Edited by

Joanna Williams
Richárd Fodor

Budapest, 2025

Reclaiming Classical Education

© Authors, 2025

© MCC Press, 2025

Edited by Joanna Williams, Richárd Fodor

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address the publisher.

ISBN 978-963-644-124-1 (print)

ISBN 978-963-644-126-5 (epub)

Published by MCC Press.

Managing director: Tamás Novák

Managing editor: Borbála Mariska

Copy Editing: Ariane Laurent-Smith

Cover design: Miklós E. Zsemberi-Szígyártó

Electronic version: György Madarász

Electronic version v1.0

Contents

Preface

PART ONE: WHAT IS CLASSICAL EDUCATION?

Classical Education From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance (Thibaud Gibelin)

A Justification for Classic Liberal Education (Alka Sehgal Cuthbert)

Liberal Arts in Contemporary Education (Artur Górecki)

Evaluating Students in a Classical Education Programme: A Holistic Approach (Antonio Fernández-Cano and Mónica Vallejo-Ruiz)

PART TWO: THE IMPORTANCE OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION

How the West Was Won: Liberating the Past to Preserve the Future (Cornelis J. Schilt)

The Decline of Classical Education and the Crisis of Socialisation (Joanna Williams)

Education and the Nation State (Nicholas Tate)

Cultural Progress and Disciplinary Knowledge in the Curriculum (Alex Standish)

PART THREE: CURRENT PROBLEMS IN SCHOOLS

Education Versus Indoctrination: Challenging the Politicisation of Schooling (Joanna Williams)

Beyond Therapeutic Education (Dennis Hayes)

A Different Country Within the Same Borders: Comparing Academic Standards and Curricula Across Four U.S. States (Jonathan Butcher)

A Year of the Scottish Union for Education (Stuart Waiton)

PART FOUR: A FUTURE FOR CLASSICAL EDUCATION

Aristotle Against the Deep Fake — The Role of Rhetoric in Future Education (Milán András Constantinovits)

Classical Education at Collegium Intermarium University, Warsaw, Poland (Filip Ludwin)

Teaching Philosophy, Learning Reality: The Current Status of Philosophy (András Lánczi)

American Education Has Become a Joke: Here’s How It Can Be Taken Seriously Again (Bonnie Snyder)

About the Authors

Declaration

Preface

Education is at the heart of what makes us human. Through the person of the teacher and the institution of the school, wisdom amassed over centuries is passed from one generation to the next. At school, children gain knowledge that cannot be accrued through lived experience alone. The curriculum, divided into subjects, introduces children to mankind’s scientific, artistic, and humanistic achievements. They come to know the abstract, the theoretical, and the beautiful. As humans are born into an already existing world, a fact the philosopher Hannah Arendt describes as natality, knowledge of the past is each generation’s intellectual birthright. Its possession allows society to advance, as old knowledge is critiqued and new knowledge is accumulated; yet mastery also permits continuity, as traditions are understood and maintained, and common threads bind citizens together. In this way, teaching is more than imparting facts; it is a project of socialising children into the wisdom and values of civilisation.

The focus of this volume is classical or liberal education; that is, a content-rich, subject-based approach to teaching that honours ancient knowledge and introduces children to what British poet and school inspector termed “the best which has been thought and said in the world”. The authors, educators from countries across the globe, share a concern with the current state of education. We came together in Brussels in early 2024, as part of an initiative organised by Mathias Corvinus Collegium, with the aim of reviving an interest in classical education. This book is a product of that endeavour, with 16 authors with different academic backgrounds from 6 European countries and two states of the U.S.A. Among the contributors, readers will find university professors, academic researchers, policymakers, and writers who left academia to find new paths to their visions.

Contributors to the first section of this book trace the origins of classical education from Ancient Greece through to the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment right up to the present day. Gibelin acknowledges the importance of this historical tradition, noting that classical education “marks the continuity of European civilisation since the dawn of Greece and shows us the legacy of humanity’s past rather than mirages of the future.” This grounding in the legacy of the past preserves ancient knowledge and traditions in the minds of a new generation. The intention is not, as Sehgal-Cuthbert makes clear, to present the past as dogma. Instead, she argues, classical education “is based on the belief that an ethical commitment to maintain and develop our intellectual tradition is a necessity for originality, not its obstruction”. Górecki emphasises the importance of classical education to character formation: “The primary goal of classical education is the mental and moral fitness of man,” he suggests, “the efficacy of his mind and will, leading to control over his emotions.”

In Part Two, authors consider the enduring significance of classical education for individuals, nations, and humanity as a whole. Schilt argues that “our identities are rooted not in discarding the past but in embracing it with open arms.” The focus of classical education, “on the transmission of the inheritance of a people, its culture and civilisation,” notes Tate, is vital if children are to identify with a nation. He contends that “the nation and nation state should be at the centre, not the periphery, of our concerns as individuals and citizens and at the heart of our objectives as educators.” Yet today, with the demise of classical education, children are taught to problematise the past and the future. Standish claims the emphasis schools place on decolonial theory and the climate crisis is “undermining the value of disciplinary knowledge traditions in curricula, leaving pupils without an objective perspective from which to view contemporary social and political issues.” The upshot, as Williams indicates, is that “new generations meet an adult world divided with conflicts between school and home”.

As Part Three of this volume explores, in moving away from classical and knowledge-based education over the course of a century, schooling has been hollowed out and separated from the intergenerational project of transmitting an intellectual and cultural inheritance. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1930, schools that do little more than “instruct the masses in the technique of modern life” leave children with “no feeling for their great historic duties”. Teachers become pedagogues rather than subject experts, and children are perceived not as resilient, capable young scholars but as emotionally fragile beings who need protection from challenging content and the stress of high expectations. The classroom becomes a site for therapeutic interventions. Hayes notes, “Teachers in the U.K. and Europe are too willing to see their primary role as working with students’ emotions because they believe there is a ‘mental health crisis’.”

