When we read our poems in class, I learned that most of my peers had not followed the assignment. Many students made use of near rhymes instead of perfect rhymes, or wrote lines that did not rhyme at all. Some included lines much shorter or longer than iambic pentameter would allow. One student even submitted a “sonnet” composed of fifteen lines. These students knew how to rhyme and count to fourteen. What compelled them to break the rules anyway?

I recalled something my professor said that I had not given much thought to before. “Many of the greatest sonneteers,” he remarked, “rebelled against the sonnet’s strict conventions.” (Here he was referring to Keats’s “If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain’d” and Denis Johnson’s “Heat,” which we studied in our seminar.) With this comment, our professor granted us permission to subvert the sonnet’s basic rules even as we wrote our very first of the form.

This was just one example of a larger educational trend at Columbia University: the elevation of the spirit of the avant-garde as the pinnacle of artistic achievement. Liberal arts classes I took as part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum highlighted norm-breaking authors, composers, and artists for singular focus and praise. We marveled at Picasso and the cubists for painting without the traditional restrictions of artistic perspective, but were even more impressed by Pollock and Warhol, who completely defied the core conception of beauty in art. We listened with awe as Debussy’s impressionist sonatas and Stravinsky’s modernist ballets introduced novel rhythmic structures and tonalities, but had to admit that John Cage outdid them both when he composed a four-minute symphony with no instruments at all. To be sure, these artists all created works that are deserving of study on their own merits. But too often we did not focus on the quality of their works themselves so much as the subversive statements that they expressed.

The poorly written “sonnets” I had to read represented a relatively innocuous symptom of a pervasive corruption that had been festering at the heart of Columbia’s educational program: Instead of being trained to contemplate beauty and truth, my fellow Columbians and I were being told to subvert them. As students at Columbia’s “academy of the avant-garde,” we learned that in order for art to have meaning, it must challenge norms and rebel against the oppressive structures of society. Was a sonnet composed of fourteen neatly written lines and a perfectly Shakespearean rhyme scheme really a work of art? If we were not avant-garde, we were nothing.

Only in my senior year did I fully understand the nature of this problem. That fall, our campus was overtaken by terribly loud and unceasing protests, culminating in the campus Gaza encampments of spring 2024. Our university commencement was canceled, and the embarrassing depths of my alma mater’s naked corruption were on display for all the world to see.

That year, I received an email from the student senate that was revealing. The email, written as a complaint against the recent use of police force to clear Hamilton Hall of the students and outside actors who had occupied it, included the following statement: “Since 1968, Columbia has gained a reputation as the ‘Activist Ivy’—for many Columbia students, including ourselves, it’s the reason that we chose this school.” I chose to study at Columbia because I believed it would be an ideal environment to gather knowledge and pursue truth, especially in light of its much-touted Core Curriculum, and I had assumed my classmates felt similarly. This email revealed otherwise. The members of the student senate, representatives of the student body as a whole, chose to study at Columbia in order to practice social activism, not to study wisdom.

I began to realize that the activist explosion at our university was a natural progression from its avant-gardist philosophy. My fellow Columbians had learned that the purpose of the liberal arts is to take part in a game of breaking systems and expressing political statements. Consequently, many concluded that a more effective and easier way of playing this game was not to create or study the arts at all, but to protest directly. It did not bother them that, in pursuing this goal, they would miss seminars, disrupt library study sessions, and wreak havoc on the entire university. To them, this was the goal of the university experience. From the academy of the avant-garde was born the activist academy.

Most administrators and professors, who had already bought into the avant-garde philosophy underlying Columbia’s pedagogy, nurtured and sustained the transformation of their university from a center of learning into an activist hub. Admissions officers selected prospective students on the basis of their propensity toward activism rather than academic merit. In 2020, deans proudly announced action-oriented seminars to educate students on the importance of protest and of amplifying the voices of the young. The Committee on Honors, Awards, and Prizes chose my class’s valedictorian from among encampment leaders while students with real scholastic achievements were relegated to lesser honors.

It is easy to wonder at the chaos overtaking our campuses today and assume it is the work of a few bad actors or the absence of discipline. But the truth is that the call is coming from inside the house. Punishing the loudest agitators is necessary but not sufficient: The deeper problem lies within the philosophy that now animates much of higher education. The academy of the avant-garde and the activist academy alike represent distortions of what a university should be. We must teach students to understand, respect, and thoughtfully build upon the traditions they inherit, not defy and dismantle them. Above all, we must rekindle in our brightest minds a love for truth and beauty pursued for their own sakes, not for the sake of making political statements or breaking norms. Then perhaps they will glimpse that unique beauty that exists only within the limits of fourteen strictly rhymed and metrically sound lines of verse.

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The conversation is embedded below. For your long-term convenience, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Image by Ken Lund, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Hankins has been teaching at Harvard since 1985. He has written over twenty books and edited over fifty volumes with Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Library, which he founded in 1998. It is the Loeb Classical Library equivalent for the Renaissance. He also recently published The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition.

While Hankins’s scholarly specialty is the Renaissance, he believes knowledge of the history of philosophy is essential to understanding any individual philosophical work. Accordingly, his courses have impressed upon students the enduring importance of the two “poles” of Western thought: the Greek philosophical tradition and the Christian tradition. By situating philosophers between these poles, he demonstrated how they mutually shaped one another and sustained a millennia-long debate over their respective claims to primacy.

