← Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
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On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arn sits down with pastor, professor and author Kevin DeYoung for a one on one conversation.
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A lot of political theory has to start, you know, as a Christian with Jesus saying give me the coin whose face is on Caesar's. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God's the things that are God's. Well, that gives some kind of to use our language, separation of churches says that it's not identical. And it says not just that you need to give taxes to Caesar because Caesar has a certain realm, but in saying render to God the things that are God's, it says Caesar doesn't have doesn't have everything. Caesar doesn't have control over your life.
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Listen to this exclusive interview with Kevin DeYoung right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. also at Apple Podcasts Spotify and YouTube and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your device. That's podcast hillsdale. Edu.
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Welcome to the hillsdale college k12 classical education podcast Podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram, we continue.
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A series of episodes from presentations delivered at Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence Seminars. The Hoagland center for Teacher Excellence and Outreach of The Hillsdale College K12 education office offers educators the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge and refine their skills in the classroom. These one day conferences are hosted during the academic year in cities across the nation and feature presentations by Hillsdale College faculty, K12 office staff and leaders in the Hillsdale Network of member schools. There is no cost to attend and attendees may earn professional development credits. Currently, the Hoagland center is hosting a series exploring the art of teaching a variety of subjects. To learn more about upcoming events, Visit our website k12 hillsdale.edu.
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What I wanted to do is to sort of think about not only the question of how we teach history, and I'll try to do a little bit of that just to kind of raise some issues. But why? Why we study history? It's always really good to know why when you're trying to figure out how to have a sense of the ends by which you're trying to find the best means. And in our case, those of us who are committed to the ideal of classical education, as I think everybody here probably is, if not you maybe wonder there's some food out there, so you want to but how do we in education shape in a positive way, students, minds, hearts, souls even we dare to use that word, souls. And that's something that we know we do as teachers, whether we like it or not, whether we intend to or not. Best to be intentional about it, about what we're doing to shape souls. And history is a discipline that I think, and my title, the most humanizing of all the arts, is meant to imply that it is very definitely a soul shaping endeavor, in addition to being the accumulation of lots and lots of factoids and details and movements and things to memorize. So we don't think often enough drawback and think about these larger questions. So I want to give a little attention to that. My title is not original. It comes from a book by the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was prominent in the sort of second half of the 20th century. And you all probably know the name, or many of you probably do. And it's his near the very end of his book called the Progressive Historians. And this segue with Paul Marino is entirely coincidental, but I'm happy for it. I think it's his best book, Hofstadter's best book, although I don't know it's universally regarded as such, because what he does in it is he is critical in a very detailed and nuanced way, but he's critical of the very tradition, the progressive tradition, in which he was rooted, from which he took his bearings. When he started out, his two intellectual heroes were Charles Beard and H.L. mencken. It's an odd pair, actually, when you think about it, but some of his writing partook of Mencken's sort of sardonic humor wasn't quite as spectacular as Mencken was, but he wrote books that sold massively, particularly a book called the American Political Tradition and the Men who Made it, which is a double entendre title, you know, the Men who Made it, you know, who rose to the top of the greasy pole. So that was his he was an ironic, slightly jaded, detached, wryly humorous and debunking sort of guy. But he changed his mind. Over the course of his career he won two Pulitzer Prizes for books that have not been forgotten. But toward the end of his career, which unfortunately was cut short by disease, he changed his mind, he changed his thinking. He hinted at this change in his about face in a commencement speech he gave at Columbia University in 1968. 1968 was the year that Columbia University blew up with Student riots over various things. The Vietnam War, the university's development policies in the neighborhood. You have whatever you want. They were writing about it and they called it the bust because the university basically closed down. And Hofstadter was asked to give the commencement address and he had to give it off campus at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York. Beautiful building. And I'm going to quote, this is. I hope I won't get any more dry than this in the lecture, but I want to quote a portion of what he said that day. And remember, the university is in an uproar, it's closed down, the faculty is sort of divided between those who support the rioters and those who support the status quo. And the President is out to lunch. So here's what Hofstadter said. Among other things, the ideal of academic freedom does indeed put extraordinary demands on human restraint and upon our capacity for disinterested thought. Yet these demands are really of the same general order as those we regard as essential to any advanced civilization. The very possibility of civilized human discourse rests in upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken. The possibility of modern democracy rests upon the willingness of governments to accept the existence of a loyal opposition. It's dry language, but on target. And I think it relates to us, even though it's about university life and academic freedom, that's not a term we often use, K12 education, but it's that willingness to recognize and respect those with whom we disagree and yield to something like due process, civil and orderly debate. Aren't these virtues that we want to cultivate in our students? Of course they are. They're paramount importance. And in our society more generally, wouldn't it be nice if that influence could percolate out? But at least the people in our classroom, we can model that and insist on that kind of respect, civility and a sense that the loyal opposition has a place. So the events at Columbia, the bust at Columbia, made Hofstadter aware of the preciousness and fragility of the institutions that made free inquiry and civilized human discourse possible. His thinking had already been shifting because of other things. In questioning the platitudes that had been guiding him up to that point. And because of this shift, progressive historians. The book I mentioned before, which I consider was his best book, is a minor masterpiece of reflection, introspection. Openly admitting that he had been mistaken, he'd come to see the study of history was not merely to aid a particular political end, but to be. And here he says the most humanizing among the arts. I'm not sure why he uses the word arts. I'm not going to try to defend that. But I did want to quote him accurately, meaning partly, history cannot be a science. I think that's what he meant to convey. But so what does the phrase mean more broadly and how does it apply to the teaching of young people about history, K through 12? Does it apply? Absolutely, it does apply. And to begin with, I would cite the example. I was delighted to see copies of the Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield out there on the table. And if you don't have one, get one, take it home, even just read the first few pages. It's a very short book, but it has a wonderfully humane understanding of history. And the way he puts it at one point, history, the historian should be a recording angel rather than a hanging judge. A recording angel rather than a hanging judge. This is kind of an antidote to this sort of what I call the arc of history view of the past, that history has a directionality. We know what it is. And of course it's progressive, isn't it? People who tend to talk about the arc of history are not the people who talk about bringing back the monarchy or anything like that. It's progressive and yet it has a tendency to turn history into a morality play. And Butterfield absolutely rejects that idea. The history. And by the way, Butterfield was a very serious Christian who wrote about Christianity and history in very interesting ways. He doesn't get a lot of attention for that, but he did not think history was a morality play. It's not our job to award pass out the white hats and black hats to the players of history. There are other historians who do that. Howard Zinn is a good example for those of you familiar with his work. He's all about white hats, black hats, white hats, black hats, good and evil. Our first responsibility, according to Butterfield, and according to me, I agree with him, is to know what we can about the past, to learn how to see it as much as possible on its own terms, be slow to pass moral judgment on it, cultivating the skill of putting ourselves into the place of others. It isn't the license to roam through the past like a sophomoric moralizing blunderbuss. But we all have those in our classes. Sophomore moralizing. And then some of them aren't even sophomores. The blunderbuss. Bashing anyone or anything that came before us while proclaiming our moral superiority to them and to the past. That's not what history should do. Instead, it should open us to the possibility, the likelihood, that great events nearly always have many causes, and it's extremely rare and difficult for any particular man or woman in the past to operate outside the form and pressure of their own times and achieve exactly what they set out to do. Butterfield's very good on that, too. His treatment of Martin Luther, if you're interested. And it should be in opposition to the weaponization of history. That word weaponization is very popular, and I really don't like it very much. But sometimes you just have to use it. The transformation of something into a weapon. History ought to be something else. It ought to be the most humane and humanizing of all subjects. It opens the world to us in all of its gorgeous variety, both as it is and as it has been, and provides us a window onto the astonishing range of human experience, from the earthbound world of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy and everything in between. It teaches that things are not always have not always been as they are now, and will not always continue to be as they are now. That's an important lesson for young people to learn. A hard one for them to grasp, but an important one for them to grasp. History's forays into unfamiliar territories can shock us and enlarge the our sympathies increase our awareness of the many ways that people have gone about the business of being human. It rescues precious things and memories from the darkness into which they'd otherwise disappear. It gives a sense of continuity with the past. It gives support to our sense of human possibility, especially if we seek to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity's achievements and enormities. Enormities are bad. Not enormous successes, enormous failures, just plurable failures alike. And we're generous enough to acknowledge that everything that happens has a mixture of motives, both noble and ignoble. Each and every one of us flawed humans brings this combination to life's tasks. Humanizing, to use Hofstadter's word. That, at any rate, is how it ought to be. But today, instead of expanding our minds and hearts, history is increasingly used to narrow them. Instead of being a way of deepening