When Educators Must Be Partisans
Part of a Symposium on the Agoge “Opening Salvo“
When the section of Westminster Palace containing the House of Commons was destroyed in the Battle of Britain in May 1941, Winston Churchill insisted that it be rebuilt exactly as it was originally designed. He reasoned thus: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” The same may be said of both laws and forms of education.
The Paradox in Education
A revealing paradox arises at the end of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This paradox helps explain both why education is inherently political and why many people fail to understand it as such.
The paradox is this: the bulk of the Ethics is an account of education for a happy life understood as the rational pursuit of human excellence for an individual; nevertheless, the final chapter admits that such a rational pursuit is impossible for most people unless they have been reared in a community with good laws from a pre-rational age to be well-disposed to certain habits. Education is thus paradoxically both an individual, rational enterprise and a non-rational, communal endeavor.
At the heart of the paradox is the acknowledgment that an individual’s effort to form habits of virtue requires the psychological help that arises from living in a political community. Among the strongest motives that stir the human heart are the hope for honor and the fear of shame: we all want to become excellent human beings and be recognized as such by the people who matter to us.
The political debate over laws is a debate over the specific content or form of what a community understands as excellent. Whatever else education may be (e.g., job training), broadly understood, it is the process by which a political community inculcates submission to its authoritative opinions on that debate. The community’s authoritative opinions are best understood as nomoi—a combination of customs and laws, written and unwritten.
A political community has a necessary interest in inculcating its authoritative opinions—its nomoi—in its young in order to perpetuate itself. The Spartan agoge was renowned even in the ancient world as the most striking example of such a regime-aligned education (even the Athenian Xenophon sent his sons to undergo its foreign rigors). But this interest extends beyond the young; the political community continues to educate citizens throughout their lives through the enforcement of laws (see Plato’s Crito).
The paradox in education is thus an inherently political phenomenon, a puzzle worked out by and worked out on a political community.
The Dilemma in Education
As the charges brought against Socrates at his trial remind us, any form of education that runs contrary to that of the regime poses an existential threat to that regime. Thus, a dilemma within the paradox is that all education points to some conception of human excellence that is either in accord with or at odds with that of the regime.
In his Politics, Aristotle describes this dilemma 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 prevailing ethic embedded in the laws is the best or the right ethic simply. This tension reverberates within the human breast of every thoughtful citizen of a particular regime and—one hopes—finds a resolving resonance within a particular paideia, or school.
For schools that are owned and run by the public, that debate is answered definitively by the politically legitimate authority, i.e., the state government through governing boards. Private schools are granted a degree of toleration to order their schools according to a particular ethos (e.g., religious, elite, or technical), but the nature and scope of that toleration still depends ultimately on the will of a political authority. Consider how students at Roman Catholic schools are taught—ideally—to be both devout Roman Catholics as well as American citizens as a way of resolving as much as possible the tension arising from the good-man/good-citizen dilemma.
The paradox in education is thus embedded within a dilemma that citizens in a political community must accept and work within.
The Riddle of Politics in Education
This paradox wrapped in a dilemma is easily misunderstood—becoming a sort of riddle—when we confuse political in this sense with Party politics. Some people today are so eager to deny that their particular school, pedagogy, assessment, Great Books program, or educational organization is intentionally aligned with a given political Party that they confuse themselves about the fundamental political element of the nature of education.
This confusion is the origin of the naive comment that classical education merely teaches students how to think and not what to think. Recollect the pernicious folly of young Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds when he learns at Socrates’ school merely how to think for himself: he rejects everything his parents had taught him, concluding that nothing is right by nature and that thus all things are permitted, including beating his own parents. Such an education corrupts the souls of students and the peace of the political community.
Consider this illustration: most people would concede that proper education includes instilling good manners in students. For example, insisting on “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” in classical schools perhaps and having anti-bullying and civility policies in public schools. Further, most people would probably assume that manners are not political but are above politics, part of just learning to be a decent human being. Note, though, that the word polite shares the same etymological root as politics (same with the Latin-based words civil and civics). It turns out that the particular conception of what a “decent human being” means in this place, by these people, in this time is a quintessential political question.
