Why Study Latin, Pars Tritia: The Sheep and The Wolf
Then I stated the obvious: that if schools are going to contribute to that love of neighbor, they will need to replace the vacuous twaddle used to impose moral relativism on children with something richer: Latin.
Some folks wanted to know what Latin has to do with love of neighbor, so I found an example of a portion of what I am talking about. Here it is:
utilitarian vs classical education
I wrote this in response to a WSJ article comparing Utilitarian to classical education. It was too long and glib but what can you do?
In a way, this is yet another false dichotomy modern thought seems to drive us into. If by utilitarian, you mean practical, the division is an illusion. If by Utilitarian you mean “based on the philosophical premises of Mill and his followers or the American variation expressed in James, Dewey, and others of the pragmatist and progressive schools, then the division is crucial.
In other words, if this is a philosophical argument, we need to go back to classical education. While if this is a practical argument, we need to go back to a mode of thinking that could see the unity of learning and practical benefits, which is, of course, a classical education.
But it does matter what we are talking about when we use the words classical education. Over the course of 2500 years, education in that tradition varied widely and its hard to pin down any core principles. There was one goal though: to cultivate wisdom and virtue in the students/disciples.
People who believe in the glory of being human don’t settle for anything less. People who don’t believe prepare us for a world that changes too fast for us to be prepared for it.
People who believe in the glory of being human note how we are unique: that awesome faculty of language; the ability to calculate, to measure, to perceive things with mathematical tools; the ability to hand on histories that enable development and intelligent adaptation; the capacity to test and perceive truth and then to embody it in sentences, poems, stories, works of art, musical compositions, gardens, and communities based (not on greed for money and/or power but) on a recognition of a common glory that draws us into a mutually beneficial harmony united by something or someone higher than ourselves.
People who believe in these things teach children how to read, write, and calculate using their reasoning faculties as well as their senses. They teach them the traditions that they feed on and that they owe to their posterity, including the stories that define them as a people. They teach them how to test assumptions with an eye, not to deconstruction, but to construction and even reform. They cultivate their capacity to remember, both alone and in community.
They link them to their heritage by preserving the languages in which that heritage stored its treasury.
They prepare them, not for the Quixotic quest to overthrow the world that is and to replace it with a world their conditioners use them to build, but for actual, practical, daily leadership in ways that heal where they can heal, guide where they can guide, and follow where they should follow.
In other words, they lay foundations for a lifetime of learning (that is to say, for pursuing wisdom) no matter what vocation they follow by teaching them how to use language and math, without which no community can ever be free and no individual can ever thrive. They teach them the natural sciences so they can learn and live in harmony with the world as it is. They teach them history so they can receive and hand on the treasury of their heritage. They teach them metaphysics rooted in the reality of truth so they are both bound by and set free by the truth. And they realize perfectly well that nothing can hold all this together except a transcendent realm of the true, the good, and the beautiful before which we must humble ourselves, as Plato, Aristotle, the apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Basil the Great, and everybody prior to the Utilitarians (with a few tentative exceptions) understood.
People with this form of education are the only practical people on earth, except those who tend a farm with loving devotion. They make good citizens. They make good employees. They make good families. They make good leaders. Have the utilitarian educators improved on that?
Why Study Latin, Pars Secunda: Or, How Love Of Neighbor Is Our Hope
It seems fair to suggest that the “neighbor” carries a great deal of weight in the Bible. In the book of the covenant, the Israelites are commanded not to covet their neighbor’s possessions or wife.
Over one thousand years later, our Lord is asked which of the commandments are greatest. He answers, “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” In this context, being asked “Who is my neighbor?” he responds by telling the parable of The Good Samaritan.
The idea of the neighbor would seem important for more reasons than I have the ability to comprehend, but one thing that leaps out to me is that the neighbor is an actual “concrete reality”, not an abstraction like “the world”.
My family has been watching Mad Men lately, so I watched a couple of episodes over the weekend and it’s easy to see why the series is so compelling. By looking at the inner life of an advertising agency in the early 1960′s, it provides a perspective on issues and ideas that dominate the contemporary mind and politics.
