Reading classics such as Anne of Green Gables, Farmer Boy, or To Kill a Mockingbird, some parents meditate on the adolescents portrayed—teenagers eager to master the virtues of free, responsible citizens. We wonder if our schools are getting it wrong. Our public schools extend our kids’ adolescence into their mid-twenties, train them in political activism, and eject them into the world, too anxious to run their own lives. So, more of us are taking control of our kids schooling, confident we can do at least as well as the teachers’ unions. 

The increasingly popular alternative to the bureaucratic schools is something now known as classical or liberal education in private or charter schools, learning co-operatives, and growing homeschools. This education evolved in the Christian West over two millennia. Plato defined its political problem in the 4th century B.C., but his solution had little cultural traction. A thousand years later, the monasteries of the Dark Age shaped its content. The 15th century Renaissance cemented its social status. Then, this past century, a classical revival, first among homeschoolers, clarified its purpose: forming young citizens, free of the coercive obsessions of the state. 

Plato diagnoses the problem in his Republic: Every society always breeds a new cohort of highly spirited youth, who, left to their own devices, launch themselves into careers of activism, conspiracy, and crime. Whoever grabs control over the swords, police batons or radio stations then seizes “the regime,” which “drags the rest of us along with them.” Economist Thomas Sowell echoed the diagnosis, 2400 years later: “Every generation is threatened by a barbarian invasion.”

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How can we turn young wolf cubs into sheep dogs? Proper education. 

“Unless we can find a better way of life than ruling, for those who rule,” Plato warns, “rival lovers will fight,” either in open assemblies or back-alley conspiracies. So the soul’s limitless appetites must be offered a transcendent satisfaction. We must educate our youth in pursuit of the Good beyond politics.    

The Republic’s education has two stages, poetic and intellectual. The young learn first by imitation (mimesis), Plato says, so they need virtuous models or icons. In his day, however, their mythical gods and heroes (e.g., lustful Zeus) were very bad models, so the poets nurtured more hyenas than border collies. 

Plato’s secondary education then offers its “better way of life than politics.” Competing for power is like fighting over the Shadows in a Cave, he argues, when true happiness is found in contemplating the Good. To escape the gloomy Cave, into eternal Sunlight, youth can ascend upward through arithmetic, plain and solid geometry, astronomy, and harmony, studied not as practical skills (as in our public schools), but as eternal ideas. Revealing the truth and beauty of the Cosmos, their capstone study is “dialectics,” philosophic contemplation of the Good in itself. 

Plato’s prescription, the pedagogy of an ethereal Logos, was the seed of Western education, seeking to turn young minds from political mischief toward the Divinity, found in the human soul. So one ancient commentator described life in his Academy as “pursuing the elusive Good and finding happiness in geometry,” free from the lust for power. 

Given this need for a healthy culture, however, Plato had only a pantomime solution. A liberal education with real cultural traction needed a new poetry or foundational worldview. A half-millennium later, the Church celebrated the Triumph of the Cross, love’s victory over death. This liberated, in their thousands, small, free societies of love from their death-dealing masters. Discovering the Imago Dei in each soul unleashed true hope and escape from the brutal shadows of the Cave.

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Practical liberal education arose with the fall of the Western Empire. Martyred Christian senator Boethius (circa AD 524) first baptized Plato’s secondary studies (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmony) as the Quadrivium, with its elite philosophizing supplanted by the democratic Mass. Then, over the next two centuries, the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) evolved naturally, given the need to share Latin learning in a sea of Germanic languages. Its “copy books” included Cicero, Augustine, and Latin translations of Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy. In the 9th century, these Seven Liberal Arts were formalized and broadcast to 10 thousand scattered monasteries by Charlemagne’s schoolmaster, Alcuin. These blossomed, just in time for the cheerfully rapine Vikings to shatter Charlemagne’s fragile empire.

