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The Magnificent Ideal
By Samuel Foat, Dean of Students, Upper School
As learning is a worthy endeavor, teaching well is a difficult art; the proper aim of education looks towards the formation of the whole person and on their behalf values things of utmost truth, goodness, and beauty. In practicum, the scholar is meant to be intentionally molded towards continually maintaining a posture of learning well, in order that they may live well. With this preeminent aspiration, we must acknowledge the fork of means that lies before us: the progressive and classical models of education.
Progressive education¹ functionally maximizes one’s potential utility towards society by emphasizing the social and political goals of adaptation and evolution.2 Utilitarianism is nothing new: people have always wanted to avoid pain and pursue pleasure3 in fashions that widen their own prospects. This philosophy is presented under the experiential learning, critical thinking, student-centered banner of pedagogy that has surged in popularity since the beginning of the 19th century.4 Practically, progressive education makes a point of student collaboration as a primary means of instruction by which students must then accomplish this aforementioned task of education: learning well in order to live well. Postmodern philosophy influences this style of education as the dominant way of thinking in the current age as things that are true, or good, or beautiful are not standards in and of themselves, but abstracts primarily attained as a result of collective effort. Consequently, the progressive education movement generally does not place high value on cultural or intellectual heritages but instead values continual reinterpretation of history and information based upon current circumstance.5
Primarily, classical education represents the intentional methodology of teaching people to love what is life-giving by immersing them in the αρετή of their heritage. Practically, these gifts are given as any good gift would be: when it is appropriate to do so, by whom it is appropriate to do so. Within the contextual stages of the trivium and quadrivium, young scholars are taught the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. These “lost tools”8 are available to all who seek them, however, it is not the hand that needs to be primarily trained, but the heart; proper love and proper fear9 rightly focus affections10 that men with chests might live among us once more.11
Educators who fail to acknowledge their responsibility to the entire12 human being trade leisure for less-than. May it not be said that our scholars lack in legacy: what is before us is all we have, and yet, what we have is not our own. May the moral imaginations of all educators mentor odysseys towards magnificence.
5Classical education is “σχολη αριστος” or, “the magnificent ideal”.6 This roaring fire is hot, and apt to forge malleable souls who are transformed in noble result.7 Classical education is rooted within antiquity, however, its fruits are ripe and available to all in the modern age.
¹As primarily developed by Dewey, Kilpatrick, and Darwin but more recently seen through the adoption of programs such as Common Core Standards, NCTM Standards, emphasis on STEM, and college and career readiness.
(www.hyperhistory.net), Rit Nosotro. “History of Public Education.” History of Public Education in the USA, May 9, 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120509224247/http://hyperhistory.net/apwh/essays/cot/t0w20education.htm.
2The Progressive Influence on Modern Education. Hillsdale Online Courses. Accessed October 7, 2022. https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/k-12-education.
3 Bentham makes this distinction throughout his work- functionally this is something the vast majority of people demonstrate through their choices towards self preservation and comfort.
4 Kennedy, Robert. “Progressive Education: How Children Learn.” ThoughtCo. ThoughtCo, May 30, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/progressive-education-how-children-learn-today-2774713.
5 The Progressive Influence on Modern Education. Hillsdale Online Courses. Accessed October 7, 2022. https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/k-12-education.
6 Pieper, Josef. Leisure, the Basis of Culture ; and the Philosophical Act. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1952.
Young, Tim. Arete: Excellence or Virtue (What the Ancient Greeks Thought and Said about Arete). Cave Bonfire Series. Sugar Land, TX: The Classics Cave, 2021.
7 Regardless if this idea originated by Plutarch, Socrates, or Yeats, it is clear that fire is a helpful picture in regards to the nature of education, and what benefit is available to a person who will undergo the trials of holistic scholarship.
8 Sayers, Dorothy L. The Lost Tools of Learning: Symposium on Education. CrossReach Publications, 2017.
9 Machiavelli Niccolò, Leslie J. Walker, and Cecil H. Clough. YThe Discourses. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
10 Edwards, Jonathan. “Affections Notebook, “No. 7.” In Jonathan Edwards Documents. New Haven, CT: The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, 2016
11 Lewis, C. S. 2001. The Abolition of Man. Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, No. 9. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
12 While discrepancies between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle existed regarding the degree by which particular elements should be valued, they generally agreed on the importance of the physical self and the spiritual self (the soul) submitting to virtue.
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