We are living through a transition perhaps unlike anything since the western Roman Empire dissolved into the Germanic Kingdoms during the long fifth and sixth centuries (or at least since the Reformation of western Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries). In a single blog post, one can only speak somewhat glibly about a matter of such global import, but let me state some of the more obvious points. World Wars One and Two, especially WWI, ended the European Enlightenment experiment, which was itself a turn from and largely a renunciation of the European Christian heritage.
Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The effects in America were delayed, but the United States of 2012 are not the United States of 1963 (the year I was born), much less the United States of 1912.
When we think of World War II, we speak of things like “the greatest generation,” the great courage of the boys who conquered the Nazi war machine, and “Our Finest Hour.”
As is so often the case, however, while we won the war, I believe we have lost the peace. The ideas that gave rise to Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia were complex and local. That is why Italy gave birth to fascists, Germany to National Socialists, and Russia to International Socialists.
But it is not hard to see the common root of all three philosophies: the will to power unleashed by a relativism rooted in opposition to religion and the constraints of the Western (Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian) perception of truth. More briefly: power, relativism, and secularism.
These ideas now dominate American thought and politics, though the will to power bears many disguises.
For teenagers and pre-adolescents it is called “love” and sung about with ever-increasing cynicism. For most people it is called “rights” of one sort or another. In every case, love and rights have been made social and political commodities used to barter in the marketplace of power. They are the coin of the realm, as it were.
The trouble is this: as “coin” they are paper money or, worse, electronic digits. They are so abstract that you can make them mean anything you want. Love is a euphemism for desire. Rights are a euphemism for power.
The neighbor, on the other hand, is a real person, located in a particular place, with particular needs, offering particular temptations. In the so-called Christian “worldview”, the neighbor is penultimate, our duty to love him second only to our duty to love God.
“The world” is just another abstraction. Only God is able to love the world. Do not believe for a moment that you “are the world.” You are not. You are a neighbor. You are one person able to love other people as you come in contact with them through words, mind, and body.
The more we try to change the world, the more harm we do. When we gain the wisdom to defend and run our corners of the world (meaning our kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and yards), then we might be able to bring that wisdom to our communities.
The Good Samaritan by Aimé Morot (1880) shows the Good Samaritan taking the injured man to the inn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When other people try to meddle as we seek to fulfill our duties to our household and community, we ought to tell them to go away. Part of governing is protecting. The world is full of meddlers known as experts.
The rise of the expert is part of the movement of thought I mentioned above, toward the will to power, relativism, and secularism. The habit of mind that sustains and is motivated by this contra-trinity of ideas is abstractionism.
Because the public sphere is dominated by people who deny any place to religion in the discussion of public matters, anything that once was included in and expressed by the religious life has been absorbed by the expert, who is a secularized priest.
At this point I am going to make an assertion that will trouble people. It troubles me too. I am going to argue that in a very deep sense we lost World War II. Not to the Axis military powers by any means, don’t get me wrong. Hitler, probably with a sense of Wagnerian fulfillment, committed suicide. Japan surrendered, broken and humiliated. Italy gave up.
But when our boys came home, they came home to, and brought with them, an America that was deeply altered. How could it not have been? We had just endured four years of the most horrifying war in the history of the human race, in terms of sheer unleashed destructive power. The boys who returned did not come home whole and the nation they returned to was not a whole nation.
The wild optimism of the 50′s disguised a terror that embodied itself in bomb shelters and air raid drills, and in what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex,” which he warned us against with genuine fear.
Americans have always been a nomadic people, at least northerners. But after World War II the best words to describe America might well be “anxiety-driven nomads”. We were unmoored and didn’t have any idea where the port should be. Our minds were unhinged. Everybody either “loaded up the truck and… moved to Beverly” or wished they could.
Out in California (and Seattle, and Denver, and, eventually Phoenix, Albuquerque, etc.) we would build a new world on new principles of love and freedom.
Then came the sixties.
Even as a child I was amused by the arrogance of the 60′s generation (probably because I they were a few years older than I), but as the years have passed and I’ve listened with my mind to the lyrics of the era, I chuckle ironically. In 1963 or so, what the world needed “now, is love sweet love.” And for the first time in world history, a group of east coast boarding school young people who read beatnick poetry had discovered this secret and were ready to reveal it to the world.