When separated from the legacy of the past, schools become institutions in search of a moral purpose. The direct transmission of values in classes covering topics such as comprehensive sexuality education fills the intellectual vacuum. Williams points to “the introduction of new subjects into the curriculum, the transformation of traditional academic subjects, and the emergence of the teacher activist” as contributing to “shifting the purpose of schools towards concerns with social justice”. Children are taught “correct” ways to think about a range of issues from climate change to gender and race. As Butcher contends, “Families are faced with the pervasive—and pernicious—influence of left-of-centre special interest groups such as teacher unions and gender activists with radical, Marxist views on economics and culture.” Waiton considers how this process has played out in Scotland: “the ethos within schools encourages a diminished and degraded sense of the world, creating a form of ‘disaster education’ that loads adult/political concerns onto the shoulders of young children.”

How do we turn back the tide of so-called progressivism that has hollowed out our schools, robbed teachers of their true purpose, and left children rootless and culturally alienated from older generations? The final section of this book offers a way forward. Ludwin provides an example of classical education in practice at the Collegium Intermarium, a university in Poland. “Classical education fits well with legal studies and is beneficial for students and future lawyers,” he contends. Constantinovits explores the importance of instruction in the ancient art of rhetoric, which, he writes, “can serve as a guide for students of Generation Alpha in classical knowledge, values, systems thinking, avoidance of manipulation, and social interaction.” Lánczi, meanwhile, makes the case for teaching philosophy, a subject that is “vital in the quest for truth; a quest which has fallen out of fashion in modern European culture.” Part Four concludes with Snyder’s call to arms. “It is time for academia to rediscover and recommit to the core Judeo-Christian principles and understandings on which their institutions and America’s founding documents were based,” she argues.

We end this volume with the Declaration on Classical Education, initiated by MCC Brussels and MCC Learning Institute. Our hope is that teachers and educators from around the world will join us in arguing for this approach. Children deserve so much better than indoctrination, basic skills, and therapy. They deserve knowledge of the best that has been thought and said—not set in aspic but as a meaningful intellectual inheritance. Only armed with knowledge of the past can they make the world anew.

Joanna Williams, Richard Fodor, János Setényi

Part One

WHAT IS CLASSICAL
EDUCATION?

THIBAUD GIBELIN

Classical Education From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance

Faced with the problems that beset today’s education system, many conservatives are calling for a return to classical education. This essay reviews the principles of classical education and traces its development from its Greek origins to the threshold of the modern era. It highlights the conception of the individual, of the social order, and of culture that was attached to it at different times. Our aim is to contextualise problems with the current education system, on the one hand, by comparing it with what European societies have been able to achieve in the past, and on the other, by identifying the ways in which the West has departed from a tried and tested tradition. We then consider the relevance and topicality of the ancient heritage through its resurgence in sometimes unexpected forms. It is only by reformulating the original characteristics of classical education in the present day that reforms can have lasting force, coherence, and impact.

Keywords: excellence, tradition, dialectic, resurgence

To understand where we are as educators, twenty-five centuries after the golden age of classical Greece, we need first and foremost to put things in context. Developments in education in Europe since the Renaissance have been exceptionally prolific, but it would be risky to analyse them without understanding practices from previous centuries. Our ambition in this article is to provide an overview of classical education, from its origins in antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, in order to offer the reader the keys to understanding the modern era.

Definitions and Background

Classical education derives its prestige from its ancient origins. It benefits from the aura of antiquity and from having survived through many centuries. It marks the continuity of European civilisation since the dawn of Greece and shows us the legacy of humanity’s past rather than mirages of the future. It is therefore opposed to the “new man” and the nihilism of tabula rasa.

The term “classic” refers to four categories:

• Aesthetics: the fundamental role of beauty (associated with the Good and the Righteous); it presupposes harmony, measure, balance, and completeness.

• Seniority: i.e. an authority associated with origin; in Greek, the same word designates command and beginning (arché).

• Excellence: “aretḗ”, excellence, is the central ideal of all Greek culture.

• Greek and Roman history: The events recounted and their decisive influence on subsequent eras are important for expressing an ideal of humanity.

Far from offering independent or even contradictory approaches to a vanished world, these four categories are underpinned by a profound unity. Excellence is essentially linked to beauty. Far from being the mere appearance of things, beauty expresses their inner structure. This manifestation of being is based on the recognition and celebration of an order that is both natural and divine. The “Greek miracle” in both the sciences and the arts reflected the religious conceptions of the Hellenes. The authority associated with origin is therefore fundamental. As far as ancient history is concerned, it is the Ariadne’s thread bequeathed to later eras to cultivate their filiation with Greek origins. Yet a profound gap between these foundational categories and our current situation raises the following questions:

• What is our relationship with aesthetics? The consumer society has buried people in the production of standardised products; in less than a century, functionalism has tarnished our environment; the reign of the commodity indicates the triumph of excess everywhere.

• What is our relationship with antiquity? For three centuries, various religions of progress have been undermining the authority of customs and tradition. It is the future, not the past, that is invested with mysterious authority.

• What does excellence mean to us? The cult of equality, associated with human dignity, is one of the hallmarks of the modern age. Among the Greeks, excellence gave honour a central place in the hierarchy of values. Werner Jaeger has highlighted the aristocratic nature of Greek education (the paideia).[1] Virtue does not fundamentally refer to moral asceticism. It refers to the virtuosity with which a man conducts himself. In this sense, it fits in with the Greek concern for excellence. Such a conception does not imply that men are given over to unbridled competition. It is always a question of excelling in one’s place, in the service of a higher good. The abstract individual as conceived by Western modernity did not exist for the Greeks. The famous Delphic maxim “know thyself” invites us to find our rightful place in the city, the family, the profession (and not to indulge in introspection).[2] Greek aretḗ combines with the four cardinal virtues identified by Aristotle: prudence, temperance, justice, and strength. These virtues have passed into Christian culture. Yet aristocratic excellence waned with the decline of ancient civilisation, and with it, classical education itself.

