it, making it out of bounds for most experimental science. Entropy we observe every weekend.

The early Darwinists (like Herbert Spencer) thought that if biological evolution occurred, then certainly there must be a social and historical evolution. Do human affairs, generally, get better and better as time goes by? From at least the time of Herodotus, humans have engaged in investigations (which is roughly what is meant by the Greek word historia) about human behavior in society and individually. What makes for a good life? What makes for a good society? Can a human being grow in virtue? Is it inevitable that he will? Can a human being grow in virtue and then fall prey to vice? If so, how can this happen? Is your life evolving to higher and higher moral forms?

It is in Herodotus (and quoted by Aristotle) that we read that a man’s life cannot be regarded as happy until he has died. This we learn from an exchange between Solon (Athenian lawgiver) and Croesus (king of Lydia). Solon tells Croesus that the happiest man he knew was Tellus of Athens:

• He lived in a prosperous city.

• He had fine and noble sons.

• He saw grandchildren born.'

• He died bravely in battle defending Athens.

• His city honored him publicly after his death.

In other words, Tellus had a good life and a noble death.

Why must we wait until a man’s death to assess his happiness?

• Human life is uncertain.

• Fortune (tyche) is unstable and changeable.

• Many who are rich and powerful end in ruin.

• Therefore, one must not call a man happy until his life is complete.

Are you happy? Good—but let’s see how it plays out and how you die.

Another startling principle from the classical tradition is that the ultimate aim of education aims at just this same thing: not just living well, but dying well; not just this life but the next life. Apparently the majority of the American population still believes in a life beyond death. So it must be true of most of us in this room. If life does transcend death, then should not education have that life in view too? But who, anywhere, speaks about education in these terms any more? Education for a good death? Education for the next life?

We can trace this back at least to Basil of Caesarea who said this in his short book addressed to young Greek scholars:

We, my children, in no wise conceive this human life of ours to be an object of value in any respect, nor do we consider anything good at all which makes its contribution to this life of ours only. Our hopes lead us forward to a more distant time, and everything we do is by way of preparation for the other life.

This is echoed by W. Kane writing in the 1940s in An Essay Toward Education:

All its significance comes from that which it aims, and all its details are measured by the definitive test of furthering an eternal achievement. (p.6)

We note something practical in this principle of education with death in view—and even the next life: this life is fleeting and we will all die, whether we believe in the next life or not. As Franz Kafka said somewhere: The meaning of life is that it stops. We read similar things in Herodotus, and we certainly see it in the dialogue Phaedo when Socrates happily drinks the hemlock, and we encounter it again in Ecclesiastes.

The reality of death (memento mori) prompts us to ask good questions about what constitutes a meaningful life, and bears directly upon education. How shall we live in our few short years under the sun? How shall we treat our neighbors if we regard them as fleeting—and even more if we regard them as immortal souls?

Solon was right that a man’s life could deteriorate and decay over time—even if he started well and rose high. Anyone who rises can fall, as we all know not just from books but from personal observation. The passage of time does not make for progress, by definition—not for persons and not for periods.

Periods of time, nations, empires, may start well, rise, and also fall. Tomorrow does not guarantee a better day, even though it is just a day away. Where is Babylon today? Where is Egypt of the Pharaohs? Where is the empire of Alexander, the empire of Rome? Where is Imperial Japan or the Third Reich?

The late and great historian Jacques Barzun (who died in 2012 at the age of 104) masterfully reminds us of these realities in his book Dawn to Decadence. He says he is no prophet, but he thinks we are declining as a civilization and will continue to, unless there is some kind of unexpected renewal. He is not without hope. In one place he says this about scholarship and learning:

The great idea of a university or of scholarship will not die; it will hibernate, and on reawakening will suggest to its renovators the plain duties they should take on.

We might say that classical education since 1890 has been hibernating, or sleeping underground during the winter of the last 100 years or so. It is now waking up. If we extend the analogy, we in the classical education renewal are waking up and walking, but still rubbing the sleep from our eyes. We need a good cup of coffee.

If we are like animals or daffodils waking up, it also means that we are part of a tradition that is reemerging and resuming. We are like homeowners who discover that the previous owners of our house planted seeds in the soil that we knew nothing of until the flowers appeared. We receive the blessing, beauty, and benefit on account of the labor and service of those who preceded us.

