Part of a Symposium on the Agoge Opening Salvo
Some months ago I made the case here at American Reformer that the classical education movement in this country needs to take schooling’s national and civic ends even more seriously than it has, placing them second—but firmly second—to the primacy of its Christian commitments.
Now that I’ve made the case for why, I want to give some practical guidance on how to embody these principles in the life and curriculum of a school or homeschool. Many readers wrote asking me for help imagining what a truly American classical education might look like. In this article I’ll attempt to give a rough picture, basing my suggestions on my own teaching, and the curricular reforms I’ve helped oversee.
Some Preliminary Principles
To begin, a few guiding principles. Of course, our goal must be to build curricula of “excellent” works that feed our students on “truth, goodness and beauty.” But as I wrote in my previous article, advice that stops there isn’t terribly helpful. When building a curriculum, we need practical criteria that help us choose between classic works that can all claim to be excellent.
Here, as in so many places, educators can benefit from keeping the ends of our schools in view: what kind of student is your school forming? Focusing on that simple fact will help clarify what specific works of excellence and beauty your students most need.
For those of us in classical, Christian schools (or homeschools) here in the United States, the answer to that question has several layers. First and foremost, we are forming students who are mature and deeply-rooted Christians, grown into “the stature of the fullness of Christ” and committed to serving “first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” Second, if we want students who can wholeheartedly live out their lives in the context of the specific regime God’s providence has placed them in, we must impart those affections, civic virtues and skills that will enable them to do so. That is, our students must be fully-formed and equipped Americans who can faithfully, but prudently, carry on their forbears’ way of life in this negative world. Third and finally, as citizens of a federal republic, they are heirs of, and participants in, a regional culture. Knowing and loving this local culture is not only an act of piety—that most fundamental of all educational virtues—but an essential part of their self-knowledge, as well as the preparation they need to serve their immediate neighbors most effectively.
Curating the Curriculum
Those last two points are particularly important, and are the ones I’ll be stressing. The national and regional make-up of our students has profound implications for the books we teach, the way we structure our curricula, and the rhythms and liturgies we build our school year around. They dictate that we immerse our students in the rich inheritance of Western civilization – the trunk of the tree from which our own American civilization branches out. To be an American is, after all, to be part of the English-speaking peoples, and therefore a particular kind of Westerner. But, as this metaphor suggests, though our nourishment ultimately comes from the trunk, it comes to us through the national limb, and the regional branches we inhabit.
In other words, we should select from the canon those Western works that are—along with being excellent, true, good and beautiful—most formative and central for our own American civilization. This means that the American curriculum will in important respects have a Protestant and English bent, since both served as our nation’s “point of departure.”
Here are some examples from the humanities: when we have to choose between them, we should include Homer over the Viking sagas, Beowulf over the Song of Roland, Plutarch and Cicero over Aristophanes, Bunyan over Thomas a Kempis, Shakespeare over Moliere, Rembrandt over Tintoretto, Handel over Tchaikovsky.
This doesn’t mean an American classical school can’t read Confucius, for example, or enjoy Russian fairy tales. But it does mean that these shouldn’t generally take the place of stories or authors that are central to the tradition. We hope, of course, that students go on to understand works of beauty outside their tradition as well (indeed, as W.H. Auden remarks in his foreword to Owen Barfield’s History in English Words, we can’t truly understand our “native land without having spent some time in a foreign country”). I couldn’t myself do without Dostoevsky and Aivazovsky. But what students need first—particularly in our day and age—is knowledge of, and piety for, their own national inheritance. Conveying this is our particular duty.
An equally important point: since one of the main goals in all this is to equip our students to understand and love their own civilization, we must be sure to give the best American works their due. In my experience, this is not always done as well in the classical movement as it could be. As I argued in my initial article, many classical schools I’ve been familiar with teach colorful stories about Charlemagne’s statesmanship but don’t get much beyond John Winthrop’s name, the date 1630 and the phrase “city on a hill.” Should classical schools be graduating students who know Michelangelo’s life and works in great detail but have barely heard of Thomas Cole, whose art formed the American moral imagination for generations? Or who have read most everything the Inklings wrote, but don’t realize that Emerson, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt had similar (if less brilliantly-expressed) concerns about materialism and the “abolition of man?”
A word of advice for literature teachers: don’t slavishly follow the typical high school reading list, despite how long it’s persisted in schools (public and Christian). There’s no reason the American books we assign should so heavily feature naturalistic tales and tiresome 20th century social commentaries. It’s no wonder many students end up loving English literature more than American. Hemingway and Steinbeck are indeed important for the story of contemporary literature, but consider assigning less of their writing and more by authors like Edith Wharton, Louis Auchincloss, or Marilynne Robinson. These are not only better writers, their tales contain at least as much truth, goodness and beauty as those I mentioned, and they engage more deliberately with the longer American and Western literary tradition.