ourselves, helping us to take a mature, complex view of our past, History is being employed as a simple bludgeon which picks its targets based on a simple litmus standard, often little more than a popular cliche, and applies it mechanically. Perhaps the best example of this is the pell mell rush we've seen in recent years. To Pass judgment, summary judgment on the heroes of the past and tear down or rename the monuments to them that we've erected, the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons, Woodrow Wilsons. I know Paul Moreno might not have a problem with tearing down Woodrow Wilson. I might not either. But he's a hero to somebody. This tearing down of statues is kind of appalling. Are we really so fragile, so. So faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of great men of the past who fail in some respects, to meet our current specifications? Yes, it's true that all three of these men either had held slaves or had racial beliefs that we would find profoundly unacceptable today. I'm talking about Woodrow Wilson there just. Does that exhaust everything that we need to know about them? Does that exhaust everything we need to know about George Washington? Ought it to outweigh the value of everything else that he did? Apparently, in some people's minds, it ought. For them, the transformation of history into a weapon depends on a brutal simplification of the historical record. So Washington's ownership of slaves becomes the only relevant fact about him. A genuinely historical use of history would acknowledge and insist on this fact. Yes. But it would go on to consider it from a larger perspective of a long, important, consequential life of a man who lived in a different, very different era from our own. It would weigh his beliefs and actions carefully in that context, would take into account his decision to free his slaves at the end of his life. Account that paid this kind of respectful attention to detail and complexity is no longer what we're getting. Instead, we get patent idiocy. And in the interest of time, I'll skip over some of the examples of patent idiocy I have, but I like this one. The public high school in San Francisco, which planned to spend $600,000 to cover up a historical mural written by. Written by. Painted by an artist. They called him left leaning. He was actually a communist who included Washington with surrounded by slaves and Native Americans and very dignified folks form. But the very fact that they were there was racist and meant this had to be demolished, dealt with. That didn't actually happen in the end. It hasn't happened yet. It may yet happen. But it illustrates a point about how the weaponizing of history corresponds with a kind of remarkable hostility to history as the record of the past in all its complexity. It's like a juicy quotation pulled out of context and that drives it home with repetition, stubborn repetition, like the chants of a bunch of mindless protesters in the street. So why should we study the past if we went by the standards of the present? And I see this in history departments in higher education all the time is to provide us with battering rams to use in our present day battles. Unanswerable proof, support for our current grievances. But that can't last forever. Once history becomes transformed into a weapon, it will lose its credibility as history. So part of the battle we need to fight is for history itself. If we care about it, rescue it from these would be weaponizers. And yet history may not be a moral object lesson, but history is not an amoral enterprise. The search for moral meaning in the past is an essential part of our human endowment. And it's extremely important to our students, to all of us, but especially to our students. They're concerned about what kinds of moral lessons can be extracted from the past. They need to have explained to them why it is. We can admire George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and yet be honest about the ways in which they fell short in our eyes and in Jefferson's case, in his own eyes. So that's part of their moral formation, our students, part of our job. We can't be content to present them with a version of history that's just a tale full of sound and fury, things signifying nothing. I didn't make that line up. Not anymore than we can be content with a presentation of history that begins and ends with visceral patriotism. My country, right or wrong. And you know, if you don't like it, I'll slug you. Neither one of those will do. But instruction in U.S. history is at the core of civic education, which is an education for democratic citizenship. We can't ignore difficult questions about our imperfect past. We just can't. But we have to address them in the right way. Balancing critique and affirmation while always being faithful to the truth. We can't make things up. When I was writing Land of Hope, which I really didn't want to do, actually I was sort of talked into it. My arm was twisted, but so glad I did. I mean, I lost the use of my arm, but, you know, it was worth it. And while I was working on it, I happened to have lunch with a lawyer friend who is a very high flying, what they call white shoe law firm guy in New York City. He had a lot of involvement in government. I won't mention his name or his achievements, some of which are pretty amazing. But he's also a fervently orthodox Jew who has very high moral standards and principles. And he said to me over dinner. I'm convinced that if children are taught to believe that the regime under which they live is not a good one, it will do damage to their souls. And that just hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, I don't want to say I never had thought about it, but I had never thought about it in that way. It affected me very deeply, and it affected some of the ways that the book took shape. And I think he's right. I think we see the evidence of that assertion all around us with our students and young people. Not at Hillsdale College, of course, but everywhere else. I actually sort of mean that. I'd already launched into the book at that point, but it really did help me and made me realize we Americans really need to know our history. We need to know it better than we have in the past. We need to know that we're not