The Patriot Post® · NYT Asks: Can Properly Educating Our Children Cure Toxic Politics?

A guest writer, James Traub, submitted a rather interesting essay to The New York Times wherein he discusses the encouraging classical education that children are receiving at a Minnesota-based charter school. In Traub’s opinion, this sort of morality-grounded educational pursuit — steeped in the richness of Western culture — is a way for our next generation to find equilibrium and be less tribal in the political landscape.

Classical education is the study of the great philosophies, works, and moral framework that shaped Western culture. It often employs the Socratic method, where the teacher asks questions and the students answer and ask questions of their own. It encourages critical thinking, as the questions are often open-ended, allowing the students to work through their own thoughts before coming to any sort of conclusion.

Traub points out that our Founding Fathers were, by and large, products of classical education, and they read extensively to improve upon that knowledge. He rightly observes that most public schools are severely lacking in providing a satisfactory education of any sort. Many students come out more well-versed in the latest TikTok fad than having any knowledge of The Iliad or The Odyssey.

Traub also notes that American schools, with the advent of progressive thinkers like John Dewey, have expunged any sort of moral grounding. He says:

In practice, what often filled the space once occupied by morality was not Dewey’s high ideals but a lowest-common-denominator relativism. Virtue language, as James Davison Hunter wrote in the grimly titled “The Death of Character,” gave way to talk of “values,” which is to say, personal preferences. In our modern therapeutic vocabulary, “temperance” and “justice” gave way to “self-esteem.” If the schools of a century ago imposed too much guidance, the schools of today offer too little.

Progressives exchanged the word “virtue” with “values,” and people began to think that morality was subjective. That is where the “my truth” adage began to take hold.

Traub makes many excellent points, and I mostly agree with him. However, he does not go far enough. He admires the implementation of moral training in children, but morality without a religious basis has no teeth. It still allows for the moral decay of relativism to seep in.

The morality that built the West came from Judaism and the Ten Commandments. Moses bringing the tablets down from Mount Sinai predates Socrates and Plato. The moral code set by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is more binding than the standards of virtue set by ancient philosophers. That sort of reasoning leads people right back to progressivism. If everyone holds different values, then one philosopher’s ideas are just as good as another’s. Ergo, should we not conjure up our own moral code?

Another point on which Traub and I may disagree is that even though classical education is a net good if done well, we are fighting against a contingency on the Left that hates Western culture and all it stands for. It is a losing battle trying to convince many on the Democrat side of the aisle that shared morals and Westernism are worth preserving.

We are in a heated cultural war of ideas, and the invasion of Marxist philosophers is the antithesis of classical education. Socialism, multiculturalism, and nihilism — which rally around greed and victimization — stand firmly against the building nature of classical education, which venerates the West and the virtues it imparts.

While I am pleased to read some common sense on the pages of The New York Times, it is nevertheless tinged with the sense that James Traub still misses the real underpinnings of what makes classical education great.