What is classical education all about, anyway? This is a difficult question to answer, because classical education encompasses so much – a whole world, one might say. Let’s consider two answers given at the bookends of our western civilization. Plato said that education should name the “formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain.” He thought education should make you hate what you ought to hate and love what you ought to love. Fast-forward to the twentieth century and Dorothy Sayers rather ardently claimed in her very famous essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, “the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves” (emphasis added). These rather different definitions might help explain how I’ve been feeling lately.

For the last several months, I have been unable to respond to any current event or to any acquaintance’s social media post without thinking some form of the phrase, “it’s all about education.” To form that thought into a coherent argument applicable to the myriad perspectives on our innumerable present societal woes would be laughably impossible. Yet I do wish to find some common thread, some way to understand how education can be connected to so many different problems.

It is easy to agree with Sayers: The better a person knows how to acquire knowledge and information for himself, the better off he’ll be. People today do have rather a difficult time reading, discovering, categorizing, and thinking for themselves. They have lost certain essential tools for learning. That’s a big problem. We all know and agree that education is about knowledge and information. When looking at our system in America, there is almost universal recognition that “education” leads to varying degrees of success, wealth, and power. That many haven’t been as well equipped as others would be the simple answer, the quick diagnosis. It is helpful to some extent, but I don’t think it says everything that needs to be said.

If we look to the other quote, Plato’s definition of education is much more confusing and perhaps unrecognizable. While we hear the words hate speech and bigotry, love and unity in the national dialogue frequently right now, and yes, a parent’s main goal these days is to teach her child to be a “lover not a hater”, that doesn’t mean that love and hate should be connected to formal education, does it? Teaching a small child to love the dog or love her baby doll isn’t what we would call education anyway – it’s just something that happens naturally at home.  So, ultimately, what in the world does love have to do with education?

A lot, actually. It has so much to do with education, in fact, that I think it’s the key link, the place we should be examining most closely. Simply put, we postmodern Americans have believed a great lie. We have believed that education would make our pocketbooks thicker but should do nothing to enrich our hearts. 

The reason I call this idea a lie and not simply a mistake is because while educators were busy pretending that education could be limited to serve only one end (a “good” job, success, wealth, and power), our hearts and souls were being shaped and molded without our attention.  Even in classical education circles, for decades we have been saying that the main problem with modern education is that it is utilitarian; that it doesn’t value learning for its own sake or produce good thinkers, but instead is only interested in reaching the goal of financial success. While that is indeed a problem, I don’t think it fully realizes the deeper problem. And if the idea was simply a mistake and not actually deceptive, we would have realized it quickly. If it was simply a mistake to believe that education should be about getting a good job, it would’ve shown itself as such very quickly. Universally, children would have grown up to meet financial failure. But of course, children can learn skills and, especially in America, can become quite rich using those skills. So even though some children have fallen through the cracks for a whole host of reasons, over the last century many students have become financially successful adults because of America’s educational system. This success has allowed the deception to take root and we are only just now noticing the consequences of the deeper problem. 

What is the deeper problem? What was really happening - perhaps intentionally spurred on by an ideological enemy, but more likely unintentionally - was that education was shaping the hearts of millions of little Americans. Any imparting of knowledge always involves the heart, not only the mind – an idea I will return to shortly. So if modern education, which we supposed was only serving one end, that of material success, has also been shaping hearts, the question is has it been shaping them properly or poorly? I believe poorly. The first stones of that education were knowledge of the self. While good education has always been connected to self-knowledge, it has always maintained that all self-knowledge begins outside the self, not within (i.e. through the senses, through spiritual revelation, etc.) The modern mind embraced a new perspective. It sought to perceive all things through the self. It taught students that there is nothing which he should not question - no idea, no tradition, no institution, no “social construct” – because ultimately, he determines what is, what exists, what is true. This has created a foundation in each child’s heart that we might call the principle of doubt. Nothing can be known except what the individual thinks or feels. And if an individual can only know himself,  then he can only and should only love himself. Therefore this “principle of doubt” has the strong power to teach a child to adore nothing but himself.

Again, I’m oversimplifying, but there are some logical conclusions that wind their way out of this self-centered foundation. If ultimately only the individual, the self, matters and can determine what is, then duty to and love for anything outside of the self play second fiddle.  Things like country, family, and a creator go right out the window – perhaps not immediately, but pretty quickly. Where do we think terms and phrases like “self-care”, “love is love”, and “I’m in a relationship with myself” come from? It might be difficult to trace specific movements, trends, and fads directly to formal education, but if we want to find common links between so many different kinds of societal problems, I would argue there’s some type of fundamental idea about self and love that has contributed to the connection.

As an example of how deeply and imperceptibly this foundation of self-centeredness is rooted in our society’s general educational philosophy, consider John Dewey. He was a key player in the shift toward what is called “progressive education” in the early 1900s. His ideas about education can be directly linked to how we have educated for most of the last century. Let’s just look at his simple idea of “self-interest”. When speaking about the motivation for a man to risk certain danger in order to help others, Dewey does not mention love. He only speaks of the “continuous formation through choice of action” of the self. That’s a strange and convoluted way of saying that he believes that when someone risks danger for someone else, it is simply because the man has chosen to “be that kind of a self.” This is a bizarre way of getting around the idea that we human beings are capable of loving, and not just capable but created to love others more than ourselves and sacrifice our own safety and happiness for the sake of another. Not surprisingly, Dewey is referenced as an enemy within classical education circles.

Dewey clearly abandoned the simple teachings of the Christian tradition, but he didn’t have to be a Christian to understand the concept of love and duty towards God, family, and country; what might properly be called piety. This had been a solid and enduring element of the culture that he inherited. Bringing it back around to Plato, we see that even the pagans recognized that love needed to be encouraged, modeled, and taught – not arbitrary “love” of whatever the self desired, but a defined love shaped and molded to act with kindness and respect and care towards specific persons.

Plato gives us a clue about this “shaping” with the word formation. This word evokes an image of a human being as a piece of clay requiring a bit of work before he is recognizable. The key difference between Plato’s use of the word and Dewey’s is that Plato believed something outside the human being caused that formation, namely the truth. For Dewey, formation occurred through the human being’s own choice and could take any shape.

Let’s unpack this a little bit.

Okay, so if I say that teaching a child to love others is important, almost everyone would agree. But I’m not sure that we all would agree about whom we should love, what we should love, or even how we should love. And that brings us to the point of drawing some kind of connection between education as an imparting of and training in knowledge (Dorothy Sayer’s definition) and education as a formation of loves and hates (Plato’s definition). Love, not desire or lust, only exists when tied to truth. To know truth, to recognize it, understand it, and live according to it is to love it. In the Bible, “to know” and “to love” were synonymous actions. These were more than simply emotional or physical acts. They involved the entire being. Similarly in the broader ancient world knowledge meant a participation in and with the object known. Within these ancient contexts, one first knew and loved mother, father, family, and one’s country (or fatherland) as an extension of that family. That was the beginning of the formation of a person and provided the foundation for all other knowledge and loves.

And specifically within the Christian context, of course, one began to know and love the Triune God because He first knew and loved you. Christ says, “I am the Truth” (John 14:6) while John teaches that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8). Interestingly, it is this second passage in John that explicitly ties knowing God to love! (“The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”) And we know God by His Word and by knowing His creation: the most basic definition of “curriculum” for education. It is fully explained throughout Scripture as well that loving God means loving our neighbor. Our closest neighbors are our family members, while the broadest application of our neighbor would be those who live in our land and under the same laws. So we have the fundamental “who and what” we should love: God, family, country.

Knowing and loving involve all the parts of man: the soul, the body, and the mind. To oversimplify, then, we could say that education is the mystery of the mind coming to know truth, the body learning to participate in that truth (think of training good habits for using and controlling one’s body etc.), and the soul beginning to love it (St. Augustine and others refer to this as making truth one’s own, becoming united to truth). The beginning and end of this education is Christ, who establishes Himself as the Truth and all things are one in Him. But the modern mind gives a different definition of truth and therefore education: the self is all that can be known and therefore is all that exists and is the source of all truth and reality. (Many trace the introduction of this definition back to the French philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century who coined the famous logical proposition, “I think, therefore I am.” ; some trace it back farther than that.) This naturally leads to the principle of doubt mentioned earlier. And if only the self can be known, then only the self can be loved. This idea is false! But once it is taught and accepted, it eliminates completely the idea that some persons (e.g. God, family, country) ought to receive our love and devotion above other objects and above ourselves. If only the self can be loved, then it is “free” to love whatever and wherever it pleases. The formation of clay becomes less and less recognizable. The body, mind, and soul are shaped according to no pattern, no order, because there is no hand shaping the clay. Rather than the Truth directing our habits for our own good and the good of those we love, we develop the habit of following our immediate impulses and desires in the moment. I have called this habit a “love of self” but in reality it does not lead to the self’s good and therefore it is not really love at all but in the end can only turn into self-loathing.

To bring all of this back to Sayers and Plato, one might ask if they understood or taught this concept of love. Plato was a pagan and did not know Christ. That is true. But he did teach that Truth existed and could be known, even if he was not blessed to receive God’s revelation of His Word. That means that while Plato and the pagans couldn’t trust in Christ for salvation (as far as we know from what they wrote), they could understand that education was about a reality that first began outside of the self – that the self needed to be drawn into a higher truth outside of its own existence. At the very least, Plato understood that people ought to be taught to love first family and country before self and feel duty towards them. Turning to Sayers, then, she explains education as a passing on of skills so that people can learn for themselves. What does she mean with regard to love? At the very least, she understands that people need skills to learn, not just a body of facts or information, but truth. She knows that the world will seek to deceive and devour young people as they grow into adulthood and she recognizes that this can corrupt them. For Sayers, a proper education protects them from this corruption and enables them to find the truth.

The place of love in education is monumental. It is connected to the question of what education is and does and it is also a fundamental element of our understanding of faith in God. When I watch children learn, I often wonder at how mysterious and beautiful the process is, because inevitably I witness my students beginning to love what is true. And while there are many different ways to diagnose the problems with modern, progressive education and its curriculum, this point is the simplest; it is the most fundamental aspect of that philosophy’s error: Progressive education teaches the child to love herself above all else. Proper, good, classical education teaches the child to love God first, family and country second, and self only insofar as she is a created being loved first by God. I believe this kind of education not only prepares students to be successful, but it gives them joy and a habit of turning to their Creator for all things.