The riddle of politics in education can only be answered by realizing that the entire enterprise of a school is concerned with forming students into a politically formed conception of a good human being and citizen. As John Adams noted in a letter to his son, John Quincy: “all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.”
Putting the Puzzle Together
Before I conclude, I will make what may seem a controversial point—at least to the flurry of classical educators who insist that classical education should not be understood as political or especially “right wing”—and that point is that educators should be partisans.
I do not mean to equate partisan with either of our dominant political Parties necessarily. However, insofar as one Party assumes the citizen perspective of the nation and its culture as an inheritance to be embraced, and the other Party assumes the perspective of the critic, condemning the nation’s heritage except for those few critical voices from its past, classical educators should not feel a duty to be neutral.
Here I draw on a distinction by Charles Kessler in his Crisis of the Two Constitutions, that between “normal politics” and “regime politics.” As Kessler notes,
Normal politics takes place within an accepted political and constitutional order, and concerns means, not ends. That is, the purposes and limits of politics are agreed; the debate is over how to achieve those purposes while observing those limits. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for the sake of what ends or principles. It unsettles any existing political order, as well as its limits. It raises anew the basic questions of who counts as a citizen, what are the goals of the political community, and what do we honor or revere together as a people.[1. Charles R. Kessler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions, Encounter Books, NY, 2021: xii]
Our times are those of “regime politics,” and thus educators today cannot help but be partisans. Will they use the term illegal alien or the term undocumented immigrant? Will they teach that our ancestral immigrants to this country from England and Europe were on the whole courageous settler-colonists or vicious oppressor-colonizers? Will they describe transgender surgery as mutilation or gender-affirming care? If they decline to comment and let their students decide for themselves, they are worse than useless for neglecting their duty to educate. These debates are inescapable today, and being partisan is also inescapable.
Accordingly, during normal politics, educators do not appear as partisans but as mere citizens. During regime politics, though, the only options are partisan. Educators can teach for the original constitutional order with its given ends, or they can join the revolutionaries who want to “raise anew the basic questions” and give students different answers to those questions as change-makers. Traditionally—from the times of the French Revolution—these two positions are designated “right wing” and “left wing.”
I assert that classical education, by its conservative and positive postures toward the American past in our “regime politics” time, is in fact right wing today. That certain men of the Left have relied on classical authors in the past is not a refutation against the basic point that—as with the dispute over the baby brought before Solomon—there is no real compromise between those who would carve up our national patrimony and those who would embrace it whole.
Or we might rely on the metaphor of transgenderism: classical educators should be able to recognize that what the revolutionaries want to accomplish through schools is mutilation of American heritage, though they insist on thinking of it as something like cultural revolutionary-affirming care. Either way, there is no compromising here.
The early adopters of classical education—as opposed to those invested in standard, private, college preparatory schools—intended for their graduates to be educated into poor fits for the culture cultivated by our current regime: those graduates were meant to be rocks in the gears, not new cogs in the machine. As classical education becomes mainstream, though, it is to be expected that some in the movement will want to ride its success into respectability among the cultural elites. Such is only possible, however, through compromise, by convincing those elites that classical education poses no real threat at all to the prevailing culture it was created specifically in opposition to.
Conclusion
Education is always political, and in two ways. First, education is political because all schools are subject to political authorities: they are either public and given a mandated curriculum or private and granted circumscribed toleration to provide an alternative curriculum. Second, education is political because any program of education is de facto participation in a discussion over the nature of the good life and that discussion is politics in the truest sense: the why for education is always embedded in the pedagogy, and that answer supplies the why for individual life as well as for society as a whole.
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 particular political community. This conception might be that of a productive worker, a devoted communist, a devout Christian, or merely a compliant consumer. In a larger sense, one never truly graduates from a political paideia, for its boundaries encompass all of society. Whenever you are subject to a polity’s laws, school is in session, and you are learning.
The vital implication of these points is this: educators should be more aware that they are engaged in a quintessentially political activity, and they should self-consciously teach in accordance with that acknowledgement as patriotic partisans of their country’s heritage and the specific mission of their school. In fact, they have a duty to do so.