Dear Friends,
Summer is dawning on the Australian school year. And as with all great dawns, morning brings a new day, new considerations, early respite in the quiet of the new sun. For educators, summer is a time to look back and look forward. It is a time of reflection and planning. When handled rightly, educational leaders can find in summer break a nice balance between the contemplative life (reading, studying, conversing, and thinking upon the health of the school or institution this past school year) and the active life (rebuilding infrastructure, writing best practice documents for teacher training, and moving ahead with projects for a healthy launch to the upcoming new school year.)
On the eve of this new dawn of summer, there is also momentum afoot in Australia. There is hard and good work being done to bring to Australia one of the greatest treasures to touch her shores: a renewal of classical education. In the least, the conversation has started, and it is gaining worthy momentum. It is attracting worthwhile voices inside and outside the country. Nonetheless, as with any great journey, unexpected or not, we ought to follow Bilbo’s example and not leave the Shire without good friends and a trustworthy map. (A wizard is also a good addition, but that prompting will be saved for another time).
As Australian leaders spend the next few years learning more about, conversing upon, and building groups and opportunities for classical education to thrive “Down Under,” I wanted to offer what I hope will be core counsel in these early days. Being what I call a “second generation” beneficiary of the classical renewal in the United States, I’m thankful for my time studying under, working alongside, and learning from some of the top names in the American renewal of classical education. Furthermore, over twenty years of leadership and scholarship have prompted me to offer what I am able to offer toward what I anticipate to be a swell of interest rolling across Australian families, academic institutions, legislative desks, and churches in the coming years. My Australian colleagues, here are the first seven principles and the first seven books you need in order to create the kind of soil worthy of our great tradition and the future fruit of all your present and upcoming labors.
The First Seven Principles You Need
For the sake of anticipatory reading and presenting values in ranked order, I have decided to present these principles from seventh to first!
7) Start with hospitality. Good education is about hospitality. Great teachers know that hospitality is at the heart of quality learning: the teacher invites the students (and the teacher himself) into the storehouse of knowledge contained in the literature, art, science, mathematics, or particular subject at hand. Together, they not only exist in the same physical space of the classroom, they exist together at a kind of dining table whereat they can feast and be nourished. In that great epic poem The Odyssey, we find the central and ancient Greek theme of xenia (hospitality to strangers). In Homer’s wisdom, good hospitality is a life-or-death matter (we can actually track the characters who live and die, and how they practiced hospitality to strangers), because for the ancient Greeks hospitality was indeed a divine matter. Entertain the foreign guest because it could be a god or goddess! In our classrooms, we are all, according to Christian anthropology, made in the image of God, and therefore we are, in profound ways, entertaining the divine with each lesson, each test or quiz, each classroom management decision. There is no doubt that in the next few years in Australia strangers will be brought together through a common love for and interest in great education. Let hospitality be the first threshold through which each new colleague, friend, publication, or conference passes. To be sure, academic acumen will abound, but let hospitality be most prevalent.
6) Partner with parents. One of the great strengths of the classical renewal in America over the past forty years is that it has not separated its importance from the role of parents as primary educators. The top voices, publishing houses, institutions, and movements in American classical education have seen it as a paramount conviction that parents not simply make a decision and pay the tuition dollars but rather that they deeply involve their work, their own vocations, their imaginations, their homes, and their talents in this great renaissance. This is not only practical, it is also brilliantly classical. We need only to do a deep dive into what the great thinkers in our tradition said about the family to see that a classical movement which is not rooted in the parents is already a dead movement. As Plutarch guides, “There is nothing men can do more pleasing to the gods than gladly and eagerly pay out to their parents and nurses their debts of long standing as well as their newer obligations. Nor, on the other hand, can there be any clearer proof of godlessness than neglect and cruelty to parents. Hence to mistreat others is indeed forbidden; but not to bring one’s mother and father happiness by deeds and words, even if one refrains from causing them pain, is regarded as impious and lawless.” (Plutarch, “Brotherly Love” in Selected Essays on Love, the Family, and the Good Life, p. 56) Parents are the heart of the classical movement, whether they were classically educated or not. Blaise Pascal famously said, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know…” Let all institutions of classical education know that “The parent has its reasons, which academia does not know…”
5) Fresh courage take. Those who decide to step into the good and early work of bringing classical education to an institution, community, or nation will finds themselves at the tip of the spear, in two ways. For one, you will be at the tip of the spear as educational reform is shot like an arrow and cuts through modern Australian culture. The contact is real, no matter the type of education reform. The tip of the spear in modern education reform is where change meets a revolutionary mindset. If the change asks the revolutionary mindset to be a bit more ancient and less progressive, real clash happens. Secondly, you will find yourself at the tip of a spear which is held tightly by those who deeply oppose your values, virtues, ideas, and way of life. There is plenty of fresh courage to take in such work, whether it is courage to start a new business, create a new curriculum, or defend the treasures of the great tradition to family members and friends.