a people bound together by blood and soil and. But by origins in many bloods and many soils, who are bound together by our shared aspirations and principles, shared triumphs, shared sufferings. A history. These things have to be taught and learned. You don't pick them up by osmosis. And there's a growing danger that we won't pass them along to our posterity. A lot of talk these days about civic education and citizenship, and I welcome it. But citizenship is in something bigger than just the civics class, meaning how to vote and how a bill is passed and that sort of knowledge of the mechanics of government. It means having a vivid and enduring sense of your membership, your full membership in this country, one of the greatest enterprises in human history. That's why the formal study of American history should be essential. It should provide those things. And why, in so much of our country, we're failing to do that. And I'm not just talking about the consistently bad scores on NAEP tests and other statistical measures of academic attainment. I'm with Dr. Moreno about standardized tests in general. But it goes deeper than that. It's a sense of detachment from the undertaking of which young people, the rising generation, by rights, ought to feel themselves apart. They don't. So I wrote Land of Hope partly to redress this, to give a fresh, thoughtful, I hope, sometimes fun invitation to the great American story. And the idea, of course, there being there is a great American story. I'll talk about that at the very end, if I ever get to it. Just kidding. So there are things that we need to remember, too. We live in anxious times, high anxiety times. But there have been many times in our past that have been worse, far more anxious, and in which the reason for anxiety was more compelling. Let me urge you to remember that. Consider, for example, the situation. So you have to be able to remember the past or at least have acquaintance with it for this to be meaningful. But consider the early part of 1941. The world with the situation we are looking at. Hitler's triumphant forces controlled continental Europe, and only the British Isles managed to hold out against it. The future of liberty in the world seemed very dim. No melodrama to that. It was very real. That civilization itself seemed imperiled. Well, at that moment, the novelist John Dos Passos wrote the following words, which I use as the epigraph to Land of hope. At least, this is excerpted from the epigraph. In times of change and danger, when there's a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. That connection to the past he saw as vitalizing, as a source of inspiration, as a source of ideas, as a source of energy. It would have. I'm sure it was tempting for him as a journalist. You know, journalists always like to emphasize the new and the sensational and the shiny object. But it would have been tempting for him to say, this is a time without precedent. Things have never been so bad as they are now. We have nothing to learn from the past because this is so much worse. Yeah. And yes, had the world seen a more fearsome fighting force than Hitler's, we could argue about that, but I think not. But Dos Passos chose to convey exactly the opposite message. That we look backward, reach back to a past that was a source of sanity, a direction, a lifeline. He uses that word, a lifeline of sustenance and instruction and the training in that way that's such a training of the mind. To know how to look backwards is the very core of classical education, isn't it? Very core of an education for democratic citizenship. And we neglect an essential element in the formation of our young if we don't give them that ability. And that's what the formal study of American history and really all history, all Western history, should provide, and we're failing to do. We have to recommit ourselves to the teaching of both history and civics and the recognition the two belong together. This one complaint I have about the civic education movement is that it ought to say more about history. Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins has said, without history, there's no civic education. Without civic education, there are no citizens without citizens, there is no free republic. I think that puts it very well. So the stakes are that high. Citizenship is a word that's lost much of its noble luster, just as civics has been devoted to a kind of user's guide to the machinery of government. Both words deserve better. Citizenship is not about voting, it's about membership. As I've said, a society of civic equals. Citizens, not subjects. Remember the language of the American Revolution, Citizens, not subjects whose respect for one another's equal standing under the law is a guiding moral premium of the democratic way of life. Civic education is not only about how a bill becomes a law. It's about promoting a vivid sense of our belonging, belonging to this great enterprise. Both things involve fostering that felt connection to the past, gratitude for the good things we've inherited, along with a feeling of responsibility for keeping them going and improving them where they need improvement, as they always do. So a civic education is a kind of initiation, and I think it's especially true for the study of history on the primary and secondary level. It's part of the initiation into a community. Not just a community of the present, but a community of memory, a long human chain linking past, present and future in shared recognition. And, one would hope, gratitude. I would go so far as to say a patriotic education needs to be an education in love. Make no mistake, the love we're talking about is not something like romantic or familial love. It can't be imposed by teachers or schools or government edicts, least of all in a free country. Like any love worthy of the name, it must be embraced freely and be strong and sentimental enough to coexist with elements of disappointment, critique, opposition. But it's love all the same. And without the deep foundation that supplies, a republic will perish. Memory is so important in all of this, and I have inevitably to think of the cognitive diseases that we see surround us all the time these days, like Alzheimer's disease. It's perhaps the most dreaded affliction of our times because it robs a victim of his or her memories and in doing so, robs them of their fundamental identity, their very sense of who or what they are. Can we talk about larger collectivities in a similar way? Yes, I think we can. What's true for individuals and families is also true in its way for nations and peoples. What memory is to individuals. History is for civilizations. Without the reference points provided by a broadly shared historical consciousness, we will forget who we are and perish. A culture without memory will be barbarous and Easily tyrannized. Even if it's technologically advanced, the incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future in a meaningful way. It's a different fog of unknowing than that of the Alzheimer's sufferer, the one that sounds a lot like the mental state of children or too many adults and students in our classes in this churning, distraction filled world that we've come to inhabit today. Yet there's some crucial differences. Alzheimer's disease is an organic affliction that one can't will. It's not a choice. But we, the American people, can choose and can be blamed if we choose to abandon the imperative requirement to know our own past. And if we fail to pass that knowledge on to the rising generation, we can't attribute it to some disease. And our society is becoming very close to that very state, having lost a general grasp on the larger trajectory of our history. This is a fear that's a very old thing in American history. Abraham Lincoln spoke of this in his first great speech, 1837 Lyceum address. It was an extended lament about the possibility that great achievements of 1776 were being betrayed by the nation's descent into violence and lawlessness. The fears of such possibilities have been a perennial problem in each generation. In our own time, the problem takes the form of a strange paradox. We actually know more about the past. We know more about the past than others have because we have many battalions of specialized professional historians, some of them anointed with advanced degrees from institutions like the University of Maryland at Johns Hopkins, where Dr. Moreno and I went. And many of them are brilliant people with impressive achievements. But we actually know less for all of the accumulation of that particular knowledge, because we lack a shared grasp of the overarching meaning, the story of our history, the kind of meaning that helps to give shape to the way that we live together. And we have to do better than that. I close with a wonderful quotation from. Well, actually, before I do say that, I want to make an apologia for my title, Land of Hope. And it really has two features I wanted to emphasize. America is not just an idea. It is a land. It is a place. It has a particular character. When you go to Arlington National Cemetery, you don't raise your hands and say, oh, thank goodness for the universal rights of man. No, it's about this country and those who've given their lives for it. And of course, they may have other aspirations. Americans do have a universalistic side to us. But we are land, and a land of hope. Why hope? I wanted to emphasize the spirit, a spirit that drives so much of our history. We're creatures of wills and aspirations, not merely tumbleweeds at the mercy of large historical forces. Hope is a quality of soul, cardinal virtue, something that can't be explained or measured in strictly material terms. I think anyone who tries to describe America and leaves out that aspirational quality is missing the boat entirely. I mean, of course, the capacity for hope is a universal feature of humankind. It's something we all have. But that capacity has been an enduring thematic characteristic of our country. Americans have always sought to rise above the hand we've been dealt. Even the New Deal, the conditions into which we were born. That's precisely what's drawn so many people to our shores, continues to do so, the possibility of a fresh chance in life. We are, I would argue, the most aspirational nation in the history of the world. So hope, hope not always realized, hope sometimes disappointed. But hope nonetheless, I think, is a magnetism that operates continuously in our past and may continue to do so in the future. And now for my quotation from Daniel Boorstin, who is a great and underestimated American historian. The quotation comes from something he wrote called the mysterious future. And it goes like this. If the future is a mystery story, then that does not frighten Americans. For we Americans have always lived in the world's greatest treasure house of the unexpected. Boy, aren't we experiencing that right now? We're riding, we're surfing on the unexpected every day. That part of our civic education should be a thorough education in the contingency of political and social life, to take nothing for granted. That's the attitude that the good citizen has. We don't take for granted the good things we enjoy. We don't take for granted the evils that we deplore. History is a good teacher of these things, things that citizens need to know. As I mentioned a moment ago, our revolution, whose beginnings we're about to celebrate in April with Lexington and Concord. I hope you all are going to do big set off fireworks in your classes and all kinds of good stuff. Not the shot fired around the world, though. We don't need that. But it's coming, and the semi quincentennial is coming. If I was a real sadist, I would make you all say semi quincentennial, but I will not do that. But that revolution, remember, it was all about moving from subject to citizen, from subject to citizen. This is a language often used by revolutionaries, and it's summarizes a lot of things. The movement from being dependent to being engaged involves participating in the process of ruling ourselves. Not individualism per se, but self rule. So to refuse to submit to the domination of large forces, to assert our human agency as self governing citizens, that is an aspiration as relevant now as it ever has been. Thank you very much.
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If you enjoyed this lecture, we encourage you to Visit our website, k12hillsdale.edu for additional information on upcoming Hoagland center events and other free resources for educators.