• What is our relationship with Greek and Roman history? It has lost much of its clarity and importance as our modern civilisation has become more established and complex. There are two issues here. The first is to gain a true understanding of classical antiquity by following the path opened up by great European thinkers such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lucien Jerphagnon, and Walter F. Otto; the second is to recognise how the classical model has been updated during different periods in our history.

Classical education helps us answer these questions. It serves as a point of reference and offers support to us in the present. The exact meaning given to classical education changes in each new historical context, but there are consistent, necessary characteristics. Classical education marks the human character with the seal of aesthetics, moderation, Hellenic descent, and excellence. In addition, there are contingent characteristics that bring together the immense and sometimes contradictory knowledge accumulated over centuries of European civilisation.

Genesis and Development in Antiquity

Homer was the educator of Greece; the Iliad and the Odyssey were the foundation of education and the pinnacle of epic poetry. Fundamentally, grammar and rhetoric are necessary for a complete mastery of language. They paved the way for dialectic, through which reasoning was articulated and thought perfected. These liberal arts, later grouped together in the “trivium”, were all necessary conditions for the development of philosophy. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (which were to form the “quadrivium”) enabled man to take stock of his environment and grasp the harmony of the world so that he could act wisely. The aim was not just to assimilate a body of theory but, above all, to comply with the Delphic maxim “nothing is too much”.[3]

The aim of Greek education was to create the “good and beautiful man”, the “kalos kagathos”. In him, practical reason, justice, courage, and temperance come into harmony. In Juvenal’s words, the result of an accomplished education is “a sound mind in a sound body”.[4] This man is competent in combat as well as in speech, in song as well as in action. This is not a “ready-made life”: it is an aristocratic and demanding shaping of existence. However important the knowledge acquired through education may be, it comes after this conception of man. More than a thousand years separate archaic Greece from the Low Roman Empire: the evolution of this ancient civilisation cannot be summarised in a few paragraphs, even if we limit ourselves to the field of education. We are simply trying to determine which legacy, in this field, has fallen to Western civilisation.

The pre-eminence of a culture is usually the result of political and military hegemony. As the poet Horace famously wrote, “Conquered Greece conquered her fierce conqueror and brought the arts to rural Latium”.[5] He is evoking the cultural ascendancy of Greece over Rome at the time when Augustus founded the Empire. The civilisation that spread throughout the Mediterranean basin was Greco-Roman. An educational model was developed and established over several centuries. But how?

Rome’s irresistible ascendancy over the five centuries of its Republic (from 509 to 27 BC) was based on its admirable political organisation, the discipline and ruthlessness of its legionaries, its exemplary religiosity and respect for the Mos Majorum. As Fustel de Coulanges has shown, the Greeks and Romans initially shared a similar conception of the city.[6] Moreover, the language, the functional tripartition, and the religious pantheon bear witness to a common, albeit ancient, ancestry.[7] From the earliest days of the Roman Republic, there were regular exchanges between Lazio and the Greek cities of southern Italy. By the time Rome began its great duel with Carthage (254 BC), the Greek cities had already fallen into decline. Exhausted by the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC) and the ascendancy of Macedonia, they were struck by oliganthropy while Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) Hellenised the East in the course of his conquests and reduced Hellas to a portion of the Hellenistic world. At the end of the Punic Wars (146 BC), the Mediterranean basin came under the control of Rome.

Hellas was both collapsing and coming into its own. The masterpieces of the Great Age captured an ideal Greece, while the cities that had once repelled the Persian Empire languished under foreign rule. In artistic terms, Greece triumphed completely. For a time, some Romans were opposed to luxury, which they considered corrupting, but the victories increased the importance of the fine arts in proportion to wealth. The Greek aesthetic canons were adopted by Rome, just as the Renaissance would rediscover them fifteen centuries after Augustus. The ascendancy of Greek art was not simply that of an aesthetic canon considered ideal: it was linked to a concept of measure and excellence defined in the introduction—in other words, to the highest aspirations of Greek man.

The Greek historian Polybius (200–120 BC) recounted the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean basin, which he witnessed firsthand.[8] The Republic was at its height. It was “the Senate and the Roman people” who put their stamp on the known world and who were able to assimilate dynamically the forms of Greek genius. Born of a singular people, and in full affirmation of its singularity, the Greek model of education cannot flourish without the vitality of a strong people. This is an important lesson: there is no such thing as a “ready-made education”. A great example inspires emulation, not imitation. Alongside the prestige of the Greek language, Cicero’s De Inventione, the anonymous treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the works of Quintilian illustrate the affirmation of Latin rhetoric.

The initial Greek model of education changed when it became the common culture (Leitkultur) of the Mediterranean world. According to Quintilian, the duly educated young man could find “power, honour, friendship, glory in this life and in the life to come”.[9] Balance between body and mind, civic dedication, and mastery of discourse: the imperial model that succeeded the Republic was truly Greco-Roman. Classical education became synonymous with elite education, that of the ruling class of the civilised world. It was a model whose value transcended a people and an era. A decisive change was taking place here. Traditional education, Greek as it had been, trained young Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans to fulfil their lives as Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans. When the city extended its orb over the world, citizens were inclined to dilute their local roots in the universal oecumene. Rome annexed the universality of Greek reason to its politics, becoming a world while remaining a city.[10] The decisive point, which enables us to understand the decline of ancient civilisation, is that the classical model provides the contours of a model of humanity but cannot provide its substance.