In the story I am telling, we witness the passing down of a tradition of heirloom seeds that blessed Americans with many splendid flowers. Great gardens of learning were created—though never complete, never perfect. Educational gardens of various kinds were created: from vital homeschooling to town grammar schools to small colleges to one-room schoolhouses on the prairie. Much of that good remains, much has passed, anything can be recovered. But before we consider the American story of classical education, we have to note the seed bearers who came before us.

The BackStory: Educational Transmission
Humans naturally want to pass on whatever they have received that they think is good to their children. I will risk stating that as a cosmic principle. If you have been blessed with something truly good—and then you have children (which is also something truly good)—then you want to hand it down. You want your son or daughter to know this blessing, this good thing—whatever it is that has helped you or delighted you—you try to hand it down.

This cosmic principle of handing down good things we might also call tradition. Tradition comes from the Latin trado, tradere, which means to hand over, or hand down, and sometimes even to surrender. We hand down small things and big things: a wool overcoat, a set of tools, a coin collection. Of course some hand-me-downs we might wanly receive, like a set of dishes from grandma that are not your style anymore. But family treasures, such as they are, are usually passed down. The same is true of practices—like the way we celebrate birthdays, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. If you came to our house, you would find that most presents are distributed on Christmas Eve, and my unfortunate dad—born on Christmas Eve—seldom receives truly twice the presents he deserved.

Another cosmic principle to which I think we can agree is this: our first teachers are our parents. In fact, our first and most important school is the home. It is so important that historians of education note that the school follows the home rather than the home the school. W. Kane writes:

The Romans built their state upon the family unit…the Roman state did not begin to decay until the family decayed… It must be repeated that schools do not lead social changes but follow them. The school of life always dominates the school of formula.

Language Lessons
Parents hand down not only coats and recipes but those most essential lessons that every human being requires to commence an education. By this I mean lessons in language—in our case the English tongue.

To those who are inclined to deny the importance of tradition, they must find themselves in the awkward position of debunking tradition using words and a capacity for words that were passed down to them carefully and repeatedly—first with pointed finger, and then with incessant and continuing verbal instruction. If you are a parent, you naturally, with delight, and without prompting begin teaching your daughter words, words, words. And what a delight when she speaks them back to you in her own novel combinations and intonations.

I was talking to my grandson (aged 5) Owen a few months ago and somehow we got to talking about how there are things that are real that you cannot see, or hear, or touch. I mentioned the wind, and then love, and possibly God. I said to him, “Just because you can see it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” A week later, in our yard he insisted he had gathered a heap of weapons under a tree. I said to him, “I don’t see any weapons,” to which he immediately responded, “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”

Language is acquired word-by-word as a tradition. Someone taught us our tongue and without this initial education there can be no (or at least very little) education. You have heard the maxim that students learn to read so they can read to learn. But there is a preceding maxim: a child must speak and understand words if anything is to follow; a child requires a tongue even before a book. A child’s mother is the primal teacher—and let us thank our mothers now for the words we know so well that it appears we were born with them.

Recognizing that language is a tradition, acquired by tradition, is a first principle that establishes a key element of education. Education is handed down by someone to someone else. Looked at from on high, “education is the transmission of the soul of society from one generation to another” (as Chesterton said). Looked at close up it is “telling the truth to the last baby born” (as Chesterton also said). Note that the “soul of society” is something that we must regard as good, even as we regard truth-telling as good, whether to a baby or an adult.

Now this leads us to another cosmic principle: a society—if it is a society—always wants to perpetuate itself. You will not find in the history books examples of societies or civilizations that held a vote and decided to annihilate themselves. This doesn’t mean that nations don’t do things (often foolish things) that result in their destruction—they regularly do—but they don’t intend their own destruction. This is a corollary to another universal principle: humans want to be happy. Try willing your own unhappiness. Aquinas says it is not really possible.

The Athenians wanted to extend their ideals to the next generation, as did the Persians. So what are our ideals? The ideals of a nation almost always end up incarnated in a curriculum. The Greek paideia was developed over centuries as a means of passing down Greek culture—the Greek way of thinking, living, and dying (and yes they studied how to die). We can trace the Greek curriculum, note its beginnings, witness its consolidation, observe its transmission. It is recognizable today as incorporated in our liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy.

The Romans imported the Greek paideia as their educatio, giving it particular Roman twists, blending the speculative idealism of the Greeks with their own virtues of austerity, frugality, severity, and order. And of course the Romans not only gave us the word education—which to them meant the rearing and raising up of a child into full-functioning adulthood—they gave us the word tradition. Chesterton calls it the democracy of the dead, for even they should have a vote at our meetings.