In his final class for the history of ancient philosophy, he provided a historical overview of the entire Western Tradition up to modernity. He concluded that the modern and contemporary omission of the Christian tradition is partly to blame for the soullessness of our age. He pointed out that no professor will take up the task of teaching this content at Harvard, as there are few to no professors left teaching Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. (There are four courses that reference Plato being offered next semester, and 110 that reference sexuality.) Insofar as they are taught, it’s within thematic courses such as “Philosophy of Humor” or ultra-specific courses in the Philosophy department on a single work.

Where a century ago every student would have arrived at Harvard having already read the Western canon, students now enter with little to no background in the classics. Nevertheless, many hope to encounter the Western canon but find that there is a widening gap in the field. This is not solely the fault of Harvard; current hiring policies make it difficult for someone studying the ancients to differentiate himself in a millennia-long tradition of scholarship.

If Harvard is to compete for students who are attracted by the new “Great Books” colleges or programs such as the ones being offered at University of Florida (which Hankins will be joining), they must think seriously about this deficiency. Harvard has long spent its energy and resources on targeting opportunity hiring, focusing on the superficial aspects of a professor—such as race and gender—rather than competence and what needs to be taught. Harvard should focus on hiring the best professors who can teach the subjects that have been neglected, not on hiring another administrator to manage a subsection of the student course request process.

As Hankins leaves, Harvard loses not only one of the last professors in his field, but also a friend of the conservative student body. He advised conservative-leaning clubs, provided mentorship to conservative students, and even hosted a legendary wine seminar (for those of drinking age), educating young men in the ways of being a gentleman outside the classroom. One of his books, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, is one of the few contemporary books that gives a positive moral account of the Renaissance and argues that the ideas were actually useful for developing virtue. He explains that classical education works only if one has a virtuous teacher, since virtue is learned by studying under someone who is virtuous.

Prof. Hankins is one of these teachers, and his love for knowledge and his students can be seen in everything he does. Those teachers will always be in demand by students that still desire to learn the true history that built our university, country, and civilization.

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Wordsworth’s lament about consumer culture replacing the wonder-filled contemplation of the natural world could well be the lyric description of what Pope Francis called the “technocratic paradigm.” That paradigm, a term he coined in Laudato Si’, is one that defines our relationship to the natural world and to other human beings exclusively by efficiency, profit, and power. Such an inhuman understanding fosters a throwaway culture of rampant consumerism and a deep and abiding disregard for human dignity. Francis’s solution is to propose a holistic educational model that integrates our Catholic faith with the disciplines of human knowledge, immersing students in the goodness of nature and asking them to abstain from the ubiquitous screens and unreality of the digital world that surrounds them.

When Leo XIV promised continuity with Francis, I was hopeful that he would similarly emphasize his predecessor’s vision of education. In choosing to focus on the renewal of Catholic education in his first apostolic letter, Drawing New Maps of Hope, Leo is doing just that.

Leo writes that education is not a peripheral activity for the Church, but one that “forms the very fabric of evangelization: it is the concrete way in which the Gospel becomes . . . a culture,” providing a map of hope for the world:

We live in a complex, fragmented, digitized educational environment. [We must] pause and refocus our gaze on the “cosmology of Christian paideia”. . . Since its origins, the Gospel has generated “educational constellations”: experiences that are both humble and powerful, capable of interpreting the times, of preserving the unity between faith and reason, between thought and life, between knowledge and justice. . . . A beacon in the night to guide navigation.

Catholic education urges students to break free from the mundane utilitarian paradigm and to turn to the stars: “As God said to Abraham, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars’ . . . know how to ask yourselves where you are going, and why.” Two days after the release of his letter, Leo gave an address to students: “Do not remain fixated on your smartphones and their fleeting bursts of images; instead, look to the sky, to the heights.”

This last phrase explicitly echoes St. Pier Giorgio Frassati’s famous motto, Verso l’alto, through which Leo highlights the lifelong work of the recently canonized saint. He also cites John Henry Newman, the newly confirmed Doctor of the Church. By pairing the two, Leo is calling our youth out of the technocratic paradigm and drawing them to the heights of Christian witness. He writes in his letter:

Education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good. This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy. Following in the wake of the thought of Saint John Henry Newman, it goes against a strictly mercantilist approach that often forces education today to be measured in terms of functionality and practical utility.

Not only must Catholic education turn its students to the stars, it must also embody the transcendent light that it communicates. Through this embodiment, the educational community becomes an instrument of the education, serving as a polestar that guides its students (and the world at large) to an authentically human vision of life and society. No one educates alone, and throughout its history, Catholic education has created constellations of partners, using its gravitational pull to join parishes, educational institutions, political and civic societies, and countless industries in the task of offering prophetic witness to the world—a witness that is not characterized by activism but by its “mere” existence as a community that forms its students into free men and women, and into servant citizens and apostolic believers.

Throughout history, the shape of these educational constellations has adjusted according to the needs and character of the time, balancing the Desert Fathers’ call to contemplation and personal renewal with the missionary call to engage with the modern culture. In the context of our own time, Leo calls Catholic education to focus on three priorities. Firstly, to educate our youth in the interior life. As he tells the assembled students: “Without silence, without listening, without prayer, even the light of the stars goes out.” Leo notes specifically that spiritual inspiration is fulfilled and strengthened by the silence of nature and by seeing God’s reflection in the beauty of creation.

