Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it is money and power they are seeking, but I have never been able to discover what educators have in mind. The worst of them babble statistics—IQs, achievement-test scores, minority percentages, word counts in first-grade readers. None of it amounts to much more than counting—counting words or counting people.
In every discussion of reform, whether it was with professors of education, school-board members, or the secretary of education and his staff, the conversation always ran aground on the following question: “What is your object in teaching a class, running a school, or developing a program?” When I received no better answer than gimmicks summed up in slogans such as “child-centered education,” “back to basics,” “phonics,” or “writing for reading,” I clarified the question by asking, “What sort of person, if you succeed, do you expect to turn out?” A Quaker headmaster informed me that he hoped his students would be themselves; I naturally asked him why parents should pay high tuition to a private school if not to turn their little savages into some kind of civilized human beings.
Perhaps I have spent too much time reading Plato. After all, a simple society can rear its boys and girls to be patriotic citizen-soldiers or competent matrons without having an explicit theory that stipulates the for what we teach children, but that is only because traditional societies have an implicit understanding of what a good man or good wife and mother is like. An Athenian on his way to fight the Persians at Marathon did not have a refined definition of courage arrived at in a course of dialectic or at the end of an argument with Socrates’ father. He had read or heard the same Homeric poems as his fellows, worshiped the same gods at the same festivals, attended the same meetings of the Assembly and the same courts, where he listened to the wise and the foolish debating the controversies of the day. We are not so lucky.
No young man today, unless he has been locked in a basement or reared by the Amish, is unaware that every virtue extolled by parents and pastors is contemned by the really important people in our society—namely, celebrities. His parents may teach him to be polite and respectful in his speech, but if he turns on the television to learn something about politics—a grave mistake—he will be subjected to the coarse hectoring of Bill Maher and Ann Coulter. He does not need to turn on the TV. Every day in school, he learns the same bad lessons, bad manners, and bad morals. A slave to the indoctrination he has received, he thinks that he (obeying the dictates of the Harvard School of Education and FOX News) is the ultimate judge of all value, whether it is the received wisdom of the Church or the received wisdom that tells grown men to put on a jacket and tie before going to church. Instead of learning from experience, his own and that of his parents and ancestors, he believes only abstract speculations about human equality and the progress of humanity.
We live in a culture gone mad on theory: theories of sex and family, theories of government, and, inevitably, theories of education. A debate has raged for centuries over “the future of education.” Early American liberals such as Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needs a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism. What sort of American democrat could listen to Sarpedon’s admonition “always to be the best” without giving a Bronx cheer? It took over a hundred years, but this appeal began to take concrete form in American colleges and secondary schools between the two world wars.
John Dewey and his students developed the argument to include a soft social-science indoctrination that would liberate American kids from the shackles of race, ethnicity, nationality, region, class, wealth, religion, taste, and anything else their poor benighted parents might have valued. By the late 1960’s, the attack was extended to sex and gender, species and phylum. An old high-school friend—a beautiful and charming woman—once asked me (at an oyster roast) why I could be so concerned about unborn babies when I cared so little about baby seals. This same woman, if she had not been warped by the propaganda inflicted on her by half-educated Ph.D.’s, would have remained a Trinitarian Anglican and a patriotic Southerner. As things turned out, she was only a New Yorker manqué. That is why every school in the nation should have a sign at the entrance: Enter at Your Own Risk or, better still, Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.
The conservative response to the progressives’ takeover of education has been of two types, and neither has been particularly effective. The capitalist response is to emphasize vocational skills, whether at the low level of shop and computer courses or on the high level of mathematics and science. Bill Gates, himself a model victim of American education, thinks that he can do some good by rewarding students for designing innovative technical projects before they have learned anything about who they are or why they are alive. The results are all around us: the technological barbarians who cannot even imagine the moral problems presented by cloning, in vitro fertilization, and the virtual reality in which young people are imprisoned.
