Reclaiming education is a matter of returning to the insights of classical political theory
Modern Western “liberal democratic” ideals, claimed by proponents of systems as far apart as socialistic progressivism and conservative nationalism, may be irreparably compromised or perhaps even illusory by this point in the 21st century. But everyone who declares themselves a carrier of the torch of democracy recognizes one key assumption that is shared with the classical political thought at the source of the West. This is the belief that education is a fundamentally “public” endeavor that cannot, by definition, operate outside the auspices of the state. That is to say, even if the government purports not to be concerned with anything related to the personal thoughts and actions of citizens, it must have a role in schooling the young with the purpose of fostering a certain way of life. No government can survive solely on the deeds of its rulers; it must rely on the commitment of the governed if its project is to be sustained. Therefore, the flourishing of the regime hinges directly on the quality of education that it offers. A citizenry that is apathetic, ignorant of, or downright hostile to the mission of the political community will not do.
In this brief analysis of the necessary relationship between the state and education, I certainly do not mean to infer that today’s manifestations of centralized public education are morally legitimate, let alone actually effective (in fact, I will argue the exact opposite), nor that private or home education is to be discouraged. Rather, I propose that if we are to recover the great strivings of the West—and of the American republic in particular—we must return to the idea of education as a fundamentally political endeavor, as elaborated by such great classical proponents as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. An understanding of their core tenets can help both the rulers and citizens of a liberal society to work for a state in which, as Aristotle envisioned, “security and beauty will be combined.”
The State: The National Stadium for Virtue
The classical thinkers began all inquiries into any topic of direct human interest with a delineation of the proper functions of a human being, often through analogy. Aristotle is particularly fond of the image of excellence in a certain discipline, by which he highlights the purpose of a good man. Just as a swift runner fulfills the natural function (telos) of an athlete, or a skilled carpenter who produces quality work enters fully into the essence of “carpenterness,” so the essence of humanity is fulfilled through the practice of the virtues. These are the means by which men attain the divine beatitude and inner harmony for which they were created. If this is true, then just as the runner needs a track and the carpenter a workshop, we need a general arena for practicing and exercising virtue. This “carved-out space” is the state (polis), in which men dwell together for the purpose of spurring each on to the good life (it should be noted that the state is a large umbrella that extends all the way to the smallest unit of the family, a “mini-polis” which is the basic building block of the state).
But today’s liberalism has mixed this notion of the state as a natural virtue-arena with the waters of social-contract theory, which declares the state to be born from a mythical “state of nature” consisting of untethered individuals who give up their rights in exchange for protection. The brackish stream that results from this uneasy confluence can distract us from the organic claims that the classical thinkers say the state makes on us. In the words of the great Roman orator Cicero in his masterpiece On Duties, “since…we are not born for ourselves alone, it happens that our country claims a part of us, our friends another…human beings are born for the sake of other human beings, so as to benefit one another.” Classical thought sees the political community as a gift of nature that is as inevitable to human flourishing as food and shelter. Through it, the great virtues—including justice, piety, courage, and temperance—are disseminated on the grandest scale.
Even so, the noble ideal of the kallipolis (a term of Plato that means “beautiful city”) will forever remain besieged by the vices of rulers and ruled alike. Aristotle’s aforementioned qualities of “security and beauty” are always threatened by the impulse of wanton passions and wayward minds toward chaos and ugliness. This is the basically pessimistic insight which informs Plato’s celebrated discussion of the “lifecycle of states” in Book 8 of the Republic. Identifying the characteristic defects and discontents within each type of government, he concludes that democracy—the most unassailable sacred cow of today’s world order—is the ultimate degeneration of civil order. For when the unrooted masses spurn all visible and moral authority, they “call reverence foolishness and moderation cowardice…persuad[ing] the young men that measured and orderly expenditure is boorish and mean,” “empt[ying] and purg[ing] these from the soul” of the archetypal democratic man. The reality is that the vast majority of people in an average state are utterly wicked—corrupted by love of fleeting material things and interested only in gratifying their base desires rather than truly caring for themselves and the moral community that is the state. They break all natural bonds of allegiance to pursue their depraved ends. Democracy, rather than seeking to check this impulse, encourages it. “A right election can only be made by those who have knowledge.” And we can extend this to cover not only elections, but any choice one can make. If all citizenries, and particularly democracies, tend toward the ignorant and unvirtuous, how is a state to be maintained at all?