Secondly, to form our youth so that they can rightly relate to technology and AI, “placing the person before the algorithm and harmonizing technical, emotional, social, spiritual and ecological intelligence.” A philosophical and theological framework must help technologies serve humans, not replace them; they must enrich the learning process, not impoverish our relationships and communities. “No algorithm can replace that which makes education truly human: poetry . . . art, imagination, and the joy of discovery. . . . The decisive point, therefore, is not technology, but the use we make of it.” In his address, Leo notes the example of St. Carlo Acutis, who disciplined his use of technology to remain free from addiction and isolation, and in so doing, was able to humanize the digital sphere.

Thirdly, Leo calls for a peaceful education—an education that provides authentic human encounter and conversation rather than inflaming conflict and open hostility. Universities must not conform to the standards of the day, neither tolerating violent demonstrations and vulgarity nor offering a country club environment for the wealthy. Instead, they must offer accessible study that revives the imagination, is imbued with a spirit of service, and that begets a loving discourse dedicated to the truth.

The world is much too much with us, and we are laying waste to it and to one another through our technocratic obsession with “getting and spending,” polarizing conflicts, radicalizing positions, and dopamine addiction. In this pivotal moment, Leo’s letter is calling us to a new kind of Catholic education, one that responds to the needs of our day—by following St. Frassati in calling students to greatness and service through the contemplation of nature, by following St. Acutis in moderating our use of tech through humane and humanizing engagement, and by following St. Newman in providing an integrated Catholic education. New constellations are forming; the renewal is growing. To the heights!

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We’ll see. The initiative strikes some as a common-sense move to lower costs and end wasteful programs such as a $75 million payout made in the last days of the Biden term to eligible nonprofit organizations to increase “educator diversity” in America. But the Trump ambition is a massive one and has no historical precedent. It was Ronald Reagan who said, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” And William F. Buckley once observed (if I recall correctly) that the only way to kill a government program is to convince the groups who benefit from it that, ultimately, those benefits do more harm than good, which is not an easy persuasion when the good is immediate and the harm delayed (as in the case, for example, of welfare dependency). 

Added to those resistances is the fact that when a program begins and grows, a network forms around it and constitutes a new and often powerful interest group in America. If the program reaches sufficient size—that is, if it manages enough funding—the network has the status of a professional industry. In the case of the Department of Education, the constituents include consultants, researchers in schools of education, grant writers, lobbyists, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and various NGOs, not to mention actual education providers ranging from states and districts to curriculum creators and testing companies. None of those parties want to end the income stream that has flowed for many years.     

This latter fact, however, may enable the plan to work this time, finally, after so many years of Republicans calling for the abolition of the department. The method here is to eliminate some elements and personnel and programs, keep some programs within the department (for now), but move other units into other departments (Labor and Interior are mentioned) where they can be administered as they always have. This reorganization will cut significantly into the specific education bureaucracy and end the monolithic left-wing bias that reigns there. 

At the same time, and most importantly, much of the education-earmarked money will continue to be delivered in one way or another, though through other offices. As the Associated Press reports: “Education officials say the moves won’t affect the money Congress gives states, schools and colleges.” Those ongoing recipients will not be inclined to complain and to protest. Yes, the DEI industry is incensed over the administration’s assaults, but President Trump ran against the ideology and won. Besides, the general public isn’t as wedded to the DEI system as the media would have us believe. A poll earlier this year conducted by The Economist and YouGov found that 45 percent of Americans favor terminating DEI programs, while 40 percent opposed the move. And we could add another rationale that has popular appeal, namely, the performance metric: Every time in recent years the department has issued national test scores in reading, math, and other subjects, the public wonders if the department has done its job (see here for the recent NAEP scores in reading for twelfth-graders).

So, the chances of a near-total elimination of this nearly fifty-year-old bureaucracy may be pretty good. But one thing must be spared: the National Center for Education Statistics. The reason, for me, is that NCES is a primary source of data on college enrollments, graduation, demographics, fields of study, and so forth. As such, NCES has provided critics of trends in higher education with solid empirical evidence that gainsays the contentions of education defenders that all is well on campus, “nothing to see here.” The administration should be told to preserve the center. It is a best friend of reformers.

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In 2023, Colorado launched its brand-new universal preschool funding program, offering families up to fifteen hours per week of tuition-free preschool at a provider of their choice—public or private, secular or religious. Gov. Jared Polis hailed UPK as a milestone for educational access, claiming that it had “unlock[ed] the opportunity for every family to send their child to preschool.” But two years later, many religious families across Colorado are still locked out.

Why? Colorado officials have taken the position that Catholic preschools cannot ask families who want to enroll to support the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on issues related to sexuality and marriage. For these Catholic preschools, it would undermine their mission and muddle their message to admit and be forced to accommodate families who disagree with the Church’s teachings and who act as a counter-witness to their faith. But secular schools require similar alignment all the time: Many Montessori schools, for example, require parents who enroll to sign a statement agreeing to the school’s fundamental principles.

Despite taking a hard stand against Catholic preschools, Colorado has been generous in granting secular preschools the flexibility they need to serve their community. A state official even testified that, in her view, UPK preschools could admit only gender-nonconforming children and could prioritize serving LGBTQ families or children of color without breaking state law. So, Colorado knows how to accommodate preschools that serve diverse communities—but it refuses to accommodate religious groups with beliefs it dislikes.

