Things Glorious and Ruinous
Review by Mandi Gerth
With wit and acumen, Mark Signorelli in Things Glorious and Ruinous reflects on and critiques the current state of classical education in America. If this is a movement, he asks, where are we going? If this is a recovery, what are we recovering? His collection of thirty-three essays delineates the void classical education attempts to fill—a void created by the absence of culture.
Perhaps some of us in classical education are too heads down—trying to choose the best curriculum, recruit new families, raise money for a building project—Mark’s book asks us to look up from our desks and into our classrooms. He makes it clear that the mission critical work of classical education is done between teachers and students because that’s where the stories are shared, the heroic deeds recounted, and the standard of excellence upheld.
A classical school must be staffed by teachers who are investing in classroom culture, but no school will have this kind of faculty without an administrator who understands that all education is enculturation. As Mark points out, “a culture inheres in the collective effort of a people to hold an ideal of human flourishing in their attention and to conform their individual and collective characters, along with their rites, their customs, their labor, and their artwork, to the standards derived from this ideal. So defined, it is the most evident thing in the world that in America, at the present day, there is not a culture” (102). I’ve often heard administrators of classical schools and leaders in the movement discuss “human flourishing” as a telos of classical education, but Mark connects two important dots here: it is culture which gives students, parents, and teachers a vision of what human flourishing looks like here and now. The “rites, customs, labor, artwork, and standards” derived from an ideal give a people a collective identity—a way to see themselves and a way to act accordingly. It is almost impossible to disagree with Mark that “in America, at the present day, there is not a culture.” But rather than just lament its absence, Mark describes the signifiers and provocatively asks us what we are going to do to fill the void.
Things Glorious and Ruinous is organized into six sections: Theoria: The Idea of Classical Education; The Liberal Arts Tradition Today; Classical Education and Child Development; The Place of the Classical School in Society; Classical Pedagogy; and Classical Approaches to Writing Instruction. Each section contains four to six essays, and each essay runs about four to eight pages in length. High diction and complex syntax tilt the work toward the academic, and novice teachers and those new to classical education will likely find the numerous quotations and allusions intimidating, but the structure of the book greatly enhances its accessibility. Each short essay feels like a wind sprint. Fifteen minutes of focused reading provide more than enough to ponder on the recovery bed. Mark’s erudite and lucid observations and criticisms of our contemporary application of ancient and medieval thoughts on education and the human person will fuel many lively debates and discussions. In fact, I would encourage administrators to strategically choose an essay a week for professional development seminar discussions. The required reading would be brief, but the resulting conversation extremely beneficial.
Teachers are frequently caught between what administration expects and what parents demand—a true rock and hard place—and Mark honestly calls it like he sees it. For example, “The people running our schools believe that their highest priority is to safeguard the emotional and psychological placidity of their students and to ensure that their self-regard never suffers even a momentary challenge, from which distress may be likely to result. Schools are structured now to affirm students’ own conception of themselves, no matter how far distant from reality that conception might lie” (94). And elsewhere, “When we refuse to teach to norms, we just as surely signal our doubts about whether our students can competently accomplish any of the things we are asking them to accomplish. By relentlessly fixating on exceptional cases, we communicate to young people our assumption that they are not capable of meeting any real expectations we might frame for them” (89). His observations are pointed and pressing. Yet he’s not shining a light into the dark corners just to make us squeamish about what lurks there. Each essay is crafted as a signifier of the true problem classical education must address: the absence of an American culture that unifies and ennobles. We will not know where we are going or what we are recovering in classical education if we don’t have a real and dreadful sense of the cultural impoverishment which characterizes our students and their families.
This book comes at just the right time and will be of great service to administrators who need to be asked its provocative questions and heed its urgent call to action. It stands to be equally as valuable to leaders in the renewal movement who theorize and advise from outside the classical school. Things are different now from when the movement began, and Mark takes us right to the center of what it looks like to run a classical school now. He asks the questions that need to be asked now. And he points us in a direction that is very much needed now. Now is the right time to read Mark’s book.
Mandi Gerth lives in Dallas, Texas where she teaches and writes about classical education. She is the author of Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom. For over twenty years, she and her husband have labored to build a family culture for their five children that values books, baseball, museums, home-cooked meals, and conversation about ideas. You can follow Mandi on Instagram or subscribe to her substack here.