The 10th century anarchy permitted free, learned societies to rise up amid barbarous warrior states. The unarmed monks were useful, submissive clerks (clerics) for the illiterate chieftains. They were mostly celibate, so never bred a hereditary priestly caste. Ordaining clever farmers’ sons generated a true meritocracy, social mobility. Their sacrificial faith—freely teaching, healing and sheltering—nurtured independent burgs, guilds, and artists. Eventually, this free society seeded the 12th century renaissance, independent universities, reviving Greek philosophy and Roman law, and inventing experimental science. Plato’s dream of “a better way of life than ruling” became a reality.     

Eventually, the Gothic Age’s spreading peace and commerce enabled the rise of a free merchant class. Popular education took off with the Italian Quattrocento or 1400s, once called the Renaissance. The poet Petrarch’s studia humanitatispopularized Classical literature, celebrating its natural wisdom, yet cheerfully blind to its pagan superstition, cruelty, and despair. Renaissance secular humanism assumed the Imago Dei in each unique person but failed to see its debt to the Gospel. And it entirely ignored the reality of Original Sin. Castiglione’s Art of the Courtier elevated “courtesy” as a moral virtue, thus defining the social status of (Christian) ladies and gentlemen, respected for their learning and civility, yet indifferent to political power. Plato’s “better way of life” became middle-class. 

For a thousand years, liberal education shaped the moral imagination of succeeding generations, freeing them from the coercive obsessions of their political masters. Young Shakespeare read Plutarch’s Lives, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Cicero’s On Duties, and the Bible, then wrote plays subtly rebuking his patron, Queen Elizabeth. King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet were the pinnacle of implicitly Catholic Humanism, singing of the misery and suicidal tragedy of unrestrained power. Two centuries later, Abe Lincoln proved the Bible and Shakespeare sufficient for the integral formation of a free-minded statesman. 

This Western Canon was open and progressive, absorbing a flood of Aristotle in the 12th century, then Dante’s Commedia, Chaucer’s Tales, Cervantes’ Quixote, More’s Utopia, Newton’s (theistic) Principia Mathematica and Bacon’s (atheistic) New Atlantis. These were simply the books that all free citizens should read.

In the late 1800s, seduced by Progressive ideologues such as Egerton Ryerson and John Dewey, the democratic state began transforming parent-run grammar schools into training mills for its industrial economy. Poetry vanished from the curriculum, and the Quadrivium’s contemplative sciences were atomized into “useful technical skills.” Over decades, bureaucratic imperatives corrupted the educating of free citizens into the training of docile clerks and laborers. That dangerous cohort of highly spirited youth then gravitated to law schools as their path to power.  

By the early 1900s, wiser educators worried that state training was producing “highly skilled philistines” (Robert Maynard Hutchins), supplanting that “better way of life” with careerism. Their prescription was secular Great Books colleges, still flourishing. Yet, with popular moral imaginations shaped by poets such as Elvis Presley and James Dean, better reading risked training merely articulate philistines. So Catholic educators such as John Senior (The Death of Christian Culture) insisted that any real recovery required a return to “the thousand good books,” the classic adolescent literature that previously formed moral imaginations in harmony with the Imago Dei.   

Modern liberal education’s defining moment was the 1947 Oxford address by Anglo-Catholic writer Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning, now copied in its thousands by classical schools, homeschoolers and curriculum developers. Sayers shows that the elite “products” of modern schools seem “incapable of disentangling fact from opinion.” Studying random subjects leaves them “incapable of thinking.” So, to teach kids how to think, she offers an inspired translation of the Trivium into the natural stages of learning. No precis can do justice to her wit and wisdom, but her speech is easily found online.    

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So, what is a Catholic liberal education? It is not catechesis or education in the faith—though it assumes the moral imagination of Catholicism. It is literary education in the proper ordering of Catholic society, as The Lord of the Ringsteaches the proper service of a king, priest, or layman. Reading the good and great books of the West through a Catholic lens, it breathes the reflexes of Catholic social teachings, like human dignity, family autonomy, subsidiarity, free association and intellectual freedom. Accepting the need for cheerful, life-long effort, it brings light into the perennial political Cave, and compassion for those trapped in its Shadows.    

(Joseph Woodard is a Research Fellow with the Edmonton-based Gregory the Great Institute.)