The upshot? Two Catholic preschools have closed, including one that served low-income families from black and Latino communities. Enrollment is down almost 20 percent across the archdiocese’s parish preschools. Being excluded from UPK undoubtedly puts enormous pressure on Catholic schools and families to abandon their beliefs. The Denver Post pounced on this, calling Colorado’s pressure campaign an “incredible opportunity” for the archbishop to abandon Church teaching and start enrolling families who disagree with the Catholic Church’s beliefs so its preschools can receive UPK funding. Unable and unwilling to compromise on matters of faith, the archdiocese has remained steadfast. 

With the help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the archdiocese and its parish preschools have been fighting against this religious bigotry in court. Throughout this litigation, however, Colorado has insisted that its rules are neutral and apply to all. The Tenth Circuit recently agreed, citing Employment Division v. Smith, an oft-criticized 1990 Supreme Court ruling that sharply narrowed First Amendment protections for religious exercise. In Smith, the Court held that laws that are neutral toward religion and apply to everyone can burden religion without violating the Constitution. But a law—by definition—doesn’t apply to everyone when state officials make exceptions for favored groups. That’s why we asked the Supreme Court last week to take up the case. 

Three times in the past decade, the Court has invalidated state laws that excluded religious schools and the families they serve from government funding. In Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson, the Supreme Court made clear that states cannot exclude religious schools from public benefit programs (like UPK) because of their religious exercise. But states like Colorado are trying to sidestep those rulings by excluding religious people under the guise of a neutral-sounding anti-discrimination law. That’s a distinction without a difference, especially in this case, where the only preschools excluded are religious.

If past is prologue, religion-hostile states will keep hunting for ways to dodge the Supreme Court’s rulings. This case presents the Supreme Court with a perfect example of that behavior. That’s why the Justices should slap down Colorado’s latest anti-religious gambit. Doing so would not only ensure that thousands of families receive the state’s promise of universal preschool, but would also send a message to bureaucrats nationwide who think they can thumb their nose at the Constitution and get away with it.

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Estimates say anywhere from one to 1.5 million students have opted out of college after Covid, and 29 percent of Americans say college is simply “not worth it.” For many Gen Zers, the question is no longer which college to attend, but whether to go at all. Amid this national downturn in collegiate interest, Newman Guide–recommended colleges are seeing record enrollment numbers and steadily growing student bodies. And the administrators say their Catholic identity is an integral part of that growth. 

The Newman Guide recognizes vetted Catholic colleges that are successfully maintaining a Catholic identity in all areas of campus life. According to its website, the Newman Guide reaches more than 75,000 families each year: parents and students looking for a faithfully Catholic education. It lists “prayer,” “Scripture,” “sacrament,” “Christian worldview,” and “Catholic community” as some of its criteria, and there are currently twenty colleges that make the recommended list, including Belmont Abbey, Benedictine, Christendom, University of Dallas, and Franciscan.

Belmont Abbey in Belmont, North Carolina, has a monastery on campus with fourteen monks living there full-time. It currently has the highest overall enrollment in the college’s history. This year’s freshman class is its second largest ever. 

“There is certainly a Catholic piece to our growth. However, I would say the national trend we are seeing with small religious colleges experiencing enrollment growth is tied less to religious denomination than what James Davison Hunter in his highly influential book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America pointed to as a divide in our culture between those who hold an orthodox worldview and those who hold a progressive worldview,” Interim President and Provost Joseph Wysocki said. “I believe that in a world that is increasingly characterized by uncertainty, manipulation, and a feeling by students that they are anchorless, that colleges that posit timeless truths worthy of investigation will continue to attract students.”

Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, currently has 2,250 undergraduate students, up 22 percent over the last ten years. This fall was only the second time its incoming freshman class exceeded 620, and they report a record number of transfers. On the frontier of making college affordable, Benedictine gave out more scholarship money this year than ever before and launched an initiative to add 250 more scholarships over the next nine months.

Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, has grown 18 percent over the past ten years, reaching its enrollment cap of 550 students a couple of years ago. Reaching that enrollment cap has meant administrators like Vice President of Enrollment Tom McFadden are left to wrestle with the question of what the ideal Christendom student is, and how the college will ensure that he is admitted over a “not-so-Christendom-esque student.” Additionally, there has been a dramatic rise in high school students making campus visits throughout the year and attending Christendom’s Best Week Ever summer program. 

“Families who are either homeschooling their children, or sending them to private, Catholic, or independent schools, want more for their children,” McFadden said. “They have sacrificed so much to ensure that their children are not affected by today’s toxic culture, and they have sacrificed lots of money to give their children a truly Catholic education. It’s no surprise that when they are looking for colleges to send their children, the Newman Guide colleges are top of the list. As long as the culture continues to decline, Christendom College will continue to be relevant—and necessary.” 

A similar sort of wrestling has taken place at the University of Dallas. The university received more than two thousand additional applicants to its undergraduate college this past year. President Jonathan J. Sanford cites the Eucharistic Revival and the growth of classical K–12 education as some of the reasons for this growing interest. “We were not aiming to grow significantly, so what this enabled us to do was to take more care to ensure we pulled in very strong fits who are prepared for our core curriculum, who want to go to our Rome campus their sophomore year, who want to deepen their faith, who want to build character with friends, and who want to be excellent people who also excel professionally,” Sanford said.

Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, however, is looking to grow, reporting increased enrollment numbers for the eleventh year in a row. Franciscan expanded its academic programming to include an engineering major, which just graduated its first class. They wandered campus with the option to attend Mass four times a day alongside over a dozen practicing friars and a practicing priest as the college president. 

“St. John Paul would have said that a university should have two communities, an academic community and a faith community, and those two things aren’t opposed to each other. They live vibrantly in a Catholic institution,” Fr. Pivonka said. “That’s what we’re trying to do: What we’re trying to do here stands in contradiction to what’s going on in the culture. And I think more and more young people . . . they see the emptiness. The world that doesn’t stand for anything that’s true, good, or beautiful. And they want to stand in contradiction to that.”

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Hope, love, faith: The three theological virtues, though not in Pauline order, form the tripartite shape of a good life—childhood, youth, maturity. You can’t skip over any phase. If some overpowering love doesn’t shatter the chrysalis of my childhood, I’ll never surpass the passivity of childish hope. Without the memory of my original inspiration, I won’t keep slogging through long seasons of slow, sometimes imperceptible germination and growth. 

Among other things, Rosenstock’s sketch of life stages highlights the near-inevitability of a “generation gap.” Here’s the paradox: Children must grow up, but they don’t become fully-realized human beings if they simply replicate their parents. They have to leave father and mother and cleave in love to wife or husband, cause or mission. Rupture with the past is the only pathway into the future.

How then can the sons be turned to their fathers, fathers to their sons? What prevents the young (men) from renouncing the past in a frenzy of revolutionary nihilism? In “Man Must Teach,” Rosenstock’s seminal essay on education, he argues that the classroom harmonizes generations by harmonizing time. A classroom doesn’t have to be part of a formal institution; it can be the dining room table, a weekend fishing trip, a liturgy, a conversation over coffee. Whatever its form, the classroom brings a teacher together with a student or students in the same place at the same time. Despite appearances, teacher and students don’t meet as “contemporaries” but as “distemporaries.” The teacher is always “older,” if not in age at least in his exposure to the material; students are always “younger” because they enter the class as innocents venturing into an unexplored country.

Distemporaries forge a common present only when “they admit that they form a succession, if they affirm their quality of belonging to different times.” And the classroom works its magic only when it’s infused with faith, hope, and love. Students must trust and entrust themselves to the wisdom of the teacher, yielding their shapeless souls to his sculpting. The “aged” teacher must die to possibilities and plasticities that are still open options to his students. In self-sacrificial love, he hardens himself, foreswears youthful play, and gives his students a taste of his life-and-death struggle for truth. Student faith mingles with the teacher’s love to produce a common spirit of hope that animates the classroom.

As a reward for his renunciation, the teacher overcomes death, putting his imprint on a future he won’t live to see. Teachers are driven by a “forwardizing force,” students by a “backwardizing” force that seeks to hold conversation with the past. Teachers throw out a feeler to the future, students a feeler to the past. When forwardizing teachers and backwardizing students come together in love and faith, they form a “body of time” that old and young inhabit together. 

To succeed in this essential vocation, the classroom must be held in a delicate equilibrium. For several generations, it hasn’t. Teachers and parents buddy up with the young as if they were contemporaries. They’re reluctant to submit to the burdens of being “old” and are stirred by the same lust for novelty as the young. Many have lost confidence in the past they represent, or never had a chance to receive their heritage in the first place. Unmoored from a teacher’s past, without the guidance of a teacher’s love, the young lose faith in the old, and the arid classroom that results is bereft of hope. Under these conditions, the youthful explosion of inspiration turns purely destructive, and we’re left with generations of disinherited young (men) who misconstrue their homelessness as oppression. Our hope lies in the Spirit, who alone can revive the theological virtues and form classrooms that bind up the wounds of time.

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What is at work is not simply financial mismanagement but a long-brewing cultural transformation. For more than a century, American higher education has been shaped by a Zeitgeist that disintegrates the liberal arts university. It denies that mathematics, the sciences, and the humanities form a unified whole ordered to human flourishing. Instead, it replaces integration with specialization, reducing education to a utilitarian enterprise. The result is that universities have increasingly forgotten what it means to be well-educated.

The reigning assumption is that the purpose of college is to produce workers, not persons; employees, not citizens; technicians, not thinkers. The great tradition of liberal learning—an education that frees the soul by opening it to truth, wisdom, and virtue—has been crowded out.

Many small and mid-sized colleges, particularly those with faith-based roots, bought into the hypothesis that they could survive by imitating research universities. They gutted their core curricula to expand specialized programs, hoping to attract more students. Yet this has proven a false promise. Why attend a small liberal-arts-in-name-only college when one can go to a large state university for less money, with shinier facilities and the prestige of Division I athletics?

Institutions that abandoned their liberal arts identity now find themselves struggling to survive. Meanwhile, those who have remained faithful to the liberal arts mission—though not wealthy—continue to attract students seeking an education that forms the whole person.

Even if the financial calculus were reversed—even if dismantling the liberal arts could generate more revenue—there remains a deeper principle: The purpose of a university is not reducible to market utility. To treat education as a commodity is to betray its essence. The genuine task of the university is the formation of free and virtuous persons.