The Romans conquered the Greeks but their captives then captured them culturally (Horace). The Romans witnessed the cultural treasures of the Greeks and decided to pass them on to themselves, not with self-congratulatory victory cries, but with piety and respect for what they found. There is a reason Roman architecture looks like Greek architecture and a reason why, after reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Roman Virgil wrote the Aeneid. There would be no Aeneid without the Odyssey, and no Divine Comedy without them both. Often the Roman empire is called the Greco-Roman empire for this reason.

Most of us know that Christianity emerged in this Greco-Roman empire and that by 313 AD had grown so large that the emperor Constantine (who was on his way to becoming a Christian himself) signed the Edict of Milan that allowed Christians to worship freely. The new church was comprised of all kinds of ethnicities, but they were largely Roman subjects, and they generally spoke Greek in the east and Latin in the west. Just as the Romans had incorporated the culture of the Greeks, so did the Church incorporate and subsume the language, culture, and curriculum of the Greeks and the Romans as well as Jewish culture.

The Church received all that it thought good from the Greco-Roman tradition and placed it squarely into the church. It turned basilicas and temples into churches, replaced the worship of goddesses with the veneration of Mary, turned wells into baptismal fonts, and organized bishoprics according to Roman political jurisdictions—so that where there formally was a Roman governor there was now a bishop. The language of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca became the language of the Church and its liturgy, preaching, and theological writings. The Church too was, in an important sense, Greco-Roman. We might say it was traditional: it sought to incorporate all that it found good from its Greco, Roman, and Jewish inheritance. In it, the dead spoke.

That the Church spread throughout Europe such that we can safely call the early and late middle ages Christendom ought not to be controversial—the cathedrals and churches that still dot Europe are evidence of this. Where the Christians went, they brought their ideals with them, and this meant their educational ideals, their curriculum—their own adapted version of the Greek paideia and Roman educatio or humanitas. Yes, one of the most common Roman words for education was humanitas.

The Catholic lands of Europe (prior to the Reformation) adopted ways of teaching and learning that continued a course of studies recognizably still Greek and Roman though transformed by biblical teaching: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Theology became the governing discipline or “queen.” The church widened the scope of who could access this education, though it was not easily available and affordable to all—though generally improving over time.

This education took root throughout Europe, and certainly in England. In fact, the light of learning burned bright in England at a difficult time on the European continent (around 800 AD) when learning was diminishing for various reasons. You may have heard of the learned and devoted Alcuin of York who was recruited by Charlemagne to help revise learning in Europe.

The curriculum of the liberal arts and literature, philosophy, and now theology, prospered in England. Englishmen after even the Reformation did not refer to their curriculum and pedagogy as “classical education”—that phrase is relatively modern and only introduced in the late 1800s when progressive education emerged. Their education was “liberal” and sometimes called “learned.” It was the education for freedom and for free people: liberal in the sense of liberating, facilitating, and capacitating one for thought, service, and work in any profession.

Coming to America
We all know that the English were the first, and in the largest numbers, to settle America. Recalling our cosmic principle that any parent will seek to transmit the good he has received to his children, it naturally follows that the English men and women brought not only their clothes, pots, pans, and tools with them—but also their books and their tradition of teaching and learning.

Put another way, they brought who they had become—their full and developed humanity—with them to the shores of New England. While they had come to a new world, they brought old traditions that would have to be transplanted in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. We might say they brought seeds to be planted in new soil.

The Puritans of New England inherited the “grammar school” from England. Grammar school meant more than learning grammar—it meant learning grammar so that one could then read and study what grammar made possible: literature, literature of all types. Some etymology is fun: gramma is the Greek word for letter. We speak of “learning your letters,” and we know that letters form words, and words form sentences, and sentences combine to form literature of all kinds.

“Literature” literally means that which is composed of letters. Its use for a long time referred to learning derived from books of all kinds—poetry, philosophy, theology, as well as books on mathematics and science.

When the Puritans created grammar schools they intended that their children would study literature—all kinds of literature, though naturally selected according to their level and ability. Sometimes they called grammar schools “Latin schools” because students also learned their “letters” in that language so that they could eventually read Latin literature. They learned Latin and English side-by-side as was done in England in the 1600s. The simultaneous study of Latin and English illuminates both languages: one’s English improves on account of the Latin and one’s Latin is facilitated by the English tongue.

The Puritans (under John Winthrop) landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Within five years they started the Boston Latin School. By 1636, they founded Harvard College to train ministers for the colony. By 1642, a law was passed requiring heads of households to educate children; by 1647, every town of fifty households was required to hire a teacher so children could read and write, and towns of one hundred households were required to found and operate a grammar school.

