Rethinking Classical Education (Part 1): Education or Ideology?

For the classical education movement to succeed in America, it needs to become untethered from ideology. But what do I mean by “ideology”?

In a 2020 article on Jordan Peterson, I cited Norman Doidge’s introduction to Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, where Doidge explained what he had learned from Peterson about the meaning and danger of ideology.

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within. . . . Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

The book of Proverbs warns against ideology when describing the epistemic vices of the fool—someone who follows simple ideas that purport to explain the world and people yet function as a substitute for knowledge, a buffer against genuine engagement with the complexity and uncertainties of life or—to use the terminology of the Hebrew wisdom literature—the riddled nature of the world.

By contrast, a man or woman well-formed in the epistemic virtues—character traits such as intellectual humility, tolerance for ambiguity, non-dismissive considerations of opposing arguments, etc.—will learn to recognize when someone is speaking from a place of genuine understanding vs. merely opinion or agenda-driven conceptualizations. A man or woman well-formed in the epistemic virtues will eschew oversimplified ways of looking at the world, even when the simpler perspective may be useful, or may be more easily instrumentalized for agenda-driven ends.

Over years of involvement in a variety of classical schools in the Pacific Northwest, I became concerned that classical education easily breeds ideology, both in students, and everyone else (teachers, administrators, parents, etc.).

Ideological thinking often emerges when we want to operationalize thought or art for external ends, essentially turning education and creativity into mere instruments for various social, economic, or political agendas. It is easy enough to spot such instrumentalization in the factory mindset of the achievement society, or in the co-belligerence between Islamic terrorists and woke revolutionaries in their joint crusade against the heritage of Western civilization. But it is less easy to spot ideology at work in the very classical education movement that is supposed to be an alternative to both the factory and the revolution.

Consider how teachers, parents, and administrators of classical schools routinely conceptualize the rationale for this kind of education. Whether driven by nostalgia for a medieval golden age, or dubious claims that Latin magically rewires the brain, or by the conviction that a worldview-centered classical education can help conservatives win the culture war, ideologically-motivated reasoning abounds. In the process, the justification for good education has shifted from anthropology and human flourishing (the biblical basis of good education, I would argue) to various agendas that can be justified, and sometimes even quantified, in pragmatic terms. Once the educational aspect becomes subservient to various agendas, then the forms, ideas, virtues, models, and traditions that are properly the content of classical education must inevitably be simplified to become ideological deliverables.

If the school happens to be one of those unfortunate institutions that tries to view all subjects through the lens of “worldview,” (a problem I’ve discussed here and here) then the instrumentalizing tendency is supercharged tenfold: texts that might have been an induction into more complex and ambiguous ways of understanding the world and others, are reduced to mere fodder for worldview analysis. Instead of learning to sit with a text and drink it in, reading becomes a decoding exercise to find the implicit truth-claims; the text becomes a mere proxy for the real business of a liberal arts education, which is worldview analysis. Can we blame students if they begin approaching meaningful art (whether a novel, poem, painting or song) as a husk that can be discarded once they reach the kernel within, the kernel being identification of the right or wrong worldview?

The showcase of this reductive approach is the notorious Omnibus curriculum produced by Veritas Press, an ambitious multi-volume project that achieved the remarkable feat of reducing all the great texts of Western civilization into mere debating points to reinforce the preoccupations of the various ideologues (mostly rationalist Presbyterians) assembled to create the Omnibus disaster. Instead of teaching students to approach texts in a spirit of curiosity and wonder, the approach of Veritas Press, Logos Press, and others is to teach students to to judge, to criticize, to become fallacy hunters.

But the problem is more systemic than the actual messaging produced by these outlets. The very medium of classical schools is often structured in ways that implicitly promote ideology. By turning the reading and analysis of books into a “subject,” with assessment models that force students to give an opinion (either in written essays or classroom discussions) on books or sections of books they have likely only read once and certainly not thoroughly digested, we teach them not to be patient recipients of texts, but to be opinionated, to be wise in their own eyes, and perhaps worst of all, to read quickly. And we should expect nothing less when classical schools approach the Great Books in ways that reinforce students’ assumptions that these texts are mere inputs for facilitating the right outputs. The text becomes an instrument in the larger project of approaching humanizing activities merely for their pragmatic value, for their intrinsic usefulness instead of their intrinsic qualities. Whether that usefulness is getting a good grade, becoming smart enough to be prosperous in later life, getting into a good college, pleasing one’s teacher, becoming clever enough to debate atheists and always win, or getting enough work finished so the weekend is free, the text and associated analysis comes to have a merely instrumental value. (I have argued elsewhere that this is similar to the Marxist’s approach to the humanities, eschewing as they did any sense of “art for art’s sake.”) Put a student through six years of this kind of training and you not only risk destroying his or her love of leisure reading, but you likely form the child in oversimplified ways of looking at the world.

If I have time, I plan to follow this post with a short series addressing some of the underlying ideologies that have calcified within the modern classical education movement, from overly simplistic theories of history (you’ll learn how classical education is more a child of the Enlightenment than the medieval period), to false theories of the brain (you’ll learn that Latin, despite its beauty and value, doesn’t actually deliver the cognitive benefits claimed by classical propagandists, at least as normally taught), while suggesting some ways that classical education might be purified from ideology.

Further Reading