There is a danger in this edifice. It lies in the artificiality of the ideal form as soon as it becomes the fruit of mechanical repetition. The generalisation of the classical model reflects a devitalisation. The evolution was undoubtedly insensitive. The administration of the immense empire demanded zealous civil servants rather than heroes. The purpose of education became less about excellence and more about utility. Above all, we need to consider what official education takes away from the elites of the cultured provinces. Education is no longer that of the Greek cities of the archaic and classical eras, the result of a transmission that is both clannish and civic, communal and political, perpetuating a habit rooted in the ages since the birth of Homer’s poems.

The model of the universal monarchy originated in Persia and passed to Rome via the Hellenised East. The countless borrowings from Greek and Hellenistic culture were put to a completely different purpose. They were no longer concerned with the freedom of the cities and the excellence of citizens. Now they were to guarantee the stability of an unprecedented cosmopolitan whole. We cannot understand the decline of the ancient world without judging its late culture through the eyes of a contemporary of Pericles: a culture of imitators and parvenus. Classical education did not disappear, but it was passed on, diminished, and petrified.

Christianity and Medieval Changes in Classical Education

The Middle Ages marked the transition from one world to another. As soon as the Western Roman Empire collapsed, it was no longer a question of defining classical education but more a question of understanding the ruptures, developments, and resurgences in European education along the long road to Western modernity. Here, we trace the key developments:

Christianity’s Initial Appropriation of Classical Education

Just as ancient education was rooted in the Hellenic religion, so the Middle Ages bore the stamp of Christianity. The conversion of the Empire marked a complete subversion of ancient civilisation. At the end of a long decline, a culture born of Greek religion served as the philosophical basis for a religion derived from Judaism.[11] Saint Augustine condemned ancient culture “as an independent ideal, rival to Christian revelation”.[12] Yet, he also proposes a classification of knowledge leading to revealed Truth.[13] According to Augustine, reason gives rise to grammar, followed by dialectic and rhetoric; then, in order to reach God, come geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic. In this way, he introduced and justified in the nascent Christian world the liberal arts defined by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry in 270.[14] We owe to Boethius (born in 480), the two categories, trivium and quadrivium, forming two successive stages of so-called “classical” education in the medieval centuries.[15] The focus here is on the reception of antiquity by the nascent Middle Ages, a thousand years after the golden age of classical Greece.

Paradoxically, this Copernican revolution united the Middle Ages with antiquity. By failing to exclude ancient wisdom from the new religion, the former clashed with, competed with, or spurred on the latter. In claiming to go beyond and overcome philosophy in service of the new religion, the Greek fathers of the Church integrated both. What were at first merely methodological rules contributed to a Hellenistic-Christian synthesis. Elements of the medieval melting pot coexisted from late antiquity onwards, and we will analyse their developments later. But it is important to note that neither the Church nor the last faithful followers of the Hellenic tradition saw things this way. The “liberal arts” were the debris of the ancient world and existed only to serve as a justification and propaedeutic for Christian revelation. Education was then a substitute for religious teaching. It was assumed that people learn in order to submit to a truth that is external and superior to the sensible world. From this point of view, there was both a complete break with classical education and a prerequisite for ideology in its modern sense.

The transformation of classical education was not simply the result of a renewal of the worldview within the late Roman Empire. These upheavals came to full fruition as a result of a key historical event: the “barbarian invasions”, that is, the advent of Germanic peoples conquering the Christian West. Christianisation in the religious and ideological spheres was matched by a political and military overthrow imposed by young people on a society in decline. Europe is dialectically the place where they met and also the fruit of their union.

The Church As the Foundation of a New World

The Church occupied a central position throughout the medieval millennium. This historic age came to an end precisely with the break-up of denominational unity caused by the Lutheran Reformation. Although education and the religious history of the continent cannot be superimposed, the two subjects largely overlap. From the point of view of the educational legacy bequeathed to modern Europe, we can distinguish two major medieval periods: first, five centuries of dissolution, fallow land, and sedimentation; then, five centuries of expansion and redeployment, of unitary civilisational affirmation and national flourishing. The first period was above all an interregnum. The Church played a decisive role. It took the place of the failed administration after the fall of the Roman Empire and assumed a significant share of temporal power. The bishops, in particular, played a leading political role. The “contempt for the world”—which the Church accidentally assumed—explains the gradual separation of the Church from temporal power.[16] Political Augustinism imposed a decisive divide[17] between temporal and spiritual power, and the Papacy gave it considerable scope. In contrast to the symphony of powers that prevailed in Byzantium, the Gregorian reform in the West worked to separate spiritual and temporal powers in order to place the former above the latter. During the first period, at the crossroads of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Carolingian Renaissance led to the development of numerous schools and the organisation of classical education in the medieval West. But the profound “feudal night” that followed meant that the glorious Carolingian decades had to be seen as a parenthesis in the long genesis of the Christian West.

The transition from one era to another in the tenth century was marked by the stabilisation of societies and of the Western world as a whole. This period was marked by the end of invasions: the Moors started to retreat from Spain, and Viking incursions and Magyar raids came to an end. The founding of the Abbey of Cluny in 910 marked the rebirth of monasticism and the gradual reorganisation of the Roman clergy. The political structure of the West was based on feudalism, culminating in the renovatio imperii of Otto the Great with the advent of the Holy Roman Empire in 962. The result was the spread of the Roman order, as evidenced by the Christianisation of Scandinavia and Central Europe. The Great Schism of 1054 demonstrated the specificity of the West vis-à-vis the Eastern Roman Empire. A new world was taking shape. It was up to the prelate Adalbéron of Laon (947–1030) to define the constituent orders of medieval society.