Harvard started as a small college with fewer than ten students and gradually grew over two centuries, slowly, to a range of 200–300 students.

By about 1770 there were nine colleges that enrolled about 1500 students—in all of America—meaning less than 1% of Americans were enrolled in college.

One can get a good education without going to college—have you noticed that? That was the case in early America. The clearest and most interesting survey of this fact is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). He marvels at the literacy and learnedness among the general population—far surpassing what he had seen in France. He notes that America had fewer deeply-educated intellectuals—but a kind of popular intellect that put America in a class of its own. As we might suspect, however, he was not commenting on the African American population that was enslaved.

The Adams Family Across Four Generations

For this essay (and my presentation) I read these three books, two biographies, and one autobiography (The Education of Henry Adams)

There may be no American family through whom we can watch the transmission—and gradual transmutation—of classical education more clearly than the Adams family. Across four generations—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and Henry Adams—we see not merely a lineage of statesmen, but a lineage of schooling. And through their schooling, we glimpse the larger story of American education.

John Adams (1735–1826), our 2nd president and a signer of the Declaration, was formed in the full confidence of the classical tradition. At Harvard he studied Latin and Greek, Cicero and Virgil, rhetoric, logic, moral philosophy. The ancients were not antiquarian curiosities; they were living tutors. Rome to him was not nostalgia; it was instruction. For Adams, classical education formed men capable of liberty. “Liberty,” he wrote, “cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” Knowledge was not ornamental; it was the safeguard of self-government.

The classical curriculum did not merely inform him; it shaped his moral imagination. Cicero trained prudence. Tacitus warned against tyranny. Scripture formed conscience. Education, for John Adams, was about forming citizens capable of sustaining a republic—civic, moral, and theological all at once. And he transmitted this inheritance to his son with urgency.

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), a senator and our 5th president, may have been the most intensely educated child in early America. Tutored abroad while accompanying his father, fluent in French as a boy, steeped in Latin and Greek, disciplined in history and moral philosophy, he kept a diary from childhood—the diary of a young Christian Stoic. Classical education, for him, was not merely preparation for office; it was preparation for judgment.

He once wrote, with sober self-examination, “My whole life has been a succession of disappointments.” That is not the language of ambition thwarted; it is the language of a man measuring himself against inherited standards of virtue. His classical education (liberal education) had taught him to live under the gaze of history—and of God. In John Quincy Adams, the classical tradition reaches an American zenith: cosmopolitan, disciplined, morally serious, confident that the past still instructs the present.

By the time we arrive at Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), the inheritance remains, but something has begun to thin. He too was educated at Harvard, he too traveled abroad with his father, and he later became ambassador to England. He too read the classics. He preserved family papers, wrote history, and served the republic–notably as ambassador to England during the civil war years. But the intellectual climate was shifting: romanticism stirred, industrialization accelerated, professional specialization began to fragment the older moral unity. The classical curriculum was still there, but it no longer stood uncontested at the center of cultural life.

And then comes Henry Adams (1838–1918), and with him the fracture becomes visible. Henry Adams too was educated at Harvard and travelled abroad extensively with his father, but he felt himself born too late for the world that formed his forefathers. “He was born in the eighteenth century,” he wrote of himself, “and he had to live in the twentieth.” The education that had shaped his great-grandfather for republican liberty no longer seemed adequate for railroads, the steamship, electricity, industrial capitalism, and the scientific materialism inspired by Darwin.

In The Education of Henry Adams, he describes himself as a “manikin” upon whom the garments of education were draped in order to see whether they fit. “The object of study,” he writes, “is the garment, not the figure.” The figure—the human person—becomes almost incidental. Education is no longer primarily about forming the soul; it is about testing the clothing–and for Henry the educational garments of the 18th century no longer fit.

And then comes a telling line: “The young man himself… is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force.” The vocabulary has changed. John Adams spoke of virtue and liberty. Henry Adams speaks of energy and force. The anthropological center has shifted. The student is no longer primarily a moral agent to be formed, but a bundle of matter and energies to be managed.

Henry does not reject education; he questions its coherence. The classical inheritance had assumed a moral cosmos—an ordered universe in which Cicero and Scripture still spoke meaningfully into political life. But Henry stands before the electric Dynamo—the machine, the power plant, the mechanical symbol of modernity—and feels that the older curriculum cannot interpret it.