Most of us, who are neither angels nor monks, would like to have money; sensible people would like to earn their money by pursuing an interesting and useful career. We all understand that an aspiring physician, lawyer, or engineer must receive specialized training, but what hardly anyone realizes is that money, career, and profession are, in most cases, only marginally connected to the serious purpose of education. The application of businesslike methods to politics or education is routinely disastrous, because the object of statecraft or teaching is quite different from the object of business.
So-called cultural conservatives are aware of the shortcomings in the businessman’s call for vocational education, but their response has been to call for a return to the Great Books, though some of them cannot distinguish between The Great Gatsby and what William Bennett once described as “the published works of Socrates.” If our cultural-conservative leaders had read some of the great books, instead of merely talking about them, they might have read in Plato (who wrote the works Socrates did not) that reading impairs the memory. Plato’s observation—which is truer with every technological step away from simple orality and literacy—might have led them to reflect that books are only means to the ends of a system of education or paideia, to use a more inclusive Greek word, which means nothing more than childrearing. The end, as Calder Willingham expressed it in the title of his beautiful and almost forgotten novel, is a man.
All of the above might have been written 20 years ago, and, indeed, such arguments have routinely been made in Chronicles. All that has changed in 20 years is that these false conservatisms, which used to be limited to movement periodicals and small ideological colleges, have now metastasized into a viral empire of websites and distance-learning programs that feature the usual cafeteria of computer skills and great books. All of these projects will fail; most of them will do more harm than good. Even at their best, they will distract well-intentioned parents, teachers, and students from considering the purpose and function of education.
The same basic questions, however, remain, and, until they are addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education: What is the purpose of education—that is, what sort of a person do we want to result from 20 years of schooling, and what is the curriculum that will produce such people? The traditional answer, “the classical curriculum,” is short enough to appear on a standardized test, though only if it is one of multiple choices on the grid of a computerized test form. But what are the classics, and why should we study them? For most readers, Great Expectations and The Thirty-Nine Steps are classics, but I should be hard pressed to defend the inclusion of these admittedly good novels in a serious curriculum.
Critics, including Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, have tried to define such terms as classics and culture. For Arnold, the son of a famous headmaster, culture was “the best that has been thought and said.” In his lecture “What is a Classic?” Eliot set out to be more precise and more profound than the Romantic Arnold. For Eliot, maturity is the hallmark of classical literature—maturity of mind, of manners, and of language. Maturity is a quality difficult to pin down. Like the Greek sophrosyne, it implies restraint and the absence of extravagance, but maturity of style is the perfection of the best tendencies in a language. A mature writer is not a child of his own time, but, like Vergil, he possesses a sense of history. It is Vergil who displays all of these qualities and is the benchmark of classicism.
As valuable as they are, both of these essays in definition were on one point misguided in beginning at the wrong end. Do we value Vergil because he is mature or maturity because it is Vergilian? Before answering too quickly, we should consider that civilized men of the West have been Vergilians for two millennia. From one perspective, it does not matter if Homer and Plato, Vergil and Augustine are the best writers, so long as they are ours, the writers who define our civilization. The body of classical literature is not a set of museum exhibits, catalogued, arranged, and dead; it is a living tradition, something handed down from one generation of intelligent readers to the next. The Latin for “hand down” is tradere, from which we derive our word tradition. Naturally, the canon must be open to the new writers—Dante and Racine, Shakespeare and Goethe—who make themselves indispensable, but never to the exclusion of their literary progenitors.
In recent centuries, we have grown used to the idea that tradition is in conflict with “objective truth,” and academic intellectuals (unless they are either reactionary or postmodernist) would tell us that the only way to strive for truth is by being objective—that is, by eliminating all the prejudices that come from our personal experience, our ethnic and national identity, and our religion. They might as well ask us to flap our arms and fly across the Grand Canyon. No ordinary mortal can entirely escape the blinders of subjectivity, and those who claim to have done so—e.g., modern university teachers—have simply put on another, more constrictive pair of blinders that prevents them from seeing any good either in patriotism or religion.