Three types of education in the Middle Ages correspond to the three orders of society:

• Ecclesiastical education for the Oratores, “those who pray”, i.e. the Church, the holder of spiritual power.

• Nobility education for the Bellatores, “those who fight”, the nobility, holders of temporal power.

• Education in the Third Estate for the Laboratores, “those who work”, placed under the authority of the first two orders.

Education in the Third Estate involved children leaving their mothers at a very young age to enter the adult world, working in the fields, looking after the herd, or toiling in the workshop of their father or another member of the village community. This type of upbringing prevailed for the overwhelming majority of the population until the upheavals linked to the industrial revolution. The community formed a cohesive whole, where transmission was guaranteed by mimicry and the organic interweaving of generations. This model differs from complex societies that isolated young men from their parents to make them citizens of the city. With the collapse of the political order and the depopulation of cities, the early Middle Ages saw the disappearance of youth as an age group separate from the adult world.

Classical Education and European Chivalry

The development of medieval society gave rise to two types of elite associated with the classical heritage, one temporal and the other spiritual. All education is designed to form the ideal man sought by society at that point in time. The figure of the medieval man is dual, even hemiplegic: hero and saint.[18] In the Middle Ages, the figure of the knight was a secular counterpart to the figure of the “kalos kagathos”, the citizen-soldier of classical Greece. There were a few major differences between these two ages. The Greek hoplite was the man of a city and of Hellas; the European knight was the man of a fiefdom and of the Roman oikoumene in its new meaning, Christendom. The feudal system, which rebuilt the political order on the Nobles of the Sword, was developed within this framework. The knight’s service was reminiscent of the devotion of the ancient citizen. Throughout the West, the emperor was the pinnacle of the temporal hierarchy. But the man educated according to the Greeks held legislative, executive, judicial, military, and religious responsibilities. However admirable he may be, the knight lacks the fullness of a classical education. He fulfilled mainly a military duty and ignored book learning, the art of discourse, and philosophical wisdom; this knowledge, inherited from classical antiquity, long remained the prerogative of the clergy.

Chivalric education concerned a small fraction of society. There were several stages before a child, first a mere page and then a squire, was knighted. The formation of this education was a slow process. According to Dominique Barthélemy, medieval chivalry was born out of the fusion of traditions carried on by families from the Roman, Germanic, Gallo-Roman, and Gallo-Germanic elites who made up the society of the early Western Middle Ages.[19] There is an unbroken link with Roman tradition. In the Roman Republic, the equestrian order (ordo equester) was a censual class, requiring the possession of a horse and participation in the best-equipped ranks of the legion.

The renewal of the warrior elite in the wake of the Germanic invasions played a decisive role. The cult of heroism among the Franks and Goths brought the new nobility closer to the archaic Greek model, whereas the decadent elite of the Low Empire had little connection with the ancestral examples of which they retained a formal knowledge. As early as the High Empire, Tacitus observed among the Germans that “good morals have more empire there than good laws have elsewhere”.[20] While the High Middle Ages were marked by a brutal decline in classical culture, the human qualities that had enabled it to flourish were expressed in unprecedented ways.[21] The quest for excellence at the heart of Greek paideia was reborn in the forms of bravery, chivalric devotion, and the quest for the Holy Grail.

The Clergy and Classical Education

Although the clergy were the repositories of ancient culture, they were still distrustful of secular scholarship. This rivalry undermined the initial completeness of classical education and had a considerable influence on the intellectual elite. In spiritual terms, the exemplary figure of medieval man is the saint, the sublime halo above power and knowledge. The eminent figure of Francis of Assisi illustrates the paradoxical relationship between classical education and the Christian ideal. A well-educated young man from a wealthy family, Saint Francis fulfilled his vocation by detaching himself from the world to found a mendicant order, the Franciscans. Knowledge and riches were eclipsed by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. “Blessed are the simple-minded, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” says the Gospel.[22] Just as the temporal sword derives its legitimacy from its submission to the Church, the liberal arts are justified as a means of promoting Christian revelation. In the medieval West, classical culture in the service of religion led to the formation of a new philosophy, scholasticism. Its main aim was to reconcile Greek wisdom with Catholic theology.[23] Its main characteristics are as follows:

• Continuity with the formalism of the Late Empire and a close relationship between grammatical formalism and logical formalism.

• Reasoning framed by premises and dogmas.

• Truth is discovered through disputatio, by comparing opinions and relying on undisputed authorities.

• The central importance of Aristotle’s philosophy.

Scholasticism was spread and supported by the University. After the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088, a vast network was built up over the centuries. The West was covered with universities just as it was adorned with cathedrals and enriched with monasteries. It was the great expansion of a blossoming culture. In 1400, Paris had between 3,500 and 4,000 students. The university did not teach a trade or how to live but knowledge that was the authority. Its development across Europe led to the formation of a unified intellectual elite from one end of the Christian West to the other. It was the intellectual counterpart of chivalric culture for the military elite.

Classical education in the service of Christian revelation had far-reaching effects. The rigorous scholastic discipline gave the medieval spirit great strength. Classical education also incorporated an unprecedented dogmatic dimension; the pupil is merely the ephemeral receptacle of an intangible and irrefutable truth. This exemplary humility is not without a reverse effect: the puny repository of such a great and necessary truth becomes its proudest propagator. Classical education is no longer so much the path to excellence for individuals (“know thyself”) as the method for humanity to verify the Truth valid at all times and in all places. In this way, medieval education reveals one of its most salient characteristics and is closely associated with a major transformation in European civilisation. The moral edification of the individual and universalism are, in fact, two structuring points of support, destined to spread throughout subsequent eras.