He famously contrasts the medieval Virgin—symbol of spiritual unity—with the modern Dynamo—symbol of impersonal force. The Virgin represented a world in which education ordered the soul toward transcendence. The Dynamo represents a world in which education must adapt to acceleration.

This is the hinge. In Henry Adams we witness not yet the full architecture of progressive education, but its psychological precondition. If the world is no longer stable, if energy rather than virtue is the operative category, if change rather than continuity defines the age, then education must prepare students for flux. It must be adaptive, practical, forward-looking. The curriculum must loosen. The authority of tradition must soften. The aim shifts from transmission to preparation for a rapidly-changing material and technological world.

And yet—here is the irony—Henry Adams’ very lament is classical in tone. His prose is measured. His moral seriousness is unmistakable. His disappointment assumes that education ought to make sense of the world. His crisis testifies to the greatness of what he inherited. One does not mourn what one has never loved.

Across these four generations, then, we see something profound:

• John Adams: classical education as the guardian of republican liberty.

• John Quincy Adams: classical education as disciplined moral vocation.

• Charles Francis Adams: classical education preserved amid modern currents.

• Henry Adams: classical education strained by modern fragmentation.

The transmission does not collapse overnight. It thins. It shifts. It begins to translate itself into new categories. And eventually, in Henry’s world, the confidence that education transmits a stable moral inheritance gives way to the question: how must education change to keep up with the double-time march of history?

The Adams family tells the story of America’s educational arc—from confident classical formation to anxious modern adaptation. And perhaps their story leaves us with a question of our own: if the garments no longer seem to fit, is the answer to abandon the form altogether? Or is it to recover the measure of the human being for whom they were first woven?

C.S. Lewis says that when we have lost our way in the woods the quickest way forward to return home and the first to make that turn about is the most progressive man.

W. Kane notes that the history of education is always the history of new beginnings. And Chesterton notes that every revolution is a restoration–we move forward truly and best only by inspiration from the past, for the past is not dead, it’s not even past.

And T.S. Eliot writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Where We Are Now: Our Own New Beginning
Henry Adams died in 1918, in the midst of the War to End All Wars, using massive machinery that he saw quickly invented and deployed in his lifetime, which took him from horse and buggy to the airplane. He saw the forces he studied and feared play out in ways that stunned the watching world. America had become a great power and England no longer looked to it as a younger cousin but as a needed, stronger ally. The British empire was shrinking; the American one was rising.

What kind of education was needed now? While Henry had ambivalently welcomed the new, progressive education (he did not see another viable choice), he was not sure the new model emerging was healthy or good—though perhaps it was inevitable. The irony of the education Henry received is a common one: he received the old education which equipped him superbly to eloquently reject it and to adapt and find his way in the world as a professor, writer, journalist, and author. It is not unheard of for great rhetoricians to use rhetoric to eloquently critique liberal education—we see it as far back as Tertullian and Jerome, and nearly all the famous progressive pioneers used their eloquent pens to deride the arts that made them.

Critique of Progressive Education
We must, I believe, lament the rise of progressive education, but we must understand it and note that the progressives got a few things right, and the classical educators of the time got several things wrong. Our critique must be sharp and fair, and I prefer it to be brief because there is nothing so boring these days as critiquing mass education. Everyone does that. I know you don’t like modern education for several reasons—but what are you for? This renewal will not be sustained by negative energy any more than a friendship can be sustained by two people mad at the same person.

The progressives, like Henry, were responding to unprecedented change, wave upon wave: Darwinian evolution suggesting natural forces rather than human will were responsible for human destiny and history; waves of technological change—the train, the steamship, the telegraph, electricity, the telephone, the factory, the automobile, the airplane—all suggesting humans could engineer and remake virtually everything—so why not education? Add to this massive immigration of millions, many of whom did not speak English, doubling and tripling the size of schools in short spans of time. What would you have done?

What They Got Right
What did the progressives get right? They saw that, in the midst of remarkable change, traditional institutions did have to adapt, and they were willing to try. They noted that traditionalists were slow to adapt and often calcified, even ossified—stodgy and stuffy. Why? Because anything good can be corrupted, and in many cases it had been.

In many cases the tradition remained vibrant and sought to make a cogent case for the classics, even in 1917 when Andrew West, professor of classics at Princeton, published The Value of the Classics. But generally the traditional educators were caught flat-footed and out-maneuvered, blinking their eyes as a new generation of educational scientists took over first Columbia Teachers College and then, in the space of three decades, much of the nation.