I cannot imagine what it must have been like for parents of the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s to try to raise children. Increasingly centralized control over the economy and the minds of children through schools and media created an anxiety the world probably had never seen before. If it had happened suddenly, it probably would have created a panic. Instead it created an intense vulnerability for parents who wanted their children not to have to
The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1630) shows the Good Samaritan making arrangements with the innkeeper. A later (1633) print by Rembrandt has a reversed and somewhat expanded version of the scene. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Art of their Time: Recent perspectives, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, ISBN 0915773104, pp. 68-69. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
live through a depression and a global war.
No children had ever had so much power, in the form of money. It would be silly to suggest that they created their own music forms, but the people who ran the recording industries knew how to take advantage of their new power and to direct it to their desired ends. For a couple years, a battle took place over who would dominate pop music: the Pat Boone’s with their “wholesome” (though, I would argue, syrupy) music or the more radical Little Richards. Elvis settled that question by forging a quasi-compromise, singing wholesome songs and unleashing the sexual charisma in a bewildering succession.
By the 60′s, marketers and the music industry had created the “teenager” (a term coined by the recently departed Dick Clarke) and the teenager felt his power. The generation gap was invented as a permanent condition so everybody could try to adjust himself to it. Parents were pushed further out of their children’s lives (a process begun much earlier by the legally coercive common school movement of the early 20th century).
Many vulnerable parents were relieved. They didn’t know how to raise children anyway, having spent most of their own childhoods separated from their parents. So they turned to the experts and made Benjamin Spock a prophet for an age (and spawned an industry of “how to raise your child on the new principles of social management and modern irreligious child psychology). They turned their vulnerability into a virtue by concluding that they were better able to raise children because they had the latest teachings on parenting.
The children took the same approach to love. Only, instead of reading books, they listened to music. The Beatles began with cute, innocent songs, like “I want to hold your hand” (yeah, right). And while I remain an admirer of the extraordinary creativity and musical talent on display in the music of the Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work, I cannot deny that their vision of love left much to be desired.
It wasn’t long before rock and roll and pop music were working a revolution of their own – one long ago predicted by Nietzsche. The generation of the 60′s was drunk on revolution and high on saving the world. They were convinced that their generation had found the path to truth, which was merely a path laid out for them by John Dewey in their schools. It was a path to “your own truth”, to finding yourself through experimentation, through mindlessly rejecting the traditions of your parents and ancestors, and through rising above the limitations of your place to find yourself in a new universal place that is nowhere.
Perhaps that is the essence of John Lennon’s wistful ending to his strangely judgmentally sympathetic song: “Isn’t he a bit like me and you?”
Believing they were rejecting, but in fact merely absorbing more deeply, what their parents had handed on to them, the children of the 60′s made relativism their defining value. They were thoroughly debunked. They were ready to be conditioned.
America was “preserved,” – or at least found some ballast for a few decades, and only partially – by her “rednecks”, people not smart enough or schooled enough or high enough to realize that all they had to do to save the world was give more power to the government in DC. But an instinct to preserve disconnected from the wisdom that knows what and how to preserve is as vulnerable as the California teenager.
No society can survive relativism. Over the next couple decades we might experience the reaping of the whirlwind.
Perhaps we will see the face of our Lord soon. Perhaps He has ordained a time of great testing for us. Perhaps He is done with us (ie. American Christianity). Perhaps He will surprise us by granting repentance and renewal. There is no way to know what the future holds, because He is merciful. But if it were not for His mercy, it would be easy enough to predict: chaos, violence, breakdown, and tyranny. Same as always.
If He grants repentance, though, it won’t be abstract repentance and emotional remorse. It will be a return to love of neighbor as the valid expression of our love for God.
Really, this is my point: as a people and a nation, we have adopted a philosophy of life that is about love in the abstract, love as a word to stand in for my own passions and desires, love that is about the lover and not the beloved.
Loving our neighbors is not liking or feeling good about them. It is actively willing, not power for ourselves, but their blessedness. And our first neighbor is the one we covenant with to be faithful, “till death do us part.”
That is why the marriage is the bedrock of civilization and the family is the fundamental unit of freedom. It arises from a covenant that is a promise to “love your neighbor as yourself” and nothing else can lead to a flourishing society.