4) Know you are not alone. As you fresh courage take, know that this work is not solitary, even if is at the tip of the spear. With the growing educational trends around the world, but especially in America, the tip of the spear gets more crowded each day. Never have a day where you can’t look to your right and to your left and see those who are laboring with you, even if they are an ocean away. This is, indeed, the great conversation; it can be a gloriously ruckus room, but it is still a conversation. Furthermore, we are within, as G.K. Chesterton called it, the democracy of the dead. Your vote everyday is surrounded by a host of witnesses, alive and dead, cheering on your effort to give these little ones even the slightest drink of living water.
3) Let the child’s light ignite your own. Even with the support of ages past and friends present, the motivation for such work should be deeper still. And what is that motivation which stubbornly sits upon our hearts and minds each day? What is that conviction that bids us continue this good vocation? With each new lesson taught, each new school created, each new mathematical concept, literary excerpt, scientific claim, and artistic master learned, look to the light in the child’s eyes. See their deep humanity brought to life and formed in accordance with their nature, their wonder, their thirst for truth, their appetite for beauty, their delight in goodness, and their joy in friendship. Academic conviction is a strong motivation for where classical education throughout the world is at present and where it will be in fifty years. However, seeing a child learn, that kind of faith will move mountains. Chesterton is again helpful: “Education is violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like a dentist…Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.” (G.K. Chesterton in What’s Wrong with the World, p. 177)
2) Pray and study. The great Isaac Watts once said, “Study without prayer is atheism as well as prayer without study is presumption.” To be sure, the classical tradition is not co-extensive with Christian theology. While Christian church history and the classical tradition are inextricably linked and bound for those downstream, one need not be a Christian to affirm the truth, goodness, and beauty in the classical tradition, and there ought to be room in Australia for such collegiality. Nonetheless, a classical renaissance, as history has shown, cannot be the mere might of men. It has never been such and can never be such. The work is too important. The topics are too complex and interconnected. The ideas are too transcendent. The children are too important. Therefore, as you labor in the vineyard, remember that prayer and study are both crucial faces of the same coin. Neither is heads nor tails. They are both faces.
1) Love one another. Avoid factions. Avoid silly squabbles. Squash your egos before every conference and board meeting. Employ the virtues. Help one another and avoid the power grab of the market share. This will not be felt in these early days, but it will be felt as it grows. This is the kind of adolescence classical education is in right now in the United States. There are early rumbles of “us vs. them,” early factions of method or curriculum or definition or even theological denomination. Run far from such pollutants. Celebrate one another’s wins, even if small. Small wins are still wins, and someone’s wins in another part of the landscape of good education in Australia is a win for everyone. Every new ACES member is a win, even if someone starts, let’s say “SCA: The Society for Australian Classics;” every new parent who inquires is a win; every new book published for Australian classical education is a win; every new donor who engages the beauties of this educational possibility is a win; every student who has one more hour in this tradition is a win. We now come full circle from where we started (with hospitality) to being a good neighbor. The renewal of the classical tradition in any land is about neighboring. It is about loving your neighbor by providing with them and to them one of the greatest inheritances we could ever give. Calvin Seerveld’s wisdom here never gets old: “Neighbourhooding is a glorious gift to human nature: the opening to give to and receive from one’s fellow human what is needed….Any seasoned teacher knows that teaching means you wash the feet of your students. In line with the texts before us you could also understand and describe teaching…as a kind of neighbouring, where you bind up the wounds, the traumata, of the younger generation who come to you, having been damaged at home or in earlier schools. Blessed are those who neighbor the poor people who have lost their way and become captives or have been damaged in the arts, or in the marketplace, or in the minefield of politics. And it is a wonderful occupation…to bring healing and comfort to those with need, to give good direction and to announce the coming jubilee and judgement for music, commerce, family relations, philosophy—you name it.” (Calvin Seerveld, On Being Human, p. 63-67)
This is the wisdom I offer to you. Perhaps it is not much, and better men would have deeper and more timely insight. Nonetheless, if you commit yourselves to these seven, I do not see how your efforts will not be wildly fruitful and change the course of Australians for generations to come. There is no more glorious work than to renew the splendor of education for a people who either have lost what they once had or who have not yet seen what could become of the “cut flower,” to use Herberg’s metaphor, if it were repotted where it belonged. As a kind of benediction, I offer you the seven books I would encourage every Australian classical leader to read, as they must plant their own roots before they attempt to plan anyone else’s. Furthermore, while there are plenty of worthy books on classical education, the seven books below were carefully selected to provide the vocabulary, structures, insights, and ideas needed for decades of hospitality, parent partnership, courage, community, child-like ignition, prayer, study, and love.
The First Seven Books You Need
(in the order you should read them)
The Best Things in Life by Peter Kreeft
Humanist Educational Treatises translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
How to Speak How to Listen by Mortimer Adler
How to Destroy Western Civilization by Peter Kreeft
Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
Unbinding Prometheus by Donald Cowan
The Great Tradition by Richard Gamble
With You,
Brian G. Daigle
on this twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2024