Education and Aristocracy
This is the problem that education is tasked with resolving. Education in “the regime”—or, as Aristotle might say, in the spirit of the constitution—aims to ensure from the youngest possible age that citizens’ spiritual eyes are raised toward their duties to the state, which in turn exists to foster their full humanity. But there soon emerges a paradox: to support the regime, citizens must be educated in civic virtue. But obviously, there are only a select few who prove fully capable of understanding and applying such virtue, and who are deemed worthy of exercising influence over the wayward commons. Thus, we find in classical politics a major emphasis on the cultivation and preservation of an elite—an aristocracy of the “true philosophers” (in Plato’s words) who have most thoroughly grasped the humane things, and who are most devoted to advancing those endeavors in the polity. But these elites are not just “career politicians” or those who happen to be strong and persuasive leaders. For Cicero, the ideal man of politics, who is also the man accorded most respect in the state, is the gentleman: the one whose intellect, language, memory, taste, and emotions have been schooled in the beautiful. Since he is able to win others to the good life by his brilliant example, he should be afforded the most power. So education, as manifested through the liberal arts that examine the nature of human order (the Trivium) and the order of the universe (the Quadrivium), intends to develop this aristocratic class.
This insight may cause immediate anxiety for us today—isn’t the liberal order predicated on the basic equality of all? Perhaps so—but let us examine the devolution of that ideal into where we find ourselves today. Simply put, our education system is not concerned in the least with the furnishing of the soul and the recognition of one’s telos, having become a caricature of Plato’s view of democracy. It has not abandoned the idea of educating an aristocracy, but it has replaced the classical virtues, and the more peculiarly “American” virtues of thrift, industriousness, and benevolence, with the diluted merits of “diversity,” “activism,” and general rebellion against what is perceived as a pernicious status quo of Western imperialistic intolerance. The elite class promised by contemporary American education is a demolition team that only knows how to tear down institutions and substitute them with radical perversions. What are these perversions? Of the classical virtues, a vengeful hatred of supposed aggressors rather than justice. In lieu of temperance, a celebration of sexual indiscretions and indecencies. Instead of courage and magnanimity, “owning” your opponent by slinging insults and perhaps even physical violence. For humility, “tolerance,” which really means coerced acceptance of whatever is in vogue. And as for those more “practical” American virtues? A crass sense of entitlement has overridden the love of fruitful labor that lies at the core of the republic’s project.
Constructive Ideals Against the Anti-Elite
There is one lesson that we, as lovers of the beautiful and the noble, can learn from this anti-elite. Its members fully recognize that education is political. To be sure, its fervor to catechize all young Americans in the religion of social justice is fundamentally at odds with the constitution of the American regime, with both its written law of the land and its uncodified Aristotelian and Ciceronian assumptions. In this way, it is also anti-political since it strives to eradicate the spirit of the constitution. But imagine if we were to approach education with the same passion and sense of brotherhood among the like-minded that the anti-elite do, but with a far more civil and humane disposition flowing from our disposition toward the proper objects. Imagine if we were to teach young Americans that their country is a flawed but great place bequeathed to them by flawed but great men who believed that humans need a spacious arena for the good life. That to love charity, discipline, moderation, humility, great art, well-ordered language, traditional institutions, hard work, and education itself is to pursue one’s telos in both a distinctly human and distinctly American way.
Not every student educated in such a fashion would rise up to become a member of the new constructive aristocracy. After all, as the Founders recognized in their writings on education, a republic needs men of mechanical disposition as well as intellectual. An engineer and an electrician are just as capable of achieving the good life as an aristocratic political leader. But to do this, they must know the aristocratic ideals–the ideals of true greatness–that have tantalized the Western mind since the days of mingling in the agora and the Forum. The elite will always be few, but the educated must always be many. The few and the many depend on each other for the health of the state.
Education requires an elite, or at least the ideal of an elite, if it is to keep a political community afloat, and the state therefore has an interest in education that runs deeper than its interest in any other institution. Today’s Western anti-elite intentionally sets out to destroy what is good, lasting, and salutary for man. Even if everyone cannot be given a thoroughly “aristocratic” education, we can return to inculcating every student in an ordinate love for one’s country that finds its source in the natural order of things. Ultimately, the classical view of politics tells us that the “active life”—the life dedicated to advancing the interests of the state, which bears directly upon the interests of our fellow citizens—is a life lived at the highest level. We need not confine this vocation only to an elite. Knowing that the state involves us all, we can advance its interests through the smallest actions of moral integrity and communal strengthening. If care is taken to define “politics” as the art of living well together, the “state” as the grounds in which the art is practiced, and the “regime” or the “constitution” as the concrete means by which the goal is achieved, then we may be able to come to peace with the relationship between education and political matters, and our particular manifestation of the liberal order will have made a return to more fruitful ideals of “freedom” than its current tenuous and ill-defined conceptions.
Image Credit: Unsplash