The studies that make up humane learning are called the liberal arts, not because they “liberate” students from inherited prejudices (as I have heard claimed by educators), and not even because they are arts practiced almost exclusively by liberals. The artes liberales of the Romans (translating a much older Greek phrase) were the studies appropriate to a free man. While servile or banausic arts were aimed at practical results (making a sword, for example) and gaining money, liberal arts form the character of a citizen in a republic or, in an aristocracy, a gentleman. Plato and Aristotle went further, teaching students to aim at the highest goal, which is the contemplation of the good.
The free man practices and values the virtues of honesty, courage, reverence, justice, and self-restraint not so much because they are good in the abstract as because he shares a general taste for them. It is only within such an ethical and civic context that it makes any sense to speak of pursuing or loving truth. Philosophy, as Aristotle points out, is a dangerous pursuit for people who have not been properly brought up by family and friends, because they will only learn how to justify their vices. Even the paltry bits of philosophy studied by Ayn Rand and her chief apostles hardened them in their selfishness, arrogance, and lewdness. Even if Rand or the Brandens had read a few good books, they would probably have turned them to evil purposes. We need only look at the example of Straussians who spend entire careers twisting and distorting every great political thinker from Plato to Jefferson. What is the result of all their lying? The kind of mad arrogance that overtook Bloom and Jaffa.
I am not arguing for illiteracy—though a glance at the best-seller lists might persuade us that Americans would be better off illiterate. Books, great and good, are the necessary tools of any educational method. It is also true that an American who has not read Hamlet or The History of Henry Esmond, I promessi sposi or Huckleberry Finn, while he may possess many serious intellectual and cultural interests, will be, in a society of educated readers, like the long line of ill-dressed gawkers who watch the beautiful people entering the club from which their lack of beauty and the right clothes have barred them. Schools must needs have a reading list of indispensable fiction, poetry, and drama, but teaching, say, Conan Doyle or Kafka in the classroom would require some justification, such as a desperate need for remediation.
We are so used to the idea of reading fiction and poetry in school that few of us stop to ask why we should spend time on what might otherwise be regarded as entertainment. If you have the patience and stomach for reading literary theory, you will discover a great many mystical statements about literature that no one in his right mind has ever believed. To take only the most banal example, you will hear that students should read modern novels, especially very dirty novels, to learn something important about life. Practical men—businessmen and engineers—with some justification make fun of the whole idea of studying literature in school. Reading stories is all very well for people who have the time, but why can they not pursue their hobby at home instead of watching TV? What possible use could it be to write essays on imagery in the poetry of Dylan Thomas or character development in the novels of Thomas Hardy?
Ancient writers on rhetoric would have no problem in answering the businessman’s objections. Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian would tell him that the object of education is to turn out a good man who can be useful to his neighbors and to his community. There is, they would add, a certain set of books that can be used effectively to teach both sound moral and civic principles and the art of effective writing and speaking. Civilization itself, they would conclude, depends on the process of inculcating these values and techniques, year after year, and generation after generation, into the human beastlings who need to be domesticated. Education, then, occupies a space somewhere between theology and toilet training.
The ancient system had its shortcomings, and nothing could be more foolish than to design a school around Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, much less to pretend to revive an imaginary trivium and quadrivium that more often existed on paper (or, rather, parchment) than in practice. However, the fundamental objectives of education remain, and not just the objectives but the methods that have proved useful and indispensable: the teaching of Latin and mathematics; the study of grammar and rhetoric (which includes logic and composition); and a systematic reading of the books that make us who we are, particularly poetry, drama, and history—and not the pseudo-scientific history written by professors but the history of historians who can write and think: Thucydides and Livy, David Hume and Shelby Foote. This is a far cry from four years spent on the Five Foot Shelf.
