What Benefit Can Young People Derive from Classical Education? (Part 1)

[ This post originally appeared on my classical teacher site, Locus Classicus. ]

I want to approach this seemingly counter-productive question (at least for those of us involved in CCE, Classical Christian Education), by discussing  two pretty provocative classical statements that recently came to my attention regarding politics and theology.

These two statements, one from the 4^th century B.C. and the other from the 16^th century A.D. stake out the position that there is a great deal of danger in exposing young people to high and holy topics of discussion, because in general, young people are simply not fit hearers of such things.

Given the institutional educational folly that CCE seeks to address by recovering and disseminating the resources of our culturally-rich past, it seems obviously good for us to have middle schoolers and high schoolers grappling with complex classical and biblical ideas. In a world of the incessant and mostly meaningless chattering that is the nightly news and social media, it is especially good, surely, to teach young people how to publicly talk about complex political, economic, and theological ideas from the standpoint of a classical intellectual formation.

Indeed, these things seem so obvious that it may seem prima facie ridiculous even to ask the question with which I began, “What benefit can young people derive from classical education?” But assuming that we want to be, well, classical in how we approach our task, if classical authors themselves raise a question, we should take the time to consider it. It may be that after considering the question, we arrive at the very place we already were before asking the question. But that does not mean having asked the question was a waste of time, for in the process of inquiring and working through the issues to the answer we already knew, we ourselves may have learned some things about how to articulate our views better and act upon them more self-consciously and rigorously.

So in this light, come along with me and let’s consider these two statements from our rich classical heritage. The first is from Aristotle on politics:

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.3

The second statement, from a 16^th century Reformed thinker, reflects on the domain of theology:

Wherefore do I admonish young men striving for piety that they ought never to think about God and religion without enormous reverence, and still less should they try to publish and dispute. Let it constantly come to mind how great, and how inscrutable is the Majesty of the omnipotent God, and how there ought to be reverence and fear in the inquirer. Next, let it constantly come to mind how abject and vile is our condition, how imbecilic and vanishing our power of understanding, indeed, I say more truly, how corrupt and askew our judgment, especially about divine and heavenly things, that the animal destitute of reason is able to more clearly understand human things than man, however whole, being earthly and carnal, is able to recognize heavenly and divine things. – Wolfgang Musculus, *Commonplaces*, “Of God”

Taken separately, these two statements are provocative enough for classical educators, since they come from sources of our pedagogical tradition, which, presumably, we want to take seriously. But taken together they demonstrate a very long running theme (2,000 years between them) about the dangers inherent in attempting to educate the young in an intellectually robust manner.

On the one hand, Aristotle’s remarks about the problem of young people who are led by undisciplined passions attempting to speak about the high and noble art of politics seem hard to gainsay because they are based on common-sense observations. Young men in particularly really do tend – often for more years than they ought! – to be full of undisciplined impulses, and to shoot their mouths off in line with those impulses. Moreover, precisely because they are young, they lack adequate life experience to properly evaluate matters of great political import.

Would we trust a teenager or unmarried early 20-something to speak wisely about the blessings and setbacks that occur in marriage? Would we trust someone who has never set foot in a laboratory to speak meaningfully about the discipline of laboratory science? Would we want someone who got a D in physics to design and run a nuclear reactor? And of what use at all is the opinion about some matter of exegesis of the Greek New Testament of a person who knows only what little Greek he has managed to cobble together from consulting Wikipedia articles?

Such questions answer themselves, and so in a similar way it is difficult to simply reject Aristotle’s view that “a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science.”¹ On the other hand, the Christian theologian Musculus, standing solidly in the second generation of Protestant Reformers, goes so far as to say that young men should not try to publish and dispute about theology lest their piety reveal itself as rather being impudence.

Since theology is such an important part of any really robust classical Christian education, few remarks could be more incisive than Musculus’ in our day, given the widespread phenomenon of young men getting hold of a few pieces of Reformed theology and, as with politics, immediately indulging themselves in protracted, undisciplined, passionate outbursts against all comers, because, you know, Truth and the Gospel. Many pastors warn about such youngsters by using the phrase “the cage stage,” because it would be better for everyone involved if the kids were simply locked up for a few years and forbidden to speak until they developed some moderation and true insight into the topics about which they so easily and so fearsomely rant.

So on the one hand, it seems obvious to me that we should not be too quick to dismiss the practical problem these old voices raise for us as classical educators. And yet…

We cannot, of course, respond to these words of past wisdom by throwing up our hands in despair of the task of classical education, since, literally interpreted, it would seem that we can never truly reach our young charges because their youth makes their minds and hearts simply inaccessible. Shouldn’t we say to Aristotle, Distinguo, in order to have some time to consider if there are alternatives to the starkness of his judgment that for young people, whose unformed minds might as well be intellectually incontinent, political lectures bring zero profit? Surely it would be better for young Christian men to sit in classrooms grappling with the difficult thought of Plato and Cicero and Aristotle himself than to get their so-called “political” formation from the sensationalistic spectacles that are our sad little parody of a free press?

Likewise, would not Musculus, who himself followed a careful, systematic, Scholastic mode of inquiry, be pleased if we were to examine critically his words about not just the value, but also the spiritual health, of young people expostulating about theology? Is there no room for teaching the young robust theology because, as Musculus said, even animals devoid of reason can understand human things better than humans possessing reason can understand divine things? What should we say in reply to Musculus? After all, in Reformed circles especially, we hear all the time that one of our chief problems is ignorance of sound theology. How will we rectify this ignorance if we don’t start with our up-and-coming generation?

In one respect, these questions have a fascinating historical dimension. For wasn’t Aristotle himself a young man when he was being taught politics and ethics by Plato? Clearly he was not intellectually incontinent, and was able to make a great deal of enduring importance to Western society out of what he heard his master teach. Plato’s instruction of the youth Aristotle did not turn out to be in vain, and for those of us classical teachers who know the Christian Middle Ages fairly well, what a vastly different, and vastly much poorer, world we would have inherited without Aristotle!

Similarly, might it not be that Wolfgang Musculus, who was living in a time of extreme upheaval as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation began in great earnest to slug it out for the hearts and minds of Europe, was not speaking of the occasional youngster like Martin Luther or Philip Melanchthon or John Calvin. Rather, he probably had in mind the sorts of undisciplined layfolk who, perhaps only recently starting out on a basic course of education, yet spoiling for a fight with the local “papists,” started ranting about the nature and attributes of God, the distinction between justification and sanctification, and how predestination relates to free will.

Aristotle and Musculus are, in fact, correct: the young, both generally speaking throughout time and particularly in our own debased day, lack sufficient experience and discipline to appreciate rightly the shape and scope and depth of the big issues that constitute disciplines such as politics and theology. And since they are by their age and frame disposed to follow their passions rather than reason, and since increasing evidence in our own time shows that they are profoundly negatively affected by the pernicious dumbing-down of culture that is social media, it would seem that subjecting them to a healthy course of classics studies must almost necessarily be a fool’s errand.

Q.E.D.: Let us put away our Big Brainy Books and flagellate our high-falutin’ ambitions and cease to seek, to adapt Machiavelli’s infamous phrase, “imaginary republics” that will bring about our ruin rather than our preservation.

Or maybe not.

[ Concluded in Part II ]