Classical Education in Schools?

 

A movement is afoot to return a classical curricula to U.S. schools. With fifty years as a teacher and administrator, I’m for it—with some reservations. 

Classical education is built around the liberal arts—language and literature, natural sciences, formal sciences (logic, math, statistics), history, social sciences (civics, economics, psychology, human geography, sociology), and fine arts. They’re called liberal arts because they liberate students (from Latin liberalis—“worthy of a free person”—and ars—“structured practice”). In democracies, that freedom is the foundation of citizenship. 

Vartan Gregorian, esteemed late president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation, called liberal education the “soul of democracy” because it prepares students to “appreciate the differences between earning a living and actually living; to cultivate more than a passing familiarity with ethics, history, science, and culture; and to perceive the tragic chasm between the world as it is and the world as it could and ought to be.”    

Classical education typically begins in the early grades, teaching reading through phonics and valuing memorization of multiplication tables, poetry, and the like. A century ago, most Americans learned in these ways, but then, so-called “progressive education” swept the land replacing phonics with learning to read (or not) by context and claiming memorization was mere drill. Too, industrialization needed trained workers, so basic skills and learning for earning replaced rigorous liberal arts and sciences except for the minority of college-bound.   

By high school, classical education involves reading and discussing what some of history’s most influential thinkers had to say about truth, beauty, virtue, and citizenship: How can we find what is true? How do we define what is beautiful? How can we be a good person? How best to govern ourselves? Plato (pictured) favored philosopher-kings; 22 centuries later, America’s founders opted for democracy. Students who read and discuss Plato and Jefferson and Madison (and others between) will have a deeper understanding of the meaning of citizenship. 

Classical education is reviving most notably in charter schools with religious affiliations attracted by the long influence of Christianity on literature and the arts. Secular investors are attracted by their potential as models of excellence for public schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies have invested millions in classical schools. Schools in most European countries and many exclusive private schools in America have never lost their focus on the classics.

A weakness of traditional classical education is the narrow focus on European civilization brought to the Americas through conquest and immigration. We’ve been taught that our cultural heritage is from Plato, the Caesars, popes, Luther, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven—a long list of dead white men who shaped our world. 

And they did, but ours is only part of the world, and as our population becomes more diverse, it’s time to make the classic contributions of other cultures part of ours. Searching for truths? Read Confucius. Beauty? Examine India’s Taj Mahal. Innovations in the sciences? Moslems invented the hospital with separate wards for different ailments and gave us algebra and chemistry terms such as alcohol. Modern music? The roots of jazz and rock were in the many empires of Sub-Saharan Africa. Great literature? A Japanese woman wrote the world’s first novel a thousand years ago. 

Another classical weakness is the near absence of non-males in the heritage of many cultures, an effect of the traditional view that woman’s role is in the home and not as leaders or agents of change. That is changing, and a classical curricula needs to reflect that.

Taught well, the liberal arts favor no ethnicity or ideology or faith. They liberate students to choose from all that civilization has to offer. That is freedom.

 

                                               

                              Nationalization ceremony for new citizens

Immigration

 

 

We need workers. Immigrants want jobs. We have jobs. It’s a match.

As in nearly all developed countries, the U.S. birthrate is too low to produce enough new workers to replace retirees. We need electricians, plumbers, physicians, nurses, teachers, auto mechanics, food service workers, school bus drivers, carpenters, and on and on. 

Fortunately, immigrants are the answer. Unfortunately, America has an ugly history of bigoted immigration policies. In 1884, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration less than 20 years after Chinese were recruited and shipped here to help build the transcontinental railroad, including the most difficult part over the Sierras, where they were found to be reliable and hard workers who didn’t drink. Other Asian immigrants were severely restricted during the early 20^th century.

In 1921, a quota system was introduced to deny entry to most southern and eastern Europeans—Italians, Poles, Jews, and others—who wanted to escape conflict and poverty at home. It was a time when a popular belief in eugenics claimed these “separate and inferior races” would lower the quality and dilute the blood of an America populated mostly by those of supposedly “superior” western European ancestry. Hitler used America’s policies as models and made eugenics part of Nazi ideology. Here, white supremacists used eugenics-based immigration policies to largely freeze America’s racial and ethnic makeup until Congress and President Johnson ended the bigoted quota system with the Nationality Act of 1965.

The Vietnam War led to a wave of Southeast Asians emigrating to the U.S., and the 1980 Refugee Act created a legal process for accepting refugees. The Immigration Act of 1990 allowed for 675,000 migrants annually and, along with the Nationality Act, form the basis of today’s system. 

Currently, our immigration system works slowly, overwhelmed by the number of refugees, many from South and Central America, fleeing violence and/or poverty in their home countries. Courts that rule on asylum status are understaffed and years behind. Still, we’re having some success: Legal immigration is now higher than eight years ago, and more refugees will be resettled this year than any year in the last thirty.

A bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2013 but failed in the Republican-led House. Last month, another bipartisan reform bill with largely Republican policies clearly had enough votes to pass both Houses and have the President sign it, but the GOP presidential candidate in Florida ordered Republicans to block it so he can run on immigration as a campaign issue. Meanwhile, many migrants and their families remain in limbo, their future uncertain and their present anxious. 

Our immigration system needs fixing with a clear path to citizenship including for Dreamers—young people who came here as children, attended our schools, and are, in effect, Americans. We also need a support system so that immigrants can get the education and training to enable them to become the workers we need. (Immigration is not border security, an associated issue which attempts to prevent undesirable people and materials—criminals, drugs, non-native plants, etc.—from entering the country. The bipartisan reform bill currently blocked by Republicans would add thousands of personnel and other measures to improve border security.)

A commission summarized the 1990 Immigration Act’s purposes: “A well-regulated system sets priorities for admission; facilitates nuclear family reunification; gives employers access to a global labor market while protecting U.S. workers; helps to generate jobs and economic growth; and fulfills our commitment to resettle refugees as one of several elements of humanitarian protection of the persecuted.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, immigrants will add $7 trillion to our economy and pay $1 trillion in taxes because of increased productivity and higher demand. Let’s welcome them to our communities.