Taken together, Louis Markos’ “Passing the Torch” and Michael Ortner and Kimberly Begg’s “The Catholic School Playbook” provide invaluable assistance in navigating the turbulent educational waters of our troubled times. They are also a sign of hope and a source of encouragement, and so are the hundreds of newly founded classical academies that are springing up across the land from sea to shining sea.

It was a century ago that G.K. Chesterton prophesied that the “coming peril” was “standardization by a low standard”. Nowhere has this prophecy been proved more true than in the field of education. This was brought home to me personally when I took my late mother on a “pilgrimage” to the two room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi in which Elvis Presley was born and had spent his childhood. To my surprise, I discovered the text of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” on the wall of one of the rooms. Perplexed by the apparent incongruity, I asked the guide on duty to explain its presence. I was told that Kipling’s poem would have been taught at the school that Elvis attended in the mid-1940s. Considering that Mississippi was the poorest state in the union at the time, it says a great deal for the quality of education in mid-century America that the poorest students were receiving such a rich education.

A similar proof of Chesterton’s prescience was brought home to me recently when a friend sent a copy of the Eighth Grade Examination for the schools of Bullitt County in rural Kentucky in 1912. Words that the students were expected to be able to spell included exaggerate, chandelier, bequeath, monotony, hyphen, antecedent, symptom, rhinoceros, adjective, architect, masculine, synopsis and eccentric. Today, more than a century later, one wonders how many public school educated eighth-graders would even have heard of these words. Certainly most could not spell them and even fewer could define them.

The exam also included sections on arithmetic, grammar, geography, physiology, civil government and history. The students were expected to be able to parse sentences, and to name the parts of speech and the properties of nouns and verbs; and they were expected to be able to define various forms of government, such as democracy, limited monarchy, absolute monarchy, and a republic, and to give historical examples of each. Needless to say, this compares very favourably with the levels of linguistic and political illiteracy which is the norm in today’s public schools.

So what went wrong?

It’s hard to know where to begin but the rise of relativism and the educational philosophy associated with it, such as that espoused by John Dewey and his disciples, must shoulder a lion’s share of the blame. The purpose of education, for Dewey and his ilk, was the churning of children in a one-size-fits-all educational system aimed at turning them into functional and conforming cogs in the machinery of the economy and the state. Such education reduced humanity to the level of homo economicus, “human resources” not persons, whose primary purpose was to serve as units of production and consumption, as non-questioning clones and drones of the secularist system.

Another cause of the decline and dumbing down of education was the cause of egalitarianism, which demanded that all children must be held back so that no child might be left behind.

So what’s to be done?

It’s easy to know where to begin because the solution to the problem of bad education is to be found in what’s already being done all over the country. The rise of classical academies, which educate children in the integrated humanities, is transforming education from the healthy grassroots up. Two recently published books exemplify this healthy revolution which aims to counter the inhumane and dehumanising public school system with the humane and humanizing influences of the humanities themselves. The first of these is Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education by Louis Markos (InterVarsity Press) and the second is The Catholic School Playbook by Michael Ortner and Kimberly Begg (Word on Fire Publishing). The first explains the rationale for classical education, the why it should be done; the second is a practical guide to starting a classical school or to transitioning an existing school to the classical model, the how it can be done.

Louis Markos’s book is divided into two parts. The first part explains “the nature of education”; the second part examines “the nature of the debate”. The titles of each of the seven chapters in Part One illustrate the dialectical chasm that separates the humane education advocated by Dr. Markos and the relativist education imposed by the Department of Education: Liberal Arts versus Vocational; Canonical versus Ideological; Books versus Textbooks; History versus Social Studies; Humanities versus Social Sciences; Goodness, Truth and Beauty versus Relativism; and Virtues versus Values.

In Part Two, Dr. Markos presents the reader with a panoramic overview of the history of the educational debate from the earliest times to our own times. He begins, appropriately enough, with Plato’s Republic and then shows how reading St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana enables us to learn to think rightly. He then looks at the negative impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, a work that has greatly influenced educational philosophy since its initial publication in 1762.

Essentially, Rousseau’s flaw was his belief in a flawless humanity, his denial of original sin and the consequent belief that man is inherently unflawed at birth, a tabula rasa, a clean slate, who is subsequently stained by the civilization and the culture in which he finds himself. This false anthropology laid the foundation for two of the principal evils which have plagued the past quarter of a millennium. The first is the belief that “society” and not sin is to blame for all manifestations of injustice, the consequence of which is the “cancel culture” which seeks to attain justice through the destruction of the cultural status quo. The second is the belief that “education” should be the writing of “correct” ideas on the tabula rasa, the clean slate, of the human psyche to prevent its being defaced by “incorrect” ideas. Such a philosophy turns education into a tool of social engineering, a means of turning students into ideological conformists. Education is no longer meant to teach students to think but to teach them to do as they’re told. It is education as political and philosophical indoctrination, education as brainwashing.

Having examined the pedagogical implications of Rousseau’s denial of Original Sin, Dr. Markos proceeds to dissect John Dewey’s Democracy and Education as the book that heralded the birth of the progressive-pragmatic education which has been the bane of the past century. He then moves to those modern thinkers who have served as the antidote to Dewey’s poison through the advocacy of a return to humane education rooted in the traditional liberal arts. Beginning with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, he proceeds to the praising of the ideas of Dorothy L. Sayers, Charlotte Mason, Mortimer Adler, E. D. Hirsch and Neil Postman. Finally, in his conclusion, Dr. Markos connects philosophical first principles with the theory of education, arguing that a good, true and beautiful education should “conduct young people through a liberal arts curriculum grounded in humanities, built on the Great Books, and geared toward the nurturing of wisdom as opposed to vocational skills, virtue as opposed to values, and eloquence as opposed to polemics”.

The Catholic School Playbook serves as a natural companion to Passing the Torch and perhaps should be read as a sequel to the latter book, as a means of putting into practice the theories that Dr. Markos explains so eloquently. There’s a chapter on “Mission: The Heart and Soul of a School”, and chapters on pedagogy and curriculum, on teachers as “the lifeblood of a school”, and on families as “the primary educators of children”. Another chapter focuses on the school community providing “a living encounter with a cultural inheritance”, as well as practical approaches to finances and “the business of operating a sustainable school”. The appendix lists the “required classics” that the authors consider to be the essential texts for a good classical curriculum.

Taken together, Passing the Torch and The Catholic School Playbook provide the reader, parent, teacher or student with the invaluable assistance they need to navigate the turbulent educational waters of our troubled times. They are also a sign of hope and a source of encouragement, and so are the hundreds of newly founded classical academies that are springing up across the land from sea to shining sea. The tide has turned!

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The featured image is “The Education of the Children of Clovis” (1861), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.