Your school’s region should also influence the parts of American literature, history and art you dwell on. A classical school in New England may wish to linger over Longfellow, Frost and Dickinson; for stories, consider Sarah Orne Jewett’s haunting Country of the Pointed Firs instead of Stephen Crane. In the Midwest, Hamlin Garland’s Son of the Middle Border could serve as an excellent substitute for Faulkner. In the South, there’s more reason to read Faulkner, but also be sure to give priority to writers like Sidney Lanier and Flannery O’Connor.
Finally, although I have focused on the humanities, the principles I’ve articulated here are equally applicable for how math, science and even physical fitness are taught. But I will leave their application to others who have more knowledge in those areas than I do.
Embodying the Curriculum
Here I use “curriculum” in its older sense: “a course of study.” The same principles used above for choosing books and works of art can also guide us in determining the kinds of classes and subjects we teach, as well as the way we structure them, how we teach them, and how we order our school days and calendars.
If it doesn’t already, the historical timeline of Western civilization should serve as the organizing principle of your curriculum, for a wide variety of reasons. Plan your historical cycles carefully, and make American history the spine, as well as the culmination – it’s the nation we live in, and we owe its study particular affection and care. Refuse to cram high school American history into a senior-level class on the “modern world” where you’ll be forced to skim the surface of American as well as world history and give a flannel graph version of both. I would recommend avoiding omnibus curricula and “integrated humanities programs” altogether. If you can’t, heavily supplement them with robust historical instruction.
Your school should very carefully incorporate the story of your state and local area into your history curriculum, or should devote an entire class to its study. Emphasize its heroes and villains, its glories and shameful moments, its speeches and writings, its rags-to-riches stories and spectacular downfalls, and the way that its cities and rural hamlets participate in the epic stories of Christ’s church and the rise of the United States. Did your county have a local Civil War regiment, or recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor? Did it produce any notable missionaries or theologians? Inventors? Writers? Artists? A “mute inglorious Milton” lies in your local graveyard, and, if you look closely enough, there are others who were neither inglorious nor mute, but who have been unjustly forgotten.
For those schools that already do this well, why not expand and do the same with science? Does science at your school look like dry-as-dust textbooks and abstract mathematical calculations that could be learned anywhere, or does it open your students’ eyes to the beauty of the earth, flora and fauna around them? Does it involve hikes, artfully observing your area’s weather, seasons and geology? Can your students easily identify local trees and birds? Do they love the scenery of your area, and can they explain what makes it unique? If you need some hints about where to start, I highly recommend Thomas Cole’s essay celebrating the beauty of the American landscape.
Next, the trades. Many classical, Christian schools have every reason to include the trades and entrepreneurial skills as an explicit part of their curricula, as I argued in my first article. Not only has Protestant classical education embraced the trades from the beginning—particularly in the United States—there is good reason to follow Hugh of St. Victor in classifying these “mechanical arts” as an essential part of students’ path to wisdom (along with the seven liberal arts). Such skills will be desperately needed by students as they weather the pressures of the negative world in 21st-century America. Not only that, these arts promise Christian families and communities a path towards ownership and independence; their focus on the hands-on and incarnational aspect of Christian life offers a vital, humanizing witness in our disembodied age.
A hodgepodge of final thoughts: civic holidays are an excellent opportunity to form your students’ affections and imaginations. For example, I helped organize a President’s Day celebration that involved a military color guard, complete with an elaborate salute, and a reading of excerpts from “Washington’s Farewell Address.” Perhaps you could celebrate the anniversary of the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Take many local and state field trips to historical sites or museums, and make them truly integral to your history instruction. Use American, as well as classical art, to adorn your hallways and rooms. Students should know and love the paintings of Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, the Hudson River School painters, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper, to mention only a few. These artists provide an endless wealth of beautiful art to draw from, much of it infused with Christian insight.
Conclusion
Roger Scruton argues that education is fundamentally about handing a culture and way of life down to our children. Such a view is at the heart of Christian “paidea” as well. It’s not merely about preserving our heritage—though that may be reason enough—but helping our children to enter into it, to find contentment in what God has given them.
I offer the thoughts I’ve laid out above in the hope that they will help your school or homeschool convey this spirit of gratitude and piety to your students. As you think about and apply these principles, your curriculum, liturgies and pedagogies will necessarily come to look different from those of other classical schools. This is as it should be: your students, after all, come from a different part of this nation, bound for destinations not quite like those of graduates from any other American classical school.
May your work help your students navigate this fallen world with the good cheer of “wayfaring strangers” who know that though their nation is not their ultimate home, it is a home, and one deserving of care and attention.
Image Credit: Unsplash