A truly liberating education does what its name implies: It liberates. By grounding students in the Western tradition, such education acquaints them with the roots of our civilization—pagan, Jewish, and Christian alike. It teaches that the intellectual tradition is not a linear story of progress but a living, contentious, and fruitful argument across the ages. Within this argument, students find their own voices, contributing to the next chapter of discovery.

For Catholic institutions, this vision includes a still higher horizon: the harmony of faith and reason. However adventurous the intellectual journey may be, its ultimate destination is the Divine Author of both revelation and nature. This conviction fosters both confidence and hospitality. True Catholic education does not retreat behind barricades, anxious and defensive, but extends an open hand. The apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae insists that non-Catholics are essential contributors to the Catholic university. Confident Catholicism is capacious; it welcomes dialogue while never wavering in fidelity to the magisterium.

This confident Catholicism stands in contrast to the prevailing insecurity of secular institutions, which often suppress unpopular questions or cling anxiously to ideological conformity. By contrast, a university that knows its telos—its end—can be both faithful and free.

I was reminded of this during a recent summer term teaching philosophy abroad. Students do not merely study texts in isolation; they encounter them in the living context of Western culture. Standing in Athens, Rome, or Florence, they learn that education is not about acquiring data but about entering a narrative. They become not sightseers but cultural pilgrims.

A pilgrim differs from a tourist in that the former seeks meaning, not diversion. Our students, prepared in advance, arrive at historical and religious sites ready to see them within a larger story: the unfolding of Western civilization and the Christian tradition. They discover that they themselves belong to this story.

This difference between tourism and pilgrimage encapsulates the larger difference between utilitarian and liberal education. The tourist collects experiences; the pilgrim undergoes transformation. The technician acquires marketable skills; the liberally educated person learns how to live.

A paradox emerges: Much of what is most valuable in liberal education looks inefficient to the modern eye. Why send students across the ocean to study philosophy when they could just as easily take the same course at home? Why maintain a core curriculum when electives are cheaper and more popular? Why require languages in doctoral programs when translation software abounds?

By the metrics of commodified education, none of these choices makes sense. They are unnecessary, superfluous, and inefficient. And yet they are indispensable. They reflect an older conviction: that human beings are not made for efficiency but for excellence.

Consider the superabundance of Western art and architecture. Why so many churches adorned with frescoes, mosaics, and sculptures designed to last millennia? Why multi-course Italian meals when one would suffice? Because beauty, festivity, and wonder are not luxuries; they are expressions of our deepest longing for the eternal. So too with education. The “inefficiencies” of small classes, Great Books, and study abroad are precisely what make education transformative.

All this is to say: Genuine liberal education stands athwart the spirit of the age. The reigning Zeitgeist prizes efficiency, novelty, and utility. It urges students to “think for themselves” by severing them from tradition and faith. It regards the Western intellectual heritage as an obstacle to innovation.

True liberal education tells a different story. It insists that real freedom requires rooting oneself in something greater than oneself—above all, in truth. It teaches that creativity is born not only from novelty but also from disciplined imitation and practice. It orients students toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In this sense, the stakes of education are nothing less than eternal. The Church Fathers spoke unashamedly of humanity’s destiny as theosis, or divinization. Education ordered to wisdom, truth, and virtue points us toward nothing less.

To what end do we educate? Not to produce employees for an economy that will forget them. Not to manufacture technocrats who mistake utility for meaning. Not to feed a culture of distraction with new diversions.

We educate so that our students may become free—free to think, free to love, free to worship. We educate so that they may seek wisdom, live virtuously, and glimpse the divine. We educate so that, in the words of St. Irenaeus, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”

Anything less is unworthy of the name of university.

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Extremist ideology has long had tentacles in public education. But the latest activist push—“Ethnic Studies” in its “liberated” form—will magnify this influence in alarming ways. 

Ethnic Studies ideology divides students into tribalized identity groups and teaches that America is systematically unjust and oppressive. But it goes beyond standard “anti-racist” critical theory in calling for active “resistance” to “disrupt” and “dismantle” our nation’s fundamental institutions. 

Ethnic Studies grew out of the 1968 San Francisco State student strikes that spawned the critical theory–based “grievance studies” that have politicized our universities. In the last five years or so, this ideology has filtered down to K–12 education. Advocates have promoted it aggressively in California, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and other states, asserting that it builds cultural understanding and allows students to “see themselves in the curriculum.” 

This campaign is most advanced in Minnesota. Here, under Gov. Tim Walz, policymakers—with the strong support of the teachers’ union—have mandated that Ethnic Studies ideology be embedded in academic standards for every grade and required subject. Implementation will begin in Social Studies instruction in Fall 2026. 

The first of three new K–12 Ethnic Studies standards, entitled “Identity,” requires students to “analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender.” The second, entitled “Resistance,” instructs students to “describe how individuals and communities have fought” for “liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power locally and globally” and to “organize with others” to engage in similar activities.

This process of stoking resentment and encouraging defiance of authority begins in the earliest grades. For example, kindergartners must “retell a story about an unfair experience that conveys a power imbalance,” while first graders must “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “construct meanings for those terms.”

In later grades, students learn that “resistance” to our nation’s social and political institutions is obligatory, as they “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “take action to affect policy” concerning “marginalized communities of color and indigenous nations.”

