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  • Classical Education:Preparing for an Epiphany
  • Florian Hild (bio)

The present state of things is the consequence of the former, and it is natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or of the evil that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent: if we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

—Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Instead, I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally.

—Donald Kagan, “Ave atque Vale”

While progressive education in America’s K-12 schools aims at vacuous commonplaces, such as “children will demonstrate levels of achievement in learning skills and content knowledge consistent with high expectations across all academic areas in the Colorado State Standards” (from my district’s “educational philosophy”), classical education aims at epiphany. While the “bankruptcy of progressive education” (Hannah Arendt in 1958) has been documented repeatedly—comically as well as tragically, anecdotally as well as through hard data—classical K-12 education conserves the lessons of culture and graduates students prepared for the “high” in higher education. As a teacher and principal at a classical K-12 charter school in Colorado, I have had a front-row seat to “the good that we enjoy” in the studies of the best of our culture as well as to “the evil that we suffer” from the sometimes ludicrously absurd demands from our [End Page 553] department of education. I have seen students have epiphanies, and I have seen students bored to death by acronymic testing nonsense.

The promise of classical education is that working through “the best which has been thought and said” prepares us for the epiphany of Anton Chekhov’s “The Student”:

Joy suddenly stirred in his soul. . . . The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end and the other moved.

Ivan, Chekhov’s seminary student, had just told two widows the story of Peter’s denial of Christ, causing tears and anguish in his listeners. The widow’s tears and Peter’s tears now flow together in Ivan’s mind as past and present respond to each other in a moment of truth and beauty. Classical, liberal education forges the chains between the present and the past, because it seeks to free us from the fashions du jour by giving voice to the timeless. In “The Student,” Chekhov’s favorite and most optimistic story, Ivan can transcend the misery of his time and touch the unbroken chain of events connecting him to the past because he knows and communicates a deeply human story with sensitivity.

Ivan had to be prepared for this epiphany, since epiphanies about our connections to the past don’t just happen: Peter’s denial leaves us cold if we have never meditated on his dilemma, Hecuba is nothing to us if we haven’t read The Aeneid, and self-evident truths we don’t hold won’t change the fate of nations or individuals. Culture, the whole heap of human creativity, only speaks to us when we listen, and listen we must, because, as Donald Kagan said in his 2013 “Ave atque vale” address at Yale, we

must be freed from the tyranny that comes from the accident of being born at a particular time in a particular place, but that liberation can only come from a return to the belief that we may have something to learn from the past. The challenge to [End Page 554] the relativism, nihilism, and privatism of the present can best be presented by a careful and respectful examination of earlier ideas, ideas that have not been...

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