There are, contra the relativists who enabled Hitler and Mussolini to take over Germany and Italy and who are always the avante garde of tyranny, I say, there are permanent principles rooted in unchanging human nature. The command to love the neighbor is a command to be blessed and fruitful and happy. It is, in God, our only social hope. It is a law of nature.
If students read Latin texts in school instead of the swill we use to impose our relativistic morality on them, they would know that.
Constitution Declared Unconstitutional
An article we tried to prevent about a bad dream
In a long-anticipated, shocking decision, the lower branches of the Supreme Court have questioned the constitutionality of the US Constitution.
“Everybody knows the constitution is about separating churches from states and states from citizens. If the constitution doesn’t uphold the UNESCO declaration of food rights, it’s obvious that the future ran out of gas in white-riddled 1950′s America,” the Times quoted the editor of the Places as incubating.
Not to be carried away, US News and World Investigations took the side of the people, contending that if the constitution is entirely consistent, then it has nothing to say to the world as it is. “When justices demand justice, you know they are obviously trying to impose their will,” chief editor Will Spine opined. “Oliver Wendell Holmes made it clear that power is for those who have it and anybody who tries to take it from them is working for the wrong side.”
Breathless crowds have gathered outside a small scale model of Tianenmen Square outside the White House, wondering if the toy tank will ever run over the GI Chao action figure or if instead the groceries will go bad. Most bets are on the food going bad.
The President expressed his willingness to set aside the constitution for the remainder of his term, arguing that his intelligence is so much greater than everybody else’s that only by using his newly created number system can all the waters of the world, including the rising tide of debt, be made to recede from the White House steps. “This constitution is just words,” he said, to riotous approval from the professors at Duke University’s English department. “If I could replace them with my numbers, we’d never have another inequality to deal with.”
He proceeded to demonstrate how his new number system eliminates the need to reverse the inequality when you multiply or divide both sides of the inequality by -1. When a journalist (J) from the UC Berkeley department of thinking asked how this eliminated the inequality, the President painstakingly showed J that he was sexist. There was a long silence while the audience waited for J’s reaction, but when he realized what the President meant the relief was salvageable. He immediately wrote a check to the president’s campaign in an amount he acknowledged with gratitude to be grossly unequal to his guilt.
The crowd applauded him, and congratulated him by granting him five free sessions of sensitivity training. Witnesses report that J spent at least 30 minutes gratefully licking the president’s boots, vowing never to read the constitution again.
At the heart of the controversy is the recognition that nobody has read the constitution in over two generations, since it was outlawed in the American schools for promoting violence and religion.
How Classical Education Shapes Us as God Intended
BY BRAD GREEN
This post was originally published at The Gospel Coalition.
A funny thing happened as the 20th century came to a close. A number of Christians began to form what were being called “classical and Christian” schools. Believers who would have been (or were) involved in their local traditional Christian school or public school were suddenly making the case for Latin, reading the great books of the Western intellectual tradition, and talking about the traditional liberal arts—the trivium and the quadrivium.
Many in this growing movement of Christian and classical schools in recent decades would cite as inspiration a book by Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (Crossway, 1989). Wilson’s thesis was fairly straightforward: Christian parents have a biblical mandate to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). Traditional Christian schools have done many good things, but a more classical approach relying on the “tools of learning” has better potential to train up children in ways consistent with Scripture. Wilson relied on a seminal essay by Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (a lecture originally given in 1947). Sayers argued that the best way to recover true education in our day was by “turning back the clock” and adopting a form of the medieval syllabus. Sayers attended more to the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) than the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy), but she affirmed the legitimacy of both.
Not only have many new schools adopted this approach, but I also believe parents with children in other schools or even Christians on their own can benefit from the classical movement’s chief insight about learning and spiritual formation.
General Traits
While there are healthy debates within the classical and Christian school world about the true nature of classical education, several general traits can be identified.
First, classical and Christian schools are generally committed to some sort of word-based or word-centered education. One of the tragedies of much of contemporary education is a failure to retain the importance of language. Classical schools are trying to recover the centrality of the trivium (the language arts) as essential to true education.