The theory of the progressives was flawed at the foundation, thinking that education could be transformed into a quantitative science when it cannot be, since it is an art, as raising and cultivating humans has to be. Surely education is informed by science—but education is the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and piety by means of the liberal arts and the great books in a community of academic friends. Be careful, the logician says, of the insane first premise—because the rest is logic. Education is not a science. If this confuses you, it is likely because generally we no longer can distinguish between an art, a science, a discipline, or a subject.

Progressive educators do a number of things right, and perhaps mainly because there are good people who love children in progressive schools, earnestly seeking to help them. Despite progressive theory, they do much good. But education is not a science (though blessed by the findings of science), and that assumption ensures ongoing tinkering with a machine that will never work. If you like the analogy of progressive education as the attempt to build a perpetual motion machine—you can thank Alfred J. Nock, who describes it that way in his book A Theory of Education in the United States (1931).

Since education is complex—the cultivation of a child—it is easy to reason wrongly about it. It is easy to generalize and say that a part characterizes the whole (as people are doing right now with AI) when it consists of many parts in a complex synergy. No: classical education is not merely the incorporation of Latin into the curriculum. No: progressive education is not nothing but child-selected curricula and project-based learning.

Much educational heresy is simply taking things out of their natural human balance. Thus we are forced to pit the child against the teacher and choose either child-centered or teacher-centered classrooms; we are told we must teach the child not the subject, as if it is not possible to teach a subject to a child. We are made to choose between hands-on learning and whole-class instruction, or between discovery learning and direct instruction. This is like insisting that you must choose between breakfast and lunch, or between Monday and Tuesday, because plainly you cannot have them both. This, you might recognize, is the bifurcation fallacy as applied to teaching.

In theological terms, a heresy is often a truth held out of balance, and it is always some genuine truth that gives plausibility to a heretical pedagogy. Thus the free school, in which the child chooses what to study and when, seems plausible because it is true that we should encourage children to explore and pursue their growing interests. Thus affirming virtually all student performance—everyone gets an A—seems plausible because affirmation is in fact encouraging to the child.

E. D. Hirsch establishes this well in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them:

Both formalism and naturalism are half-truths—the most pernicious kinds of errors because they appear so plausible. (p. 219)

Just as common is the straw man fallacy in which we trot forth the worst examples of progressive teaching or classical teaching we can find in order to discredit the whole. But I should stop. All this means is that we need to recover logic—the art of using reason well—as a liberal art. Certainly not some vague “critical thinking,” which means who knows what.

Pride Comes Before a Fall
Now, having studied and taught some logic, someone like me can find himself in trouble—and you too. I can start thinking more highly of myself than I ought (I know what bifurcation means!!). This is a more serious problem than slipping into a fallacy. As Lewis says somewhere, if we teach logic without love we just create more clever devils.

Just as our own education can tempt us and puff us up with pride and render us useless as teachers, so can the very success of the classical education renewal become our own undoing. Pride usually comes before a fall.

Classical education is now officially “a thing” on a national scale, and increasingly an international scale. Many more people than ever before have heard about “classical” education and are showing interest in it. There are about 1500 classical schools in the US and about 3000 classical homeschooling co-ops. Over 300 colleges now accept the Classical Learning Test. There is rapidly growing interest overseas in Africa, China, Europe, South America, and Australia.

We might be tempted to rejoice like the Israelites did at the end of Nehemiah—when they held a feast and festival after rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem after 52 days. That is a remarkable feat, and Nehemiah is a remarkable book that can instruct all of us. The walls of Jerusalem were built with permission and funding from King Artaxerxes of Persia. The Israelites returned from exile—and aren’t we returning from exile? ¹Perhaps that is a pattern worth contemplating, alongside reawakening from hibernation.

We should read history for encouragement and instruction. We should read about the rise and fall of Rome, and the Third Reich. We should read the Old and New Testament. But we should not become utopians—a name that literally means “no place,” and there is no place for utopianism. The word utopia is a pun invented by Thomas More: ou in Greek means “no” and topos means place—hence “no place.” Yet eu means “good,” and so it also could mean “good place.” Utopia is a “good place” that is “no place.”

Jacques Barzun says that schools can teach but not educate any more than one can learn a civilization in a short course at community college. Mark Twain gets at the same point—at a knife’s point—when he says, “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” This is because education is full formation: intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical. Schooling plays its part in education—meaningful but small, given a lifetime. We now expect schools to be medical clinics, nutrition centers, and counseling centers. There is no one place that can educate.

