Dr. John Peterson (26:44)
Hello everybody. I'll be talking a little bit about the last two chapters, seven and eight in part one to give you a taste of what they're about. Titles of the chapters are the Ennobling of the Masses, Ennobling of the Masses and the Promise of Christian Paideia. And these last two chapters are concerned with one big problem. American culture and American democracy are degraded and utilitarian. But we want to reform American culture and American democracy into something better and into something higher. The problem then is really a question. Is classical education elitist? Now, given this book's title, Norms and Nobility, you might think that it is. However, in chapter one, as John Read, Hicks writes that the classical schools of 19th century Victorian England perverted classical education by making it elitist. According to Hicks, to speak of classical education for the few is a contradiction in terms. For paideia is the inheritance of all men as individuals. Should we be surprised that classical Education was born in the greatest democracy of antiquity, classical Athens, the city of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato. Liberal learning is for all men. Self government is for all men. The two go hand in hand. If you want a stirring account of the moral superiority of democracy, you have to read Pericles funeral oration for the Athenians who died in the war against Sparta. Pericles contrasts the open, free and democratic Athens against Sparta. Sealed off. Totalitarian eugenicist Hicks argues, rightly in my view, that even if democracy was born among the Greeks, it reached its fulfillment in Christianity. Hicks quotes Erasmus, who says that to be a philosopher and to be a Christian is synonymous. Whereas even in democratic Athens, only a small elite of aristocratic men took up the life of philosophy. After the coming of Christ, whole churches of unlearned men and women did so. As the church, Father Athanasius, put it, these simple men and women learned to despise death and think rather of things immortal. The education that forms the whole person, that renews the culture, and that preserves democracy must be universal education. Further, as Hicks says, it is only democracy that provides the freedom necessary for all people to develop their full human potentials. So far, so good. The answer to the opening question is simply no. Classical education is not elitist. Rather, it's universal, and in fact, it is democratic education par excellence. The utilitarian job training in our public schools, like Dr. Gary said, is to train workers for GDP growth. But classical education forms humans for lives of virtue. It is here, though, that we encounter a problem. In order to explain the problem, I need to take you on a little historical tangent about the word democracy, which, of course, we get from Greek. Now. Pericles funeral oration occurred during a war with Sparta. That war, the Peloponnesian War, did not end up going very well for Athens. Pericles died of a plague, the Spartans conquered Athens, and Sparta installed a murderous regime of oligarchs, the 30 tyrants to rule the conquered Athenians. Shortly afterward, for all practical purposes, democracy vanished not only from Athens, but really from the Western world. And in the centuries that followed, the Christian Revolution transformed the world. Elitism was defeated. Ordinary people were, according to Athanasius and Erasmus, like we just said, living like philosophers. So where did democracy go after Pericles funeral oration, this praise for democracy? It really took about 2,000 years for another great speech to be delivered to explicitly defend the moral superiority of democracy. Let me read you a few lines from it. Only one form of government can make better and happier human beings. Democratic or republican government. These two words are synonymous. Despite the abuse of popular language. For aristocracy is no more the republic than monarchy is. Democracy is the only form of state in which all the individuals composing it can truly call their own country. Now, this speech is not from the American Revolution, whose leaders generally avoided using the word democratic and democracy. This is rather the speech that Maximilien Robespierre delivered to the French national convention in 1794. Robespierre was offering a philosophical justification for the Reign of Terror, explaining why democratic government must be protected, using a guillotine against elitists. So why doesn't democracy reappear once Christianity sweeps through the world? And why does it reappear during the murderous atheistic French Revolution when the Jacobins kill the king, launch a sexual revolution against the family and try to re engineer French cultural and social life altogether? Nowadays we take for granted what Robespierre then had to argue, that the only morally legitimate form of government is a democratic republic. So are we Jacobins? Are we the heirs of Robespierre? Well, let's turn back to Hicks. He is no Robespierre. He argues that it is the duty of classical education to relativize democracy. He says classical education in a modern democracy teaches a person to value the aims of government more than its forms. In other words, democracy is only a means, not an end. That is what, in part, Socrates was doing in democratic Athens. In Hicks words, the classical school must offer a sort of dialectical negation of democratic society, educating aristocrats rather than democrats. Now we are inclined to scoff at the charges Athens convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth. But perhaps educating aristocrats instead of democrats was what he was doing. So did Socrates go too far? The Athenians killed him. But it seems absurd to execute someone for crimes like this. But consider his students. Lots of people know the names Plato and Xenophon. They were both later students of Socrates. But Socrates had two famous early students as well, Critias and Alcibiades, both of whom died before Socrates. Now, neither Critias nor Alcibiades exactly covered themselves in glory. Both became collaborators with Sparta, Alcibiades as advisors to the Spartans in the war against Athens, and Critias as the head of the 30 tyrants that murderous oligarchy Sparta installed. And like Robespierre, Critias led a reign of terror to re engineer Athenian society. But rather than doing so in the name of democracy and liberty, he did so in the name of purging foreign blood from Athens and perfecting its biological stock. As one scholar of Plato writes Critias, Socrates, student was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism, so to speak, on Sparta radicalized a eugenic antinomian dictatorship. Now, if you were the teacher of the man who championed an insane Spartan death cult ruling Athens and the teacher of a traitor who joined the Spartans, then perhaps the charge of corrupting the youth makes at least a little sense. 50 years after Socrates was killed, his name pops up again in a speech by Escanes. And Eschenes remembers Socrates as a sophist who was put to death because he was the teacher of Critias. That's how the Athenians remembered Socrates immediately afterwards. But it seems like Socrates did better with his later students, Plato and Xenophon, who, even if only by watching their teacher die, learned some moderation and prudence. But we can tell from their writings that Socrates never stopped training aristocrats. Xenophon sent his sons away from Athens to be educated in Sparta and wrote a glowing homage to the enemy city. And in The Republic, which Dr. O' Toole rightly called one of the greatest books ever written, Plato puts in Socrates mouth plans for an ideal city that practiced a level of radical biological experimentation that would have made the Spartans blush. Xenophon too, for what it's worth, seemed really interested in biological experimentation, writing about breeding horses and hunting dogs. So why were the greatest of Socrates students so enamored of Sparta? And why were they so interested in re engineering families and experimental breeding, these things that Sparta was so well known for? Part of the answer must be family. The great T.S. eliot, in notes Toward the Definition of Culture writes, the primary channel of transmission of culture is family. In the classical education movement, we want to renew culture and preserve democracy. But as school leaders, we are always playing second fiddle to families. Now you might have heard the saying, parents are the first educators of their children. It's a bit of a cliche in classical education circles. And my question for you, do you really believe that when you think of the parents at your school who simply don't get it, who complain about everything, whose kids are ill behaved and frankly not super smart or very talented, does it ever pop into your mind, you know, in this case it would be better if the parents were not the first educators. And that's the question I want to leave you with. As you read Norms and Nobility, especially as you read chapters seven and eight, who is the child's first educator? And what can a classical school reasonably hope to accomplish in this grand vision of renewing culture and preserving democracy? Because in our attempts at doing all that, we will inevitably come up against the question of family. In Chapter one, Hicks says that the narrow and elitist schools of Victorian England perverted classical education by teaching in precept and in example, a hereditary aristocratic ideal intended to serve the ambitions of empire and to preserve the status quo. And so, my final question for you to ponder as you read this book, which I hope you do, is the same one that Dr. Peterson raised, was that really a perversion? Thanks.
