When I think of education in our time, and the reform called classical education, I try to imagine what someone from 1900 would think of a modern school for small children, laid out like a flat and faceless factory. I suppose it would give him the chills, as if he had laid his hand on a ledge and grasped a snake. Yet by that time the utilitarian view of education that such a school embodies had already made great headway, and it was crowding out not only the classics but the very idea at the foundation of classical learning.  That idea was that education is for the raising and the training of a human soul.  But how do you sell a piece of a soul?  How do you use it to turn a crank or oil a gear?

The greatest of all utopian or dystopian tales — they are often the same thing — do not predict what should or might happen, but what has already happened or is happening.  You do not need the fanciful daydreams of William Morris, whose leisurely socialist society of free lovers and idlers, the Nowhere in News from Nowhere, cannot come to pass, because it does not account for what actually moves men to work.  You do not need the man-despising fevers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose women in Herland all have developed, by slow evolutionary magic, the physical strength of men, and who reproduce apparently by wishing it to be so.

You do need an eye to pierce through self-flattery and sloganeering. So it was with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury once walked out on an audience when the people insisted that his novel was about censorship, 1950’s style, and they would not shut up. The idea that you could avoid the dystopia he described if only you refrain from censoring pornographic novels and magazines misses the point entirely. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Ignorance to the Fourth Degree)

For as Bradbury saw it, the devil was in the combination of easy, mindless entertainment via television — what the wife of the hero Montag is addicted to — and a widespread disdain for the works of the past and their wisdom. What do you need censors for, when people do not read?  Montag is a “fireman,” that is, his job is to set fire to caches of books wherever he and his fellows find them. Our schools are full of such.  They are called “teachers,” and they either consign works of great beauty to the trash, or they use them to instruct young people in how to despise them and the people who produced and admired them.

Similarly, when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was making no prediction, nor was he imagining human beings such as never would exist. He said that he based his Ministry of Truth on the experiences he had working as a wartime correspondent for the BBC.  The “Two Minutes Hate,” for which all of the workers in Oceania pause at noon for their daily paroxysm of adrenaline, is a parody of the Angelus. Orwell was not supposing that someday, Anglican divines would cease to say the Angelus and would begin devoting two minutes to anger and loathing directed against some acknowledged Enemy of the People.  It hardly mattered whether they might or not, since the Christian prayer had already been supplanted, in the lived experience of the people, with political agitation and hatred. 

It is hard to gainsay him here.  It is hard not to notice that in our schools, prayer is looked on askance, but political hatred is instilled, encouraged, and rewarded.  To say, “I think young people ought to read Plato, because he shows us many truths we have forgotten,” is already to earn considerable demerits in an educational system of social credit that is, though unacknowledged, as active in the United States as it is in China.

We see the same sort of thing when Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, puts in at an antiquarian’s shop, and they reminisce about the jingles his mother used to sing when he was a boy: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of Saint Clemens,” and so forth.  It was a feature of a real childhood, gone.  Orwell had lost his religious faith.  He had not, however, lost his love for human things, which he saw being obliterated, partly by neglect, and partly by the violence of the all-ambitious State.  Consider that a small schoolchild in the United States is far more likely to learn about the fetishes of adults, than to sing an old song by memory.

Innocence be damned. Smith’s neighbor, Parsons, has children who rat on him when they overhear him muttering in his sleep, “Down with Big Brother!”  Parsons has been taught to feel pride in such treachery.  Writ large, that is what teachers do when they instruct children to look down upon their parents if they do not adhere to the party line, whatever that may be.  Parents are but suffered in loco magistrae.  I am told you may as well have tried to enter the Forbidden City in the days of the Chinese emperors, as be a parent and sit in, unannounced, at one of your own children’s classes in an American public school.

So then, in proposing a radical reconsideration of what a school is and what it is supposed to do, I envision no change in mankind.  I do not dream of Nowhere or Herland.  Rather, the classical movement is a matter of remembering, recovering, and reinstituting what has been done, for human beings such as they are.  It was once possible to raise up young people who could read and who would read good books, those that have built up many a soul and made their dwelling within it; as what boy who has read Treasure Island can help but remember Jim Hawkins, hiding in the apple barrel, overhearing the treacherous plans of Long John Silver and his fellows? 

What has been done can be done again.  It was once possible to teach children to sing the songs of their people, from nursery rhymes to love songs to patriotic anthems to hymns; and the strains of O Shenandoah stirred within them and taught them a thousand times better than any “relationship curriculum” ever could what it means for a man to love a woman.  What has been done can be done again. (READ MORE: The University Is Now the Surveillance State)

Not in the same way, to be sure, and many bad habits must be uprooted, and the scurf of many bad influences must be scoured off.  But the reformer has all the best stories on his side, all the most beautiful works of art, and all that has been most truly thought and written about man, both to his shame and to his glory.  And since he need not take himself and his age with such dread seriousness as to suppose that they represent the peak of human wisdom, he has also on his side that merry wanderer of the night called Fun.

Utopian, this self-described classical movement?  Hardly.  It is as natural as a blade of grass poking up through the cracks of a blacktopped alley. I am delighted to take a pickax to the blacktop, to help the green things along.