Some of us are drawn to a utopian outlook—the optimists in the room, of which I am one. Let me call on the history of Christianity: since Augustine and his magnum opus The City of God and the City of Man, Christians have believed that the wheat and tares (those in and out of the church) would grow up together in the same field of this world, intermingled. For Augustine, it meant Christians were to serve peaceably with those outside the church, seeking to be leaven in the bread (or salt of the earth) that benefits all; it meant Christians were to serve, love, and if necessary die, but always pray for the peace of the city. There will be no New Jerusalem on this earth until Christ returns—no earthly paradise, certainly no utopia.

This means that those of us who are Christians in this renewal are here to serve, not rule. It means we should collaborate, not dominate.

Christian Patriotism
It certainly means that we love the land in which we live—our country and our countrymen. It means we want the common good, or as Paul puts it in Romans 12, “as far as it depends on you, live in peace with all men,” and even bless those who persecute us. We Christians are instructed to ensure that “petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” You might call this a Christian patriotism, a phrase I much prefer to Christian nationalism.

But the history of Christian education means something else that should be acknowledged. We who are Christians are heirs of a rich archive of classical education. We don’t own it, because much of classical education is first of all human—before it is Jewish, or Christian, or secular. Training in the liberal arts entails training in how to use word and number, which is according to human nature and fitting for any human being. We Christians would say that the liberal arts—discovered and developed by the Greeks and Romans outside the church—are rooted in the doctrine of creation. If you are a creation of God, then the liberal arts are for you, Christian or not.

We say the same thing about anything true, good, or beautiful—a lovely triad describing cosmic reality, articulated first by Plato but corresponding to biblical teaching. Every human being naturally loves and desires the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; every human being should have the opportunity to seek it and study it with good teachers. Yes, we believe the Trinity is the Author of all that is true, good, and beautiful, something obviously Plato did not confess.

Is it any surprise that in the history of Christian education, Christians welcomed Christians and non-Christians into Christian schools—including the poor who could pay no tuition? This was true of many monastic schools that educated Europe for centuries, from about 500 to 1400 AD. After all, Christians are supposed to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, take in the stranger. Are they not to teach as well?

The Christian tradition of classical education is rich and varied, and many—though not all—of the great books in the classical curriculum come from writers who were Christians: Augustine, Alcuin, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Newton, Kepler. But there were other truth seekers like Socrates, Maimonides, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who were not Christians. The Great Tradition is significantly populated with Christian writers but not exclusively so. Christians and non-Christians can study this tradition together; faith and reason can be welcomed into a public as well as a private academy. Whatever we make of “separation of church and state,” there should be no separation of religion and academic study in a classical school.

This means that the classical tradition, though historically steeped in the Christian religion (and at various times in Jewish and even Muslim traditions), can welcome the seeker as well as the stranger into Christian classical schools. Increasingly this is what Christians are doing—though they are free to restrict admission to Christian families only. Practices can vary, and do, for good reasons.

It is worth noting that we don’t yet know our own history very well, since this tradition has been hibernating or laying dormant underground until warm weather came. There are not yet many of us who have sufficiently read the history of the kind of education we are seeking to restore. This is a necessary irony, a necessary part of the renewal. We had to start when we knew we were not qualified to do so. We have learned on the job; we have stayed one chapter ahead. But that was nearly a generation ago, and matters are gradually starting to change. But how many of you know even an outline of the history of this tradition or its recent renewal?

We reawakened about 45 years ago—scarcely the span of one generation. We can trace the beginning of the renewal to four schools that started independently from each other within three years. To my knowledge, the first was the Trivium School, a Catholic school in Lancaster, Massachusetts, founded in 1979. Cair Paravel Latin School founded in 1980 in Topeka, Kansas. The DNA of that school descended from Columbia University (from the 1940s) to the University of Kansas to Cair Paravel. Two more schools—the Logos School of Moscow, Idaho, and the Trinity School at Green Lawn, South Bend Indiana—started in 1981. The DNA of Trinity was transplanted to the Great Hearts academies, and the DNA of Logos has often been placed into many Protestant and Reformed classical schools that are part of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS).

In the mid-1990s, the Society for Classical Learning (SCL) started to serve Christian classical schools and has been growing robustly. Colleges have been renewing in parallel with the K–12 schools. The ecosystem now includes publishers, networks of schools, charter schools, Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Orthodox schools, a few Jewish schools, and homeschool co-ops—along with new efforts to help the vast majority of Americans who have never heard of classical education understand what it is and consider it for their families.