Ethnic Studies’ profoundly illiberal ideology instills in students a mindset that directly contradicts American democracy’s defining vision. Our system of government is built on a tradition of public discourse—a vibrant give-and-take of ideas in which citizens seek to advance the common good. 

But Ethnic Studies trains students to view life as a zero-sum power struggle. It portrays debate—indeed language itself—as a sham, and the words and arguments of “oppressors” as a mask for power-seeking. Students are coached to regard those who disagree with them as an existential threat—as enemies intent on “marginalizing” or “erasing” their identity.

Ethnic Studies acknowledges no search for truth, only a will to power. And because oppressors won’t relinquish power willingly, it must be seized if “liberation” is to be achieved. 

How will this nihilist ideology play out in the classroom? Consider the tax-funded Ethnic Studies lesson plans for grades 6–12 that the University of Minnesota’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) has produced. School districts aren’t required to adopt them, but many are likely to do so to avoid the burden of creating their own.

The RIDGS lesson plans present American public life as a battle, not a civil debate. In a lesson plan titled “Protest Art & the Movement for Black Life,” sixth graders will study the Black Lives Matter movement’s “13 guiding principles” and “the role of protest art in mediating power in the city,” and then “create their own protest art.” They will learn being “Unapologetically Black” “requires the dismantling of multiple systems of oppression: capitalism, patriarchy, anti-Blackness and white supremacy.”

Seventh graders will study a sit-in staged in San Francisco in 1977 by “disability rights advocates” and learn how protestors “stormed” federal buildings. High schoolers will study 1930s racial housing covenants and “systems of oppression” in the Twin Cities and Chicano political organizing on St. Paul’s West Side.

Related instructional materials hold up Marxist activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Brad Lomax, and Gilbert de la O of the radical Chicano “Brown Berets” as models for emulation. Students analyze the tactics of groups such as “Creatives after Curfew”—“a decentralized collective of BIPOC/Queer artists & allies who mobilized during the [Minneapolis] uprisings in June 2020,” according to the group’s website.

Today, one-third of college students view violence as acceptable to stop speech they don’t like. What will happen if public schools engrain this idea in young people’s mental landscape from kindergarten on? 

Many of our youth are isolated, rudderless, and desperate to find purpose in a cause larger than themselves. Today, activists are pressuring public schools to embrace an ideology that teaches vulnerable young people to demonize and dehumanize those who disagree with them, and exhorts them to “take action” in what’s cast as a struggle with powers of darkness, a fight for “liberation.”  

If we fail to confront this grave threat to American democracy, we can expect more incidents like the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Later, when I studied the history of the humanities, I discovered that the impending doom of the humanities was a topos that went back at least seven centuries. The Italian poet Petrarch, who effectively founded the studia humanitatis in the fourteenth century by adding poetry, history, and moral philosophy to the seven liberal arts, was himself a champion cultural pessimist. The Italians of his time, he thought, were hopeless barbarians, uniquely resistant to the voices of ancient virtue found in old books. His educated contemporaries couldn’t even speak decent Latin:

May Almighty God damn them, living or dead, for whom it was not enough to have lost through their own cowardice the virtues and glory of their ancestors [the ancient Romans], or all the arts of war and peace, unless in their folly they should also dishonor their ancestral speech and character.

Leon Battista Alberti, the original Renaissance man, complained bitterly that despite studying literature with such intensity that he had suffered a mental breakdown, he could find no patron to reward his efforts. Isaac Casaubon, the great classical scholar whose career waxed during the high tide of Renaissance classical learning, gloomily predicted that knowledge of Latin would soon die out in Europe after he was gone. No one cared about literature anymore.

The humanities, as it turns out, are pretty hard to kill—though the twentieth century made a good fist of it. Educational modernizers in England during the First World War, around the time of the Battle of the Somme, argued that classical education was responsible for Britain’s inability to beat the Germans. If only as much time was devoted to science education as to Homer and Virgil, the British might be able to build decent artillery and effective airships. A brilliant response to the argument was written in 1915 by R. W. Livingstone. It is still one of the best defenses of classical education.

After the Second World War, C. P. Snow argued in The Two Cultures that science education was superior to literature. How could Britain compete in a global economy with the United States and other nations, he asked, if it did not have a forward-looking educational system that trained the young to participate in a world of advanced technology? Snow by this point was a certified member of the great and the good, so his attack on literary education became a cause célèbre. This time the humanities’ champion was the literary critic F. R. Leavis, whose monstrous personal attack on Snow was no advertisement for the humanizing effects of the humanities.

During the 1960s, however, the powers of darkness hit upon a new strategy to limit the influence of the humanities: They dehumanized them. This strategy was far more successful at reducing the humanities’ market share. The French lords of theory set about making great works of literature unreadable, covering them in a carapace of pseudo-scientific jargon and poisoning literary pleasure with Marxist guilt. Since Horace, the humanities had made lovers of poetry by mixing the useful with the sweet, but thanks to the theory-mongers they lost that advantage. History was taken over by social science, and the most popular kinds of history (to judge by bookstore shelves), political biography and military history, were made outcasts in university history departments, both genres being considered naive and morally suspect. The capture of philosophy by logicians was every bit as successful at killing interest in the subject as it had been in the fourteenth century, the last time logic ruled the discipline. All of these trends were ceaselessly promoted, needless to say, as the wave of the future, and those academics who failed to follow the trends faced unemployment or denials of grants and promotions.

The results were predictable. Enrollments in the humanities dropped year after year. Humanities professors, bewildered, asked why students no longer wanted to take their courses, looking everywhere for an explanation except in the mirror.

For the few humanists in universities who (having tenure) defied these trends, the descent into Avernus seemed all too easy and return to the sunlit lands unimaginably laborious. That certainly was my own state of mind up to about five years ago. But the humanities, it turns out, do not need the academic-industrial complex, with its multibillion-dollar endowments, to succeed. There is in fact a strong argument to be made that large endowments, with all the deference to living donors they entail, not to mention all the compromises and bureaucracy of Big Education, can get in the way of the fundamental nexus of teacher, student, and books. People who want to learn just need a knowledgeable teacher to orient them to the books they want to read and help stir their enthusiasm. They want the framework of a course to help impose some discipline on themselves, and they want congenial companions with the same interests who like to talk about literature and philosophy. Teachers just want students who love books and want to talk about them, and enough income to supply themselves with tea and cakes. You can have effective education, it turns out, with very little fuss and expense.

The growing classical education movement is proof. Readers of this journal will know how, since the crises of 2020–21, classical education in grades K-12 has been growing by leaps and bounds as an alternative to the sclerosis affecting Big Education, especially union-dominated public schools. There are now more than a million American children and young adults being educated using the same traditional methods and texts that have been discarded by district public schools and elite private schools. The latter have moved from one fad to the next, and their mission statements now talk less about humanizing students and more about indoctrinating them in luxury beliefs.

Memoria College, which offers an online M.A. in Great Books, is a newish addition to the movement and the tree of institutions that has branched out from Memoria Press (founded in 2002). It is the first institution, to my knowledge, to run a program specifically for “Nicene” Christians, meaning Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians. I was recently invited by the college to speak at the annual conference for classical educators in Louisville, Kentucky. There, I met some of Memoria College’s teachers and recent graduates, a varied and impressive group. After listening to Memoria graduates speak for two days, I began to wish that I had such dedicated readers and such thoughtful and well-spoken students at Harvard. I met an Orthodox monk and a Protestant minister—but it was the homeschool moms, educated women who wanted to return to the life of the mind, that impressed me the most.

Adult classical education for Christians is just starting out, but it’s certainly among the most hopeful developments in educational reform of the last few years, another example of how classical education is rehumanizing the humanities. As Martin Cothran, one of the founders of Memoria Press and a long-time public advocate for classical education in Kentucky, told me—“homeschooling mothers will change the world.”

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The reviewer’s account of my personal political views was inaccurate, but what concerned me more was her misrepresentations of the classical education movement in America. Maglaque writes, “The classical learning movement is partisan. . . . The classical renewal movement is one part of the culture wars that have riven American education.” She adds, “It won’t surprise anyone to know that the Christian nationalists and neoliberal free marketeers whose interests have coalesced in the cause of classical charter schools don’t actually care about Petrarch. They want to dismantle the public school system and teachers’ unions. . . . Hankins has aligned his scholarship with this movement.”

I wrote a response to the review. I thought that publishing the letter in this Renatae Literae column, with the kind permission of First Things’ editors, might prevent fair-minded readers from too readily slathering the movement with the sticky tar of politics. 

Letter to the Editors
New York Review of Books

I read with interest Erin Maglaque’s complimentary review of my recent book, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena (“An Overabundance of Virtue,” NYRB September 21). Her main point of disagreement lies with my contention that what I call “virtue politics” might have a contemporary application. I won’t argue that point, since I have an extensive discussion of it in the next issue of The Good Society: A Journal of Civic Studies. I do, however, think that Dr. Maglaque misleads her readers when she characterizes the classical education movement as a right-wing political project. In my view classical education (a variation on traditional liberal arts education) is something that progressives can and should support. 

I take it Dr. Maglaque is British, so I don’t blame her for not being better informed about the classical education movement in this country. I have spent some years going to classical education conferences, trying to inform myself about the movement, meeting its leaders and classroom teachers, and writing about it. Dr. Maglaque seems to take her information from reports published by the Network for Public Education, a partisan advocacy group for public schools. A large proportion of its news items lately have been devoted to spreading alarm about the classical school movement, which it commonly presents as an arm of Republican Party politics.

It is certainly the case that a number of Republican politicians have embraced the classical school movement in the last several years, particularly in Florida and Arizona. But the project goes back for decades, and existed long before the current phase of the culture wars. My father, after his retirement from a business career, was involved in a classical school during the 1980s and ’90s. Great Hearts Academies, the largest classical charter network, began in the 1990s. It is also true that classical schools vary greatly in quality and levels of funding (something that could also be said of public schools). 

It is not true, however, that classical educators think of themselves as weapons in the hands of Republican ideologues. Almost everyone I have met in the movement avoids making political statements and wants to keep contemporary politics out of the classroom; that, in a way, is the point. I have met no advocates of Christian nationalism, whatever that is. Some are Christians, others are not. Classical charters, which are public institutions, as a rule do not provide religious instruction. Most teachers become part of the classical education movement because they love the liberal education they themselves received in school and want to hand it on to the next generation. Many are distressed that this no longer seems possible in some (not all) public schools. They want their students to be able to receive the deep humanity of Shakespeare and the glorious music of Milton without having to