Hicks, David V. Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education. University Press of America, 1999. (paid link)
Magister, quo vadis?
“Education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about the nature of man, and for this reason, no education is innocent of an attitude toward man and his purposes.” So posits David Hicks in the “Prologue” of his carefully considered book Norms & Nobility, described by the author as his “personal interpretation of classical education.” Following the logic of his thesis, Hicks concludes that “the good school does not just offer what the student or the parent or the state desires, but it says something about what these three ought to desire.” What ought to be desired above all is the good. And it is only what Hicks calls a “classical inquiry” that keeps this noble ideal ever in view in the face of mounting pressures to acquiesce to modernity’s demands for utility. Hicks discovers the fault line in today’s educational landscape between classical education’s “normative” ends (what ought to be done) and progressive education’s “operational” ends (what can be done).
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Hicks begins by considering a “prescriptive” education, first conceived and expressed imaginatively as the “Ideal Type,” by the mythmakers of antiquity. Defining the Ideal Type as we find it today is no simple task given the many accretions, permutations, and challenges it has undergone through the centuries. Yet, Hicks does a fine job articulating the essence of the Ideal Type. It is, in Hicks’s formulation, “an aprioric necessity of human existence, a concomitant of human life, prescribing for all time the standard by which men shall judge themselves and others.” There is then a dogmatic quality attending the Ideal Type that has been clarified and crystallized through a creative tension between what Hicks terms “mythos” and “logos,” imagination and reason. Neither is complete without the other, however, Hicks asserts “of preeminent importance to human life and subsequent learning is the cultivation of the imagination” because “[O]nly through the imagination can virtue be taught and character formed.” Virtue cannot be taught analytically. It is through narrative, story, that the connotative content of the Ideal is brought to bear upon the student in such a way that word and deed, “imperative and hope,” find a virtuous union in which the student takes responsibility for what he knows. In this imaginative engagement with the Ideal Type is found the spark of “the student’s youthful desire to grow up to be a Regulus or a Cincinnatus, a Jefferson or a Lincoln.”
Hicks accepts the Platonic concept of knowledge as an activity, i.e. thinking. The mode of thinking taught via classical inquiry is the “dialectic,” which Hicks defines paradoxically as “a unity of opposites…being and nonbeing, identity and difference, temporal and eternal” etc. Without dialectic, man cannot come to understand himself or the world he inhabits. It is the the habit of mind that is ever challenging, affirming or rejecting what it receives, that allows man to escape “the exclusively analytical posture that atomizes life, smashes up experience into quantifiable chunks…and would leave him splashing around in an ocean of bits and pieces one inch deep.”
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Modern education prefers an operational curriculum concerned only with descriptive accounts of fragmented appearances. The dogmatic nature of classical inquiry is anathema to today’s educational theorists. In this way, Hicks argues, Descartes is the father of modern schooling. Yet, Hicks rejects Cartesian skepticism as the point of origin for true learning, instead reaffirming a long-standing principle of classical education – docilitas. Humility is a prerequisite of learning. “Dialectical learning,” Hicks asserts, “requires that [the student] accept a dogma before he rejects it.” This claim presupposes trust between teacher and student. Therefore, “the master’s life displays what it means to accept and to live by a dogma.” The teacher can only lead his students out of the cave into the bright light of truth if his own mind is illumined with the habit of dialect.
Advocates of progressive education balk at a term like dogma because it connotes prescriptive imperatives and suggests the past has some claim upon us today. They would rather present their students with socio-political controversies, then “students are asked to judge ideas in analytical detachment on the basis of unverifiable ideological presuppositions.” The presuppositions are often provided by the teacher or the curriculum itself. The best such an education can achieve is a species of casuistry. But, dogma is not constituted by a selection of ethical choices to be justified by clever arguments. Most dogmas must simply be accepted on the authority of the myth or the teacher. “Dogmas like free will,” Hicks claims, “are not value preferences or moral options, but firm convictions received on authority, since dialectic begins with sincere acceptance, not skeptical detachment.” The teacher also must take responsibility for what he knows.
In the latter part of his book, Hicks offers some practical guidelines regarding implementation of classical inquiry. He suggests a curriculum for 7th – 12th grade (teachers of Kindergarten – 6th grade will be disappointed), provides insights for administrators and teachers, and offers a structural model of the classical school (again focusing on middle and high school). Hicks also highlights a perennial challenge for those attempting to reform their schools on the classical model: “difficulty in obtaining teachers whose expectations and abilities coincide with the reforming vision.” To remedy this unfortunate situation, Hicks calls for a “Teachers’ Seminar” that would, in effect, train teachers in dialectic. Classical inquiry is impossible without competent, enthusiastic teachers leading the way. Too many students today have no idea where their teachers are leading them, usually because they aren’t leading them at all. A teacher who accepts the imperatives of the mythos will never be asked by his students, “Master, where are you going?”
Thomas Jay is the Curriculum Consultant in the West at Memoria Press. Prior to his current position, he served many years as a teacher and Academy Dean at a classical charter school in Scottsdale, AZ. Thomas is a graduate of the University of Dallas and also holds a Master in Humanities with a Concentration in Classical Education from UD.