We are just now coming of age, able to order a bourbon. Now that we can drink, we will be tempted to drink too much. Our success, like a good old-fashioned, can go to our heads.

If we return to the daffodils as our analogy, we are now witnessing flowers blooming across a growing garden—a garden growing wild. Not only daffodils are breaking through the ground and blooming, but all manner of perennial flowers from different regions. No one is able to control or cultivate this spreading verdancy. Classical schools emerging in Texas have distinct species (along with a special focus on live music and barbecue); other varieties are blooming in California and here in Arizona (where apparently California has come), and in central Pennsylvania where I live—and even in Hawaii where a classical school studies Latin and Japanese. The flowers there are tropical.

This marks health. Yes, there is a need for preparing and training thousands of new teachers; yes, a need for good and better curricular resources; yes, a need for leadership training, funding, and excellent operations. But no single organization can curate this sprawling garden in this new Spring. No one “owns” this garden—if anyone owns it, it is humanity—for humanity made it, even if we Christians believe humans made it by the grace and benevolence of God.

Naturally as we co-labor, we will have to concentrate on our particular garden patch or plot. This means that at times we will compete for resources and find ourselves occasionally stepping on the boot of a fellow gardener. But competition need not be viewed as a negative win-loss affair. The Latin reminds us: competere means “to seek with.” Competition only becomes negative when there are two seeking some good for which there is only room for one. If we all seek to climb to the summit of Mt. Washington (in the summer please) we will find there is room for everyone at the top.

We at Classical Academic Press “compete” with several other classical curricula companies—and there are several good ones. I am glad to say that we are colleagues and friends seeking the same thing—and finding it.

The Roman and American Arena
People have come to America. Perhaps your people came to America. There is a peppy song in the musical West Side Story where Anita and her friends from Puerto Rico sing about how happy they are to be in America.

We want to be to America
It is OK in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America

America has been seeded with good seeds from Puerto Rico and from virtually every country on the planet. This is another reason why we are a garden growing wild, and truly e pluribus unum.

In the Roman Coliseum, there were gladiator fights, other games, and even martyrdoms. Often exotic animals from around the known world were brought into the arena (Latin for sand) to astonish Roman spectators. After the Christian era, when the games were ended (about 500 AD), beautiful and unknown flowers and fauna began to appear on the grounds of the arena—which became a kind of wild garden, an astonishment of an unexpected kind. Seeds traveled on the fur and in the stomachs of the many animals brought into the Coliseum, many of which were killed in simulated hunts. The seeds mixed with their blood and over years eventually germinated and sprouted in the Coliseum—a place of frivolous games, hunts, and martyrdoms—becoming a garden, something beautiful.

America is something of a vast arena. Heirloom seeds have come from the Great Tradition from many lands, over many years. So many seeds which have remained buried in the soil are coming to life. Let us be grateful for this gift—for we did nothing to make it ourselves or deserve it—we merely were born here or came here to find this inheritance preserved for us and handed down by those who came before us.

Rekindled Fire
Plutarch said that education is not the filling of a vessel but the kindling of a fire. That was said some 1800 years ago—a principle handed down to us—which describes human experience and so remains true today. All of us have a flame in our hearts that needs to grow. Every school is a blend of those flames, which creates its own indescribable incandescent beauty.

When this kind of incandescent school exists, like other beautiful things, you really can’t describe it well, can you? I recall learning this as a young headmaster: it was far more effective to show the school to prospective parents than to talk about it. Once I gave a tour to a young mom of a kindergartner or 1st grader, who after her tour of the school said to me, “I didn’t know that this is what I was looking for, but this is what I am looking for.” She was weeping. She saw children who loved their teacher, and who loved one another, who were at peace. She saw earnest attention and conversation; she saw happy chatter and shouts of glee on the playground. But as you know, these words fail to describe the beauty of a vibrant classical school that is truly good in the deepest moral sense of that word. What that mother saw was wonder and love and genuine friendship.

Let love for this present life and the life to come fix your aims, focus your work, and fire your hearts. If that happens in your school, your teachers will become a faculty of friends whom students admire and naturally emulate.

Preserve and tend this fire that has been rekindled for you. Let it grow in your school so that each child becomes a shining lamp that collectively illuminates your school like a candlelight vigil that attracts others by its beauty. Let that beauty draw others in, and then watch beauty do its eternal work of leading us all to goodness and truth.

1. This the analogy that Os Guinness prefers, and I think he is on to something.