Genuine Education: Remembering Who We Are
[T]he emotions and motives of other people “come before us” in works of art, [fiction, poetry, and drama,] and we spontaneously sympathize, by recreating in imagination the life that they depict.
—Sir Roger Scruton
Culture situates us in the world and makes life liveable together by a complex fabric of sympathies, manners, habits of mind, affections, rules, language, and rituals. Our culture is Western. We cherish it most for its power to free us to see who we are and how we ought to live together. That vision is forged between memory and hope: memory of what has come before us and hope in the promise of what is lasting and true.
Significant social forces would have us forget the West. Divorce us from our past, and we can more easily be divided from one another. Divided from one another, we can be shaped into something altogether different: not a community with shared memory, shared convictions regarding one nature, one human condition, and common purposes, but isolated individuals at best, at worst, enemies to one another: class against class, race against race, gender against gender. Isolation and tribalism are not the heart of Western culture.
The West, however, is the wellspring for a liberal education classically understood. The curriculum, pedagogy, and daily life of any genuinely classical academy are together an exercise in Western culture. In its root meaning, to educate means to lead out. To teach is to lead the students out of ignorance and out of the limits of their immediate world. Human experience is wider than children’s experience; the world is greater than the immediate world they know. To teach, then, is not to bring things down to the student’s sense of what is worthwhile. It is to bring the student into the culture that frees them to see who they are and how they ought to live.
Culture is the record of what we know and love. By record, we mean something historical: our heritage, patrimony, or inheritance. Our culture was born in the past and bequeathed to us over the generations. It was forged repeatedly through critical scrutiny and confirmation. We call works of literature and art classics if they were standouts in their time and if they endure beyond their times. They were tested and passed on down through the centuries. They are standouts in their times and have endured across generations.
That means that culture is also a matter of right judgment. Our forebears made judgments about the world and embedded them in works of literature, art, and history. Generations judged them as most worthy. Our students, as inheritors of that culture, are formed in their own judgments by the two kinds of judgment that precede them.
The West’s specific development is a matter of history: The culture of ancient Israel converged with Greek culture in medieval Rome to give us our culture. Only under the impulse of Latin Christianity do we see the West in full bloom for the first time. Rome absorbed Greek modes of thinking, and from Israel it absorbed Christian religion.
Philosophy and Revelation remain our two main sources of normative authority. In that light, the historicist’s argument won’t suffice as an apology for embracing the West. The rationale for Western culture is not that we live here and are Westerners. We study great Western works, rather, because they free us to see what we ought to see and who we ought to be.
If a genuine education is best understood as classical in origins, it is liberal in purpose: the end objective is chiefly intellectual and aesthetic freedom, as the term liberal denotes. Its content and pedagogy lie in the liberal disciplines. Educational paydirt lies in the students’ understanding and mastery within the liberal arts and sciences.
Of all the disciplines, the humanities hold the heart of a liberal education, since they uniquely cultivate knowledge of the heart. Here, we note three core fields:
Humane Letters. Great Books constitute the curricular heart of studying literature, expository and imaginative. By reading, discussing, and writing about classic works of literature, students meet the minds of the greatest writers who ever lived, they forge the habits of speech proper to human existence, and situate their lives with their fellows through the communication of what is true. Speech is the mode of our existence. Nothing is known, no good is advanced, without the mediation of speech. Speech is external as in the Great Books, seminar discussions, and writing. It is also internal, as in the conscience where God and man alone speak to one another. Even there, the quality of speech within the conscience is formed by the study of Scripture, classic theology, philosophy, and genuinely humane imaginative literature.
Art. Great masterworks—paintings, sculptures, architecture—form the curricular heart of studio art and art history. Art mediates between the viewer and the artist. By the arrangement of a work of art, we see what the artist sees, we are moved by what ought to move us; in that, we develop shared experience that situates us in the world together. We can say something similar of poetry, drama, and music. Like art, they are redemptive in their power to forge in us what we ought to feel, what we ought to share in common: sympathy for the human condition, genuine hope, joy, anger, and the range of heartfelt matters without which life would be unbearable. Is this related to speech? Yes. Great works of art give us the words we need in times of suffering, love, anger, and desire—and the entire range of right feeling.
History. In the liberal discipline of history, our students contemplate the great lives and great events of the past. By the habit of history they strengthen their bonds to the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. Living habitually under history, as the Hebrew people first did under the Passover and events of the Exodus, and as Christians have later done living by Christ’s charge, “Do this in memory of me,” our students live according to the mystery of existence when habitually recollecting the eruption of great events into the normalcy of time.
Augustine speaks of the memory as of “infinite recess.” In that light, memory is the field on which human speech meets divine speech. This has great significance for culture and education. History, like nature and being, is a concept of unity, one by which we get our minds around the whole of things. By living under history, by preserving the culture we inherit, by educating the young in what has been bequeathed across generations, we recollect as a way of life, the form of which was first developed in ancient Israel. In that way of life, we have the gravest reason not to forget. No less than who we are is at stake.
This is a guest post by Andrew J. Zwerneman, co-founder and president of Cana Academy. He blogs weekly at www.canaacademy.org and is the author of History Forgotten and Remembered (2020) and The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal (2022). Andrew is the narrator for the forthcoming series of films, HISTORY250™.