The study of languages, live and dead, is essential. The Greeks were mostly content to know their own language, but educated Romans, by the end of the Punic Wars, had to learn Greek. In the Middle Ages, Western Europeans, whatever language they spoke at home, had to study Latin, and a 17th-century Englishman had to make a stab at Greek, speak at least a traveler’s French, and, if he wished to set up for a literary gentleman, make shift to read the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso.
Foreign languages are not everything, and each of us has limited time. But some disciplined study of ancient and modern tongues and the literatures written in them is an absolute necessity: first, because it improves our mental acuity; second, because it is the only way of gaining an acquaintance with the highest standards of “the best that has been thought and said.” Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot were trained in the classics, and Milton learned Hebrew, French, Italian, and Old English. Most poets today do not even know correct English, much less Italian. As one Italian poet told me ruefully, after entertaining a group of American poets, he had no use for American writers: They could speak no language he knew, took no interest in art, philosophy, history, or literature. All they wanted to do, he said, was to scribble postcards in a bar. Today, unable even to scribble with a pen, our poets—once the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind”—drink their coffee in an internet cafe, text-messaging each other the inanities that no one, thank God, will ever read.
Whether we wish to be a poet or merely a president, there are no secrets or shortcuts and no new method of counting people that can tell us anything useful about humane learning. There are only the old methods that taught the men who made our civilization and framed our Constitution. Begin, as they did, with Vergil and Homer. As Mr. Jefferson said, they are the poets “as we advance in life . . . we are left at last with.” Chesterton agreed: “Those who count in any generation will always be talking of Troy.” If few people today talk of Troy, in Greek or in English, it is not because Chesterton has been proved wrong. We barbarians of the New Atlantis can either bemoan our ignorance or decide to join the conversation.
Thomas Fleming is the editor of Chronicles and the president of The Rockford Institute.
This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
In my limited experience, too often those who talk of the "great books" are Straussians whether they know it or not.
"Early American liberals such as Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needs a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism."
Noah Webster was a devout Christian, which makes it difficult to label him entirely liberal. I do think his dictionary was an attempt to level and homogenize, though.
Good essay.
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY by John Senior
On a midnight cool and clammy,
once I heard on radio,
festivaling for the money,
literati with banjo.
I heard the voice of God announce
that "Allen" would progress
among the kneeling audience
absolving and would bless.
How vainly men do sacralize
sententious novelty
and in ignorance disprize
the Great Anthology.
Take up the book and read again
of Hector and Andromache,
Achilles and his mother when
they walked along the sounding sea,
and Helen coming down the stairs
who sees Odysseus
in startled adolescent eyes--
star-struck Telemachus.
Splendid article! I´ve just started with my first semester ancient Greek language at the University of Leiden (Netherlands). So i hope to be joining the ranks of all the men who were steeped in the Classics.
I've also read your book 'the morality fo everyday life' a couple of weeks ago. Together with Burke's reflections (and some other literature) it opened a whole new window for me trough wich i've been viewing the world lately. I never could imagine i would turn away from the 'natural rights' philospohy. But i did. Thanks for writing such a great book.
So instead of reading Greek tragedy and philosophy in Dutch translations i will be (hopefully) discussing them with you on this website on the basis of the original texts.
Greetings form the Netherlands,
René Schmitt
Dear Mr. Phillips,
"In my limited experience, too often those who talk of the “great books” are Straussians whether they know it or not."
Well most of the folks doing all the popularizing for greatness don't know, and those that know aren't popularizing. As they say in the South:
Them that knows won't say,
Them what says, don't know. Gotta find a teacher. Cheers rr
I thank Rene for his encouraging words. Tell us, some time, how you came across this website. We shall soon have an online (for pay) subscription to Chronicles with a special student rate. You might also consider joining us for our annual Winter in Rome. Students receive a discount and are available for scholarships.
Dr. Phillips, Noah Webster's dictionary was an aggressive, chauvinistic New England attempt to take control of American English. It was regarded with disdain outside New England until after The War. We might also question how much a Congregationalist tending toward Unitarian ranks as a Christian.
