Here is the third and final installment in this little series from Ben House on some important historical figures and events that we may have forgotten. This was taken from the 5-25-04 blog entry of George Grant.
The reason I liked this address by Ben House so much is that it gives us a picture of how we got into the cultural mess we are in. Things are a little more nuanced than we sometimes realize. In this case, all of the major players in a cultural devolution are in place - an attack on the authority of Scripture, the de-valuing of Christian scholarship and abandonment of our educational heritage. What House does is bring out some of the nuances we may have forgotten and also shows that, rather than being minor blips on the radar screen of history, these three events are actually major contributing factors to our cultural decline.
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The third event actually occurred, or begin occurring, first in time. It is the least known, the least interesting from a popular perspective, and almost completely ignored in terms of media attention or inclusion in the history books. This was the abandonment of Classical education. The Founding Fathers of America were all the products of Classical education. Pastors, teachers, professors, and all educated people in America were trained in schools that in one fashion or another were Classical.
By Classical, we mean that the intellectual foundations of education were built upon the study of Greek and Latin languages and that the ethical objectives aimed at producing men of character. This Classical strand, tracing back to Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, and others, was reinforced by two millennia of Christian influences. Hence Augustine and the other church fathers were studied alongside of Homer and Seneca. Educated men were well versed in what Mortimer Adler would later call ‘The Great Conversation.’ When educated men wrote books and letters, they freely quoted from the Greeks and Romans in the original languages and did not assume any need to translate the quotations.
This education was being rapidly abandoned in the early part of the Twentieth Century. The greater story of this abandonment is beyond the scope of this essay. But at least a portion of it can be seen by the example of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Vanderbilt fit into the tradition of Christian universities that required incoming students to have been Classically educated and then advanced that education to an even higher level. Dr. Louise Cowan highlights the case of Southern poet and literary critic John Crowe Ransom: "In 1908-1909, the year Ransom graduated, all who were working toward a B.A. degree were required to study a year of Latin, a year of Greek (these requirements presupposed four years of Latin and three of Greek in high school), and a year each of mathematics, English, chemistry, history, and philosophy. A major in English literature required two years of Latin, Greek, French, German, two and a half of Biblical literature, and one of Anglo-Saxon.”
A few years later, when Ransom returned to Vanderbilt to teach, the program had changed. Cowan states, “By 1919, the classical languages had been dropped as requirements, although they were still recommended to English majors.”
Cowan says, “Utilitarianism was becoming the controlling attitude at Vanderbilt as it had become dominant even earlier, in most other universities in the nation…. The new philosophy of education shifted this basis, focusing on the recipients of knowledge rather than the disciplines themselves, with a consequent democratization of attitude, so that the aims of education were made subject to timeliness and opportunism, and standards began their long downward plunge.”
Here around 1915, “standards began their long downward plunge.” Long before all of our current education woes, the old school, the proven and tried method, the universal standards, the Greco-Roman-Christian heritage was abandoned.
It took awhile for all the old teachers to die off. Their required courses became electives as their hair turned gray and eyes grew dim. Small classical academies that had dotted the landscape of Tennessee and other states closed their doors. School consolidation promised to save the day. Learning Latin soon went the way of plowing with mules.
Now, here is a summary of this dismal history:
1915—The heritage of education abandoned.
1925—The authority of Scripture mocked and ridiculed.
1935—Christian orthodoxy and scholarship defrocked.
By contrast, the failed politics of Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt seem refreshing. By contrast, the dangers of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II seem redeeming. By contrast, the writings of Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot seem optimistic.
If this story ended here, American history would be a great dark age for the rest of the Twentieth Century and beyond. But God is gracious. The next segment of this story will follow shortly.
The next segment follows shortly--and we are its actors.
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