Second, classical and Christian schools are almost always committed to recovering the great books of the Western intellectual tradition and attending to the past more generally. To be educated is to grounded in the texts of one’s own tradition, and for those of us in the United States, this means the central texts and ideas of the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and of course the development of the Western intellectual tradition from the first century to the present.
Third, classical schools are committed—to some degree—to the importance of the classical languages. This usually means that students at classical schools will take several years of Latin, and possibly some Greek as well. Latin and Greek are the languages of Western Christendom, and historically to be educated was to have at least some knowledge of these two languages.
Fourth, classical schools, in various ways, are also trying to recover the second and third components of the trivium—dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic is the practice of trying to deepen one’s understanding of truth through back-and-forth conversation and debate. Rhetoric is perhaps best defined as the art of fitting communication (whether in the written or spoken word). You will find students at classical schools studying logic (a component of dialectic), engaging in debate, learning via the Socratic method, and honing their skills through repeated opportunities to communicate both through writing and speaking.
Fifth, classical education affirms that there is an overarching telos or “goal” at the center of true education. This actually gets at the heart of what makes classical and Christian schools unique. Classical schools—at their best—hold that education is ultimately about the formation of a certain kind of person. While different schools may disagree on this or that pedagogical theory, or this or that curriculum choice, virtually any classical school desires to reach back and recover the notion that education is about human formation and transformation.
This is where a classical approach to education can be—rightly!—very attractive to Christian families. When I helped found Augustine School (where my children currently attend), I served as head of school for a few years. I would recommend to virtually any parent asking one simple question to the person heading their children’s school: “What is your goal for my children when they graduate from this school?”
The best of Christian thinking has always recognized we are pilgrims traveling to the city of God. While we have many joys and duties in this life, we understand present existence against the backdrop of our ultimate destiny as believers—to see God one day. Keeping one eye on heaven, or the vision of God, need not diminish the importance of life in the world. On the contrary, knowledge that life in the world is part of a larger and grander story—which culminates in the vision and city of God—can be a constant reminder that life in the here and now is important, meaningful, and weighty.
The best Christian education sees this task as a transformative endeavor that prepares students for (1) a meaningful, faithful, wise, virtuous life in the present, and also for (2) our ultimate destiny—to one day see God face-to-face and know him fully. Once we begin to grasp that true education is best construed as a person-forming endeavor, we are able to see more clearly the link between the gospel and education.
Applied Broadly
Some readers do not have access to this kind of education (at least in a formal way or setting), or do not have school-age children. Nonetheless the classical vision of education is worthy of attention. Its most important insight can be applied broadly: education is about the formation and transformation of a boy or girl into the man or woman—under God—they ought to be. This should be parents’ goal, no matter what school their children attend. Many homeschooling families are able easily to “convert” their homeschooling efforts in a classical direction, using a book like The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise.
Any parents can create space for this flourishing simply by turning off the television (or closing the computer screen), starting a fire, and sitting as a family reading a good book. I share precious memories reading with my children C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or Douglas Bond’s Crown and Covenant or Faith and Freedom series.
Parents can also begin—when appropriate—to let children join certain adult conversations about theology, politics, and other topics. My children enjoy the sharing of ideas, and they are learning how to think and discuss themselves by watching daddy and his friends engage in meaningful conversation.
Even if you’re not raising children, you can still reap the benefits of a classical-type education. Read, read, read. There are many lists of “great books”—one might start with the appendix to Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and Leland Ryken’s Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective. If accountability would help, why not start a reading group that meets monthly? Or consider scheduling your next vacation or trip around a key conference or educational experience that inspires your reading and learning.
As I have argued in The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life, we are ultimately shaped and transformed by the gospel itself—which is the only means and way by which we will ever see God face-to-face and become whom God has intended. Within that theological framework, a classical education can be a helpful tool by which we are shaped over time. Classical education—at its best—can be a gospel-fueled tool or resource used to shape and transform God’s people, so that God’s people might be prepared for their ultimate destiny—being presented to Christ as a spotless bride without blemish, and to see God face-to-face.
Bradley G. Green is associate professor of Christian thought and tradition at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He is the co-founder of Augustine School, a classical and Christian school, where he also served as head of school for several years. He is the author of several books, including The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Crossway, 2010). Green posts various essays, thoughts, and book reviews/notices athis website.