Webster was just shy of being a Jacobin, certainly an admire of Ben Franklin and the enemy of classical learning.
@TJF
well, a fellow student of mine, Jelle, and I started a dutch paleoconservative blog on which we post columns and articles (which are (sometimes) also published in the magazine of polticial science of Leiden). After slowly moving towards the direction of the old right he showed me this website (which I vaguely remember having seen once) and i was tipped over (also after having read Kirke, Burke, De Maistre, Hayek, etc.) to the paleo-side.
In the Netherlands the conservative movement is verry small. Off course we have Christian-democrats and some cultural-conservative liberals (the European way!) but a large portion of the Dutch people hang on the liberal paradigm of human rights and the welfarestate. And our democratic/coporatist concensus-model is not made for rapid change. So there is little hope for a real change on the short term.
It's funny that you wrote this piece. Because a couple of days ago one of my professors tried to convert me to radical scientific positivism. He riddiculed conservative philosophers because "they believe to have some sort of special radar for picking up the causes of social problems. They tend to 'see' things other people don't." (Mabey he was just pissed off because he can't)
The adres of our blog is: http://www.corrigo.blogspot.com
I'm currently writing an article about the relationship between the growth of the Dutch centralised state and the coming of nationalist ideas and rulers (Louis Napoleon) to the Netherlands (in the period: 1800-1850).
I don't know if Webster was leaning toward Unitarianism, but his Speller reads like a Sunday School book. It certainly would not pass muster in public schools today.
The rhetoric of Christianity continued in the vernacular and in the publishings of Congregationalists decaying and deconstructing into Unitarians and general apostates long after the essence of Christianity was dead within their ranks; hence, spellers fraught with "Christian" words. Today, the heirs of these people, falling away from their faith, lack any pretense - the Christian words are gone, although, to immediately contradict myself, not entirely. For these secular apostates usurp the authority of the Christ alone to "transform" (Be ye transformed!) and give that authority to the state or some agency thereof. They have of "epiphanies." They call things "sacred." They speak of "honor." They sings hymns such as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Today, when one says "Homer," most think "Simpson." When one says "Vergill," one thinks of the sidekick of a Redneck B-movie hero (nothing against Rednecks, for I've got seven dogs and if my front porch collapses and kills all seven, I am supposed to be a Redneck!). When one says "St. Augustine," one thinks of "grass on the lawn." When one says "Bible," one thinks of something to deconstruct or to thump. When one says "Latin," one thinks of illegal immigrants. When one says "Greek," someone says, "Yep, that's what it is to me!"
I have a personal stake in defending Noah Webster that I will elaborate on if anyone cares, but what evidence is there that he was lapsing toward Unitarianism? I am aware that they used Christian terms and invested them with new meanings, but Webster wrote his Speller in 1783 and his “Advice to the Young” and “Moral Catechism” around the same time. This was before a lot of the outright apostasy had begun to slip in. He is very much on the record about his faith. He even translated the Bible. Updated the King James really. Is there any evidence in all of this of a budding Unitarian? Or is this just painting with a broad brush because he is a New Englander?
Webster might have been a true blue Congregationalist? Hells bells! I can trust him now. Knee grow PUH-LEEEAZE!
Excellent Dutch site, btw, Rene.
Want a real American dictionary? Try this: http://www.elibron.com/english/other/item_detail.phtml?msg_id=10021093.
Webster was regarded as a religious man, though in the Connecticut of his day, who knows what that meant? Supposed to be a federalist (i.e., paid by Hamilton), he supported the French Revolution and approved the murder of one of the kindest and justest men ever to sit on a throne. The immortal Cobbet called him "a toad in the service of sans-cullotism."
As a nationalist, Webster promoted the most embarrassing kind of American jingoism, and like too many American provincials, he was undully puffed up by his modest educational attainments. His dictionary, as Dr. Wilson well knows, was not a work of scholarship but of New England propaganda, and his opposition to the classical tradition is one of the earliest shots fired in the campaign that destroyed American education and culture. Perhaps he was not a knowingly evil man, but he was on the wrong side of most important issues, and I do not like to see his name invoked in a discussion of the humane learning to which he was opposed. In any event, he was a character of slight importance in his lifetime and of no enduring interest.
Random thoughts on TJF's excellent article:
The main problem of education in today's American society is that egalitarianism is enshrined as one of the society's guiding principles, but education is in essence a non-egalitarian activity. Hence it must engage in all sorts of intellectual contortions to pay deference to the cult of equality while still attempting to maintain standards. Not surprisingly, the maintenance of standards is a losing battle.
A couple of years ago, the local superintendent of public schools in my community boasted in an article in the local newspaper of the superb graduation rate at the community's high school. It was, he reported, something like 94 or 96%, with a large number of the non-graduates accounted for by moves out of the school district rather than by actual drop-outs. My reaction was, does he think this is something of which to be proud? All it proves is that the bar is set so low that no one flunks. It is no wonder that a high school diploma signifies nothing of value to a potential employer.
This has had a predictable effect on the standards of higher education. The sort of curriculum a university student might have pursued fifty or one hundred years ago is beyond the reach of most young people today, because they are ill-prepared to deal with it. There is, indeed, a "desperate need for remediation." I suspect this explains the content of much course work offered at the university level today. There is nothing wrong with a curriculum based on "Great Books" or the "Five Foot Shelf" - other than that it is just too little, too late. But it's certainly better than much of the gobbledegook found in the course catalogues of many a university's undergraduate division.
We'd do much better to pay more attention to the elementary and high school education of most youngsters than to worry about what is studied at university. University education worthy of the name is probably appropriate to less than 10%, perhaps less than 5%, of high school graduates.
What passes for the teaching of science in elementary and high school is almost worthless, because to learn real science requires a higher level of mathematical proficiency than most high schools offer. It is almost impossible, for example, to understand classical physics (Newtonian mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, electricity, etc.) without at least a command of differential and integral calculus in one variable, which is not customarily taught until the freshman year of college. Chemistry, in its turn, is so dependent upon knowledge of thermodynamic and electrical concepts that it must build upon physics. The time spent on these subjects at the high school level might better be devoted to the development of mathematical skills necessary to master them later. Biology seems mostly to be a vehicle for the teaching of evolution as an alternative creation myth, and to alarmist propaganda about environmental issues. Descriptive botany and zoology, which might be interesting and within the capacity of the secondary school student, are neglected; most cannot identify common garden plants, wild flowers, and weeds, nor know the North American birds.
I agree that to undertake general education on Quintilian's plan would, in this day and age, be quite impractical. However, let us note that it was never Quintilian's object to set out a curriculum for the masses. He prescribed an educational plan for the future leaders of society. It is worth noting that the British 'public' (i.e. private) schools followed a curriculum not very different from it for centuries, and, for several centuries, men of the character it produced successfully governed an empire more extensive than Rome's.
The Rome of Quintilian or the Britain of Matthew Arnold had no difficulty in identifying at an early age those children who were to be prepared for social, economic, political, or military leadership. American society's uneasiness with class distinction makes this a delicate problem. Unfortunately the baby of excellence ends up thrown out with the bath water of social exclusiveness and snobbism.
Does anyone know anything about John Walker? His dictionary, "A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language", was published in 1791, compared to Webster's in 1828. Walker was a Southerner and classically educated.
Here's an excerpt from his title page: "The influence of the Greek and Latin accent and quantity, on the accent and quantity of the English, is thoroughly examined and clearly defined.... The whole is interspersed with observations, etymological, critical, and grammatical. To which is annexed a key to the classical pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names, &c."
Cleanth Brooks had an excellent contribution to the Mercer lecture series on the continuity of the Southern accent, drawing from southern and western England, as opposed to New England's east-Anglian. Jim Kibler has also written an excellent series of articles on this subject, entitled "Verbal Independence".
Walker's dictionary is available online: http://books.google.com/books?id=DnwCAAAAQAAJ&dq=%22critical+pronouncing+dictionary+and+expositor%22+%22john+walker%22&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=BWynqn16v9&sig=ALGZHJNj0Dr70rBvJ7TQp2Rt1cM#PRA19-PT95,M1
Walker's edition would have been the go-to source for every real American of consequence, before the Civil War. Webster's may have even been a little New England reaction to Walker, since the Puritans refused to go along with anything they didn't create themselves.
One slight correction, Mr. Manning. It is not that Puritans refused to go along with anything they did not create, since they never created anything worthwhile. What they refused to go along with was anything they couldn't control and pretend to have created.
@René Man,man,man : .ne paleoconservatieve Hollander !Komt da tegen. ! 'k peisde da die met Bilderdijk waren uitgestorven !
(Sorry folks, just saying hello to a neighbour)
Just a random, probably pointless, math equation for the best paleo bloggers in the world...
(the majority of GOP voters) - (neocons) + (paleocons) = what?
I want to say 'red state Republicans', but it doesn't quite have the ideological ring I'm looking for.
Why does Webster stir up so much emotion? My main knowledge of Webster, other than his dictionary, is that he is often quoted by people on the religious right. I think that is the context most conservatives understand him in.
Webster said, "In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed...No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
What about that should a conservative disagree with?
Billy Bob
"The conservative response to the progressives’ takeover of education has been of two types, and neither has been particularly effective. The capitalist response is to emphasize vocational skills, ... So-called cultural conservatives are aware of the shortcomings in the businessman’s call for vocational education, but their response has been to call for a return to the Great Books,..."
The market place has created a few self consciously "conservative" institutions - Hillsdale, Grove City, Claremont (ha ha to that being truly conservative, I know) +/- Pepperdine. And it has created "conservative" departments within certain schools - economics at the University of Chicago. But I think the colleges and universities that have best maintained some semblance of conservatism are some overtly Christian schools. The shame is that so few Christian parents send there kids to them. But the education at a lot of those schools might be more narrowly focused than Dr. Fleming advocates.
Can you get a good "classical education" anywhere anymore?
Mr. Phillips,
"Can you get a good “classical education” anywhere anymore?"
Sure, from individual teachers but not colleges or Universities -- or at least any that I know. Dr. Patrick, Dr. Fleming, Dr. Wilson, Dr. Polin, Dr. Livingston, and probably many others are doing good work either in the twilight or total darkness of their lives.
I try to tell my kids to get the government license first, and then try and find somebody who really knows how to drive. Hope that helps. Cheers rr
“My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics,” says the author of this article.
Evaluating schools, that is, the curriculum, the teaching methods, the teaching staff, etc. can not be time wasted. It depends on what you are looking for and the goal you have set yourself. Such a job does not mean compiling statistics only. It has to do more about offering solutions based on observations. If the author’s job was just evaluation of schools, did he, at least, propose some way out of the situation in the education system? If yes, which I very much doubt, then, doing the job of an “educational consultant” is not time wasted.
Comments on today’s American education system should not turn into a contest of erudition between those who post their “opinions” on this website. Webster, the Puritans, John Walker, the Rome of Quintilians or the Britain of Matthew Arnold, and so on and so forth belong to the past, which had its own problems and cannot offer solutions to the present-day issues of education in the United States. Concentrate more on today than on the past. This website is not a site where one can tell others how much he knows while failing to offer ideas that can help resolve the problems of today.
It is my humble opinion that the American education system should draw on other countries’ experiences. Why are the students from Europe better than their American counterparts? Or why do the students from Eastern Europe, though under communism until recently, outdo the American students?