The Birth of European Modernity: Ancient Revival and German Reformation

The late Middle Ages were characterised by a general flourishing of the West. In education, this was reflected in the rediscovery or development of other areas of knowledge. Mathematics, civil law, and medicine were gradually added to theology and canon law in European universities. Then came the rise of vernacular cultures. This was the beginning of a dispersive movement within Christendom or rather the reappearance of the never-erased diversity of peoples and regions. Organised into guilds or corporations, trades underwent remarkable development. This development was accompanied by the affirmation of territorial identities. The rise of cities and municipal freedoms brought back some of the conditions of ancient culture. For Italy, in particular, this phenomenon led to the early rediscovery of classical heritage. As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri created the incomparable masterpiece that is the Divine Comedy, both a founding work of the Italian language and a precious testimony to the affiliation between ancient culture and medieval Italy. Later in the same century, Petrarch heralded the humanism of the Renaissance and a rediscovered taste for ancient literature, not as a scholastic reference but as a “communion of identity.” This inexorable and continuous reconciliation over the two centuries preceding the Renaissance bears witness to the power of classical references that had long been forgotten, but also to the undiminished willingness of the same people to reconnect with what had once been. The taste for the classics was a matter of sentiment, of sympathy, a movement of self-discovery for the Latin world.

The same dynamic was brewing in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages, asserting itself by “protesting” against the Latin culture celebrated south of the Alps. The immediate and definitive success of the Lutheran Reformation in the German regions beyond the former frontier of the Roman Empire indicates the permanence and power of the Germanic identity. The Reformation represented a fundamental historical shift in that it abolished the denominational unity of Europe, which had been the great achievement of the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most decisive aspect of the Reformation was that it was undoubtedly a theological dispute but, above all, a nationalisation of religion. European unity, whether religious, cultural, or political, depended on the ability of the Romanic and Germanic worlds to overcome their fundamental antagonism.

There are doubts about recognising classical education in the fabric of a culture that is neither that of classical antiquity, which is now definitively over, nor precisely that of the Middle Ages, which are drawing to a close. Medieval unity collapsed under the pressure of national particularisms. However, the Roman matrix left such rich resources of unity that new divisions could be overcome by new achievements. This modern flowering is both national and European; both civilisational and polycentric; still largely aristocratic but also bourgeois. Latin declined in use, but French soon took its place. Arts flourished from one end of the continent to the other and became the major spiritual expression of European civilisation in the modern era. Despite the rehabilitation of ancient aesthetics, these developments seem to have little to do with classical education, and yet, they are its highest expression.

Renewing Classic Archetypes

We referred earlier to dialectic as one of the pillars of classical education. However, dialectics is more than a mode of reasoning; it is above all the art of knowing what is and what has always been, not as a unified whole but a set of contradictions which we experience and must reconcile. In its classical expression, European modernity is a dialogue between Europe and the nation, between the particular and the universal, belief and reason, thought and reality, and so on. According to the central thesis of the philosopher Stéphane Lupasco, “dialectics is the logic of the contradictory”.[24] Reality is fundamentally contradictory and antagonism is always present in the future: the revival of classical education and European culture is closely linked to this wisdom.

Dialectics is not the search for the moment when the opposite surpasses itself in synthesis: that is the impoverished Marxist conception of dialectics. The new dialectic came into being over the course of the medieval centuries, not at the instigation of any particular school of thought, but through a renewal of the fundamental antagonisms that were to resonate throughout the whole of European culture. Enemies in antiquity, then united by Scholasticism, philosophy, and the Christian religion, engaged in a tragic and fruitful confrontation. Philosophy as an ideal of knowledge and religion as a moral ideal both clashed and supported each other. The former thirsts for freedom and thrives on wonder; the latter, driven by obedience, lives on the fear and hope of God. The search for principles in philosophy is matched by the study of the divine will in religion.

It is pointless to search for classical categories frozen in the steel corset of Scholasticism or in the perfumed sonnets of Petrarch. It is just as pointless to seek them out in Roman unity or in the effervescent and contradictory outpourings of the Renaissance and the Reformation. These dilemmas pose the wrong question because they lead to division. Yet the fundamental lesson of past centuries is that to be classical is not to belong to a school but to be above a school. It is not a question of comparing, powerless, the different expressions of the order that has come about in the past. It is a question of balancing and prioritising the contradictory forces of the times in which we live. This is why classical education is not to be found through historical research but through the conquest of our times. The poet André Chénier expresses the ever-necessary and ever-relevant mission of the classical spirit, against all antiquarian and backward-looking thinking:

[…] But the spirit of light

Brings harmony and day to this chaos;

From divided elements he recognises love,

And everywhere, at happy intervals,

Separate and make peace between rival seeds[25]

This explains why classical education is not the ephemeral apogee of a society. The reign of classical categories lasts as long as a vital tension is maintained. Throughout the ages, when a culture asserts itself, classical education is attested by the completeness and authenticity of the people trained and the works produced. Completeness refers to harmonious expression recognised as the right measure. Authenticity testifies to the profound originality of the people who express their being in the world. Conversely, decadent education can be recognised by its artificial and fragmentary character. In the declining phase of a culture, a form of desiccation or abstraction degrades authenticity, which takes on the character of artificiality. In the same way, completeness breaks down and original harmony disintegrates into fragmentary education. Strength must not lack form, nor must form lack strength. Substance must respond to contours.

