Last month, I wrote a post about the situation a Tallahassee Classical School and Michelangelo's David. My point was crystallized in he following observation:
Knowledge of Scripture and art can no longer be assumed about the reading public.
Which then gets us to Chairperson Bishop and the parents who weren't prepared for David's nakedness. They need an honest-to-God classical education as much as the kids.
In other words, as embarrassing as the episode was, it really strengthens the case for classical education.
And I was gratified to see that Hillsdale withdrew is affiliation with Tallahassee Classical when things went hopelessly goofy.
But a recent piece at The American Conservative alert us to a concerning development that could potentially erode the classical-ed movement just as it's gaining traction:
On January 12, Pepperdine’s Jessica Hooten Wilson published an essay with a disconcerting question-as-title: “Is White Supremacy a Bug or a Feature of Classical Christian Education?” The essay touts the overhaul she helped spearhead at the Classical Learning Test—an alternative to the SAT and ACT—to “ensure that there is not only equal inclusion of writers across time periods but also representation from women and writers of color.”
Hooten Wilson urges her co-laborers in the classical education movement to diversify their reading lists and conferences:
In our textbooks, we should peruse the authors of the works and, if applicable, the editors or introductory writers to ensure an assortment of voices from various nations and cultures, as well as an equality of both sexes… When these groups [classical schools] gather, they should be lifting up more than the white men in their ranks as wonderful speakers and teachers. Side by side with these leaders should be women and writers of color.
Hooten Wilson’s woke outburst is only the first public salvo in a war already underway—a war set to end in the conquest of the classical education movement by liberalism. The left’s long march through the institutions has conquered virtually every aspect of modern life in the West; it is held at bay only in the subcultures conservatives form when they break away from institutions infected with liberalism. Think of the CREC or the SSPX, New Saint Andrews College or Thomas Aquinas College.
But as soon as one of these subcultures emerges from the woods and comes down from the hills, it always catches the virus. Once a conservative institution attains some power and influence, the symptoms begin. Think now of the long succession of American colleges formed by Christians to educate clergymen, starting with Harvard. Go down the sorry list. Venerable Catholic universities have developed according to the same dismal pattern. Think of evangelical parachurch organizations, like Christianity Today or InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
The author, Matthew Freeman, cites some disappointing examples of staunch defenders of classical education granting the Left its premise for this: that equality is what education should be after.
This is fundamentally wrong, says Freeman, and falls for the fatal error of non-classical approaches: trying to impose modern sensibility onto the efforts of thinkers from a time when Western inquiry was predicated on the assumption of hierarchy, and when larger-than-life status was granted to figures on the basis of commonly recognized virtues:
For 2,500 years, Europeans and their descendants have read these books and taught them to their young people in academies and monasteries and universities. From Homer till now, Western Civilization has meant hero-worship; but not just hero-worship in general, or as a principle. It means Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Romulus, Alexander, Caesar, and Jesus Christ. But Jesus hardly entailed the end of it: The Christians of medieval Europe adored the Nine Worthies, argued over which pagans to send to Heaven, and wrote massive chronicles of saints’ lives. The Legenda Aureawas among the most widely read books in the Middle Ages, at times possibly even more than the Bible.
When David Goodwin, Roosevelt Montas, and other well-meaning defenders of the classical tradition insist “No, we’re not racist—in fact, our books are anti-racist!” they are guaranteed to lose, because they are not defending the actual tradition. They are defending a pale caricature of it that their enemies slopped together, and they have, incredibly, adopted.
Whether or not “traditionally excluded groups” embrace the tradition is a matter of indifference. The tradition is there to show us heroes for our veneration, and thereby, when we are lucky, to produce new ones. This is yet another case of the left being more correct than the right: When Padilla denounces his own discipline because human hierarchy is the foundation stone of the classical tradition, there is no point arguing with him. He is right! The difference between him and me is that I think that that is a good thing. The existence of the hero presupposes the excellence of the few and the inferiority of the many. That is hierarchy. Without hierarchy, you cannot have hero-worship, and without hero-worship, you cannot have the classical tradition.
Plutarch remains, perhaps, the greatest chronicler of great men. He tells this story:
In Spain, when Julius Caesar was at leisure and was reading from the history of Alexander, he was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. "Do you not think," said he, "it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?"
Have you, who are so much less than Julius Caesar, ever wept at the gulf that separates your life from that of a hero worthy of your worship?
I saw on Twitter yesterday that Jeremy Wayne Tate, CEO of Classical Learning Test, intends to respond to Freeman in the pages of TAC. I very much look forward to that. I hope he can reassure us that he's aware that a push to prioritize equality in a classical curriculum negates all he's been working for.
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