Reform in the American education system should start with its backbone, which are the elementary and high schools.
" Concentrate more on today than on the past. "
1. Could you give this rube, reader of Chronicles an example of a culture that concentrated more on "today" or placed more hope in the future than the educational consultants of America from 1900 to the present ?
"Webster, the Puritans, John Walker, the Rome of Quintilians or the Britain of Matthew Arnold, and so on and so forth belong to the past, which had its own problems and cannot offer solutions to the present-day issues of education in the United States."
2. In the spirit of offering some solutions, would you mind to mention a few writers of the future we can look to in expectation of solving our current crisis ? Or, since it may be difficult for mere mortals to see into the future as only gods or inspired prophets can, would you mind to name some of the consultants who solved the educational problems America had three (or even thirty) years ago ?
"Reform in the American education system should start with its backbone, which are the elementary and high schools."
3. Even If you were persuaded that the backbone of education in it's most elemental form was really the family and not government schools, what reforms would you implement in America's elementary and high schools tomorrow ? Would the solutions be the same for New Yok City as for Hooks, Texas ? Thanks rr
"Alban Ziguri", who is probably the same person as what's-his-name Pellembi, is just another zany Albanian. Who but an Albanian, who cannot, obviously write English, would start dictating the content of a website conversation about the classical tradition? People think the Belushi brothers are funny, when they were/are merely unconsciously Albanian, oblivious to what anyone make think of them.
As for Noah Webster, the rush to defend him says two rather bad things about the character of American conservatives: 1) low critical standards and 2) a tendency to reduce all questions to what side someone is on. Thus, Noah Webster says nice things about the Bible, so he must be.....what? I once gave a lecture on RL Dabney to a group of Southern Calvinists who claimed to revere the great man. When I tried to show the difference between Dabney and the Puritans, they were either uncomfortable or angry and did not like it when I pointed out that Dabney turned down an excellent job in the Northeast because he did not want to live with those people. Decent people are so rare theses days, I tend to take people as I find them, one at a time, not worrying too much about where they come from or what they believe. I know Protestants whose company I prefer to most Catholics, immoralists I regard more highly than Jansenist Catholics, and even a few good Yankees, who have their own strange virtues. Ask me to respect John Adams, I have no problem, but what a waste of time to take up the cudgels for Noah Webster (I prefer Daniel) or for some Biblebelt college that spoons out bad manners along with the obscurantist pabulum that starves the students' minds.
"some Biblebelt college that spoons out bad manners along with the obscurantist pabulum that starves the students’ minds."
What? Please elaborate.
Billy Bob
"The most perfect maxims and examples for regulating your social conduct and domestic economy, as well as the best rules of morality and religion, are to be found in the Bible. . . . The moral principles and precepts found in the scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. These principles and precepts have truth, immutable truth, for their foundation. . . . For instruction then in social, religious and civil duties resort to the scriptures for the best precepts." Noah Webster
If Noah Webster “said nice things about the Bible” and believed it to be the true word of God then that would make him a Biblicist, wouldn't it?
So he was a Biblicist who unfortunately supported the French Revolution. So did Jefferson, and he was an infidel. Across the board condemnation is not justified. The good must be weighed with the bad.
Billy Bob
Once again, a conversation spirals downward into triviality and inconsequence. If Webster is unimportant, as he is, then it does not matter what he thought about anything. If he opposed hte classical tradition, as he did, then he can hardly be invoked in a discussio aimed at reviving that tradition. And, to be frank, the legal concepts of the West are only remotely connected with the Old Testament and merely inspired, though hardly shaped, by the New. Webster talks like a Reconstructionist. Perhaps he was not really a Yankee but an Armenian.
The wonderful thing about the blogosphere is that it never lets you forget how futile it is to attempt anything like a rational argument in these United States. "Across the board condemnation is not justified. The good must be weighed with the bad." Somehow I missed these clauses in the 10 Commandments or the US Constitution.
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