Civilisations may be mortal, but the assonance of opposites is based on archetypes that cannot be surpassed. It has constantly animated the European spirit through other representations. Greek genius was based on the assonance of the Dionysian and Apollonian poles and the Greek measure inherent in classical education refers precisely to the search for this balance.[26] In the Poetics, Aristotle analyses the flowering of tragedy as the development of its internal logic, through a dialectical path that is recognisable in all great creations.[27] Other gods represent fundamental antagonisms, such as Hermes (god of the distant and the external) and Hestia (goddess of the home, the near and the inner).[28] The assonance of the hermaic pole and the hestial pole thus establishes spatial equilibrium. Aphrodite and Ares express the antagonism between amorous osmosis and bellicose conflict.

Conclusion

Classical education is found from age to age in its necessary archetypes, and it disappears from age to age in its contingent and fortuitous aspects. Our Western societies of the twenty-first century have no single origin. It is conceivable that our genesis can be traced back to Athens, Rome, or the wake of the horsemen of Árpád; but it is also possible to trace our origins back to the Middle Ages, to the time of the cathedrals or of Dante Alighieri, just as Dante celebrated the century of Augustus as a founding epoch. It does not matter; perhaps the origin lies ahead of us. In the words of Ernst Jünger:

creation is not an initial act: it is possible at any point where the flames of the unexpressed burst forth. To bind together is not only the goal of love, but of all higher communion, whatever it may be.[29]

Another world exists, but it is in this one.

Bibliography

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Barthélemy, Dominique. La chevalerie : De la Germanie antique à la France du XIIe siècle. Fayard, 2007.

Boèce [Boethius], Institution arithmétique [De institutione arithmetica]. Translated by Jean-Yves Guillaumin. Les Belles Lettres, 1995.

Chénier, André. L’Invention, 1787. (Œuvres completes). Gallimard, La Pléiade.

de Clairvaux, Bernard. De laude novæ militiæ, 1120. Vivat Editions, 1866.

Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. La cité antique, 1864.

Gautier, Jean-François. La polyphonie du monde, 2021.

Hadot, Ilsetraut. Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique. Vrin, 1984.

Hazard, Paul. La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680-1715). Boivin, 1935.

Jaeger, Werner. Paideia, the formation of Greek man. 1954.

Jünger, Ernst. Besuch auf Godenholm. Klostermann, 1952.

Juvénal [Juvenal], Satires, Translated by Pierre de Labriolle and François Villeneuve. Les Belles Lettres, 2002.

Léon, Antoine, and Pierre Roche, Histoire de l’enseignement en France. Que sais-je? Presses Universitaires de France, 2018.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford University Press, 1943.

Lupasco, Stéphane. Logique et contradiction. Presses Universitaires de France, 1947.

Marrou, Henri-Irénée. Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité, le monde romain. Editions du Seuil, 1948.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Fritzsch Verlag, 1872.

Plato, Alcibiades majeur, Les Belles Lettres.

Polybe [Polybius]. Histoire [The Histories]. Edited and translated by Denis Roussel. Gallimard, 2003.

Riché, Pierre. De l’éducation antique à l’éducation chevaleresque. Flammarion, 1968.

Saint Augustine, Dialogues philosophiques: De ordine. Translated by Jean Doignon. Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1997.

Saul, Nigel. Chivalry in Medieval England, Harvard University Press, 2011.

Tacite [Tacitus], La Germanie [Germania]. Edited and translated by Jacques Perret. Les Belles Lettres, 1949.

Taine, Hippolyte. Les origines de la France contemporaine, Le régime moderne. Hachette, 1893.

Viguerie, Jean de. L’institution des enfants : L’éducation en France, 16e-18e siècle. Calmann-Lévy, 1978.

ALKA SEHGAL CUTHBERT

A Justification for Classic Liberal Education

This paper argues that the current problems facing classical liberal education (CLE) in Britain have historical precedents in the public debates between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley in the late nineteenth century, and F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow in the mid-twentieth century. At the heart of each debate is a contestation of cultural authority over knowledge, belief, and what kind of knowledge is superior for humanity’s self-knowledge and for societal progress. In other words, the debates are about value judgements as well as epistemological claims. The second part of the paper draws on philosophy to offer a history of ideas to illustrate how our understanding of knowledge, belief, and truth has itself developed historically. The formal knowledge we have today is an accumulation of past experiences codified according to disciplinary standards and which now provides us with the intellectual context from which a renewed model of CLE could, in principle, be fashioned. Such an education is based on the belief that an ethical commitment to maintain and develop our intellectual tradition is a necessity for originality, not its obstruction, as contemporary critical theories often assert.

Keywords: religious belief, epistemology, Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis

Is classical liberal education (CLE), loosely defined as a curriculum based on the study of philosophy, ancient narratives, Latin, and the arts and humanities, possible or even desirable as a model for schools in contemporary Britain? In opposition to much contemporary opinion, which places a higher value on more modern subjects, often supported with claims for their greater relevance in today’s society or that they maximise individuals’ life chances, I argue that CLE is both possible and, more importantly, the best model for schools today. Instead of asking whether CLE is relevant to contemporary society, we might do better to flip the question and ask whether contemporary society is able to find CLE relevant, and if not, why not.

The first part of this paper sketches the current parlous situation of CLE. We compare this to two historical moments that clarified the unique value of CLE. The second part, drawing on epistemology and educational philosophy, explains why the truth content entailed in a CLE curriculum and ethos provides children with a better education than today’s educational models based on extrinsic and often instrumental criteria.

Part One: The Problem

The recent closure or reconfiguration of university courses in Classics and humanities during the past six years suggests that classical liberal education is not in good health. The following timeline of recent events illustrate these concerning developments:

• 2017: The British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences publishes a report raising concerns about the future of the humanities in higher education.[30]

• 2018: The University of Hull announces the closure of its philosophy department.[31]

• 2021: The University of Leicester announces plans to drop English language and medieval literature modules and replace them with “decolonised curricula.”[32]

• 2022: The University of Roehampton announces the closure of courses in Classics, philosophy, drama, and creative writing.

• 2022: Sheffield Hallam University drops its English Literature course to offer English Studies instead. The change places greater emphasis on skills in order to accommodate students intending to take a Postgraduate Certificate in Education.[33]

• 2024: The University of Kent confirms plans to drop its Philosophy programme.[34]

The reasons for this parlous state of affairs are multiple and complex. Some argue that it is sensible to terminate university courses that do not prepare students for future employment. Britain’s politicians criticise what they deride as “Mickey Mouse” degrees.[35] In 2003, the then-Labour government’s Children’s Minister, Margaret Hodge, argued that the content of many courses “may not be as rigorous as one would expect […] and may not have huge relevance to the labour market”. Such claims were repeated over two decades later by then-Conservative Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.[36] In their clamour to criticise “useless” degrees, they reveal their assumption that the purpose of higher education is to prepare people for the labour market. Even those who ostensibly defend teaching Classics and humanities tend towards economic or politically instrumental justifications for their continued pursuit. Few argue that liberal education is important as an end in itself.

One internal justification for the humanities has recently been made by scholar David Butterfield. He describes studying the Classics as “the search to understand what others have produced, individually and collectively, and to learn from them what it is to be human”.[37] This succinct and elegant formulation needs wider support; this paper is my attempt to contribute to this endeavour. Below, we look at two historical, public debates on the respective merits of the sciences versus the Classics. They reveal fundamental differences in how we understand ourselves and society.

Debate One: Matthew Arnold and Thomas H. Huxley

Author, critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold and biologist and educator Thomas H. Huxley spoke on the topic of science and literature at two meetings of the Royal Academy of Arts, held in 1881 and 1883. They did not argue over which discipline was better per se, but which provided the best intellectual resources for improving education. Arnold’s concern was that preserving the legacy of the past, embodied in the study of (Latin) classical books, required a fresh approach to literary criticism. He wanted schools to move beyond narrowly historical analysis, which he condemned as leading to over-annotated school books, heavy with historical context. Arnold wanted teachers to help render the moral and literary meanings of the Classics more clearly for more people. Similarly, in response to what he judged to be poorly written books in English, used primarily in elementary church schools, he proposed a return to book lists for teachers.[38] For Arnold, improving public culture and schools meant a renewed focus on the Classics as well as a new pedagogic frame of literary criticism; a frame in which the book began to take a central place for its literary features as well as overt moral content.

Huxley, an advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution, agreed that the curriculum required more than science alone. However, he argued, a culture’s “habit of critically estimating value by comparison with a theoretic standard” required science to supply “the theoretic standard”.[39]

Arnold did not disagree about the value of science, but he recognised its limits when it came to understanding humanity. He argued that no scientific standard, with its necessary abstraction and largely rule-bound experimental procedures, could engender the kind of understanding entailed in a literary judgement. Furthermore, literary judgements encourage the kind of dispositions, imagination, and thought that are integral to a humanistic, rather than technical, model of education.

Arnold recognised that his differences with Huxley were about more than linguistic definitions. They represented contrasting beliefs about how we make sense of the world, what it is to be a morally good human, and how power can complicate our understanding of this. It is not that he considered science to be all objectivity and literature to be all subjectivity; rather, he recognised that both are the outcome of human effort and mental energies, but they are directed towards different objects of knowledge and draw upon different principles.

A society’s preferred forms of knowledge, those which are supported both with status and material resources while other forms of knowledge are offered no such support, are more than an epistemological question: such preferences are formed within historical and, therefore, political, contexts. The closure of humanities courses, listed at the beginning of this chapter, arise not just because of developments within academia or due to economic considerations. They also indicate subterranean shifts in our collective socio-cultural beliefs about what counts as knowledge and what it is to be educated. For this reason, the academic onslaught on the Classics and humanities requires a stronger academic defence than is currently in place—one based on first principles rather than consequentialist justifications.

Debate Two: F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow

In 1958, scientist and novelist C. P. Snow gave a lecture at Cambridge University on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. This would become the title of his book, published a year later to broader public attention. In Collini’s discussion of this event, he writes that Snow’s argument was that it was ‘members of the scientific culture who “have the future in their bones”, while those of “the traditional culture” are “natural Luddites.’”[40] F. R. Leavis who, along with I. A. Richards, had established Britain’s first undergraduate course in modern English literature, responded fiercely. In his essay Two Cultures? The Significance of CP Snow, Leavis excoriated Snow’s status as a novelist as well as a scientist. But it was not the epistemological value of science over humanities that was the object of Leavis’s criticism. He objected to the cultural status Snow afforded to science. Leavis was concerned that the language and standards of science were acquiring the status of self-evident truths through repetition alone. Leavis described scientific language as becoming the “currency” for what society valued, at the expense of the humanistic study and of literature in particular.

Part Two: In Defence of Classical Liberal Education

What follows is a sketch of a history of ideas that illustrates how each new contribution, which significantly developed the state of our collective knowledge in Western Europe, was predicated on open-minded engagement with established knowledge and prevailing cultural beliefs. Rather than isolated moments of significant intellectual breakthrough and assuming they arrive with a limited shelf life, we can understand breakthroughs as moments of, often unintended, originality made possible through a deep engagement with, rather than rejection of, past knowledge. In the field of the sociology of education, Rob Moore criticises a reductive historiographical approach to the development of ideas as a “tombstone” version of progress which speaks to a broader antipathy towards the past more generally.[41] Working backwards chronologically, I select key ideas from Kant, Vico, Augustine of Hippo, and Plato in order to identify affinities and differences in their thought.

Kant

The following quotation illustrates the nature of Kant’s originality and shows why he is considered to be a revolutionary thinker:

It has hitherto been assumed that cognition must conform to the object […] Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition.