The Heart of Culture: A Brief History of Western Education
Review by Thomas Jay
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The Heart of Culture: A Brief History of Western Education. Cluny Media, 2020.
At just over 100 pages, this slim volume published by the Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) is an excellent primer on the crucial role education has played in the formation and perpetuation of Western culture. Admittedly, such a brief account “can only hope to sketch in the broad outlines of the Western educational narrative.” Nevertheless, this book is highly informative, highlighting important milestones in the development of Western education over the past 2500 years from the Greek ideal of paideia to Renaissance humanism to the Enlightenment, John Dewey, and progressive education.
Western civilization is “the story of the clash and the combination of…two universal ideals, Greek philosophical culture and Jewish-Christian religion.” The distinguishing feature of these cultures is that “these two peoples managed to universalize their experience so as to arrive at general human truths.” For this reason, Western civilization “endures through time not mainly by geography or ethnicity but by an educational process, by the handing on of a cultural tradition.” The danger here is that “if a rupture occurs in the transmission of that culture…the culture as a whole necessarily goes into a crisis of identity.” The central contention of this book is that the Enlightenment represents such a rupture, the effects of which are still felt in our schools today.
This book begins with the development of paideia from an aristocratic warrior ideal in early Greece to a universal principle of education in Greek democracy, championed primarily by Plato and Isocrates, and traces its advancement in the age of Hellenism when the arts of language and number that we know today as the trivium and quadrivium emerged. It was during the patristic era when Christians “came to see themselves as the true inheritors of that tradition.” By the close of the 11th century, paideia had been thoroughly Christianized. The tradition was handed on from age to age for 2000 years until a new way of looking at the world and man’s place in it took hold.
The Enlightenment constituted not simply “a development or a variation on the tradition, but a fundamental rupture.” The impact of Enlightenment ideas were so radical because “every educational program is based on a specific anthropology, and every anthropology is rooted in a fundamental view of God and the world.” The Enlightenment sought to create a purely scientific basis for the ordering of society, including education, wherein only empirical information counts as knowledge. This rupture supplanted paideia, or Christian humanism as it came to be called in the Renaissance, with a new anthropology and a new secular religion. The human person no longer had a telos, or ultimate end beyond the temporal world. This led inevitably to the abandonment of educational first principles undergirding paideia for a new set of muddled assumptions about the purpose of education.
This short book is a must read for all classical educators. It includes a short bibliography of excellent suggestions for more in-depth reading. Readers will gain a much better understanding of how western education developed and why it is so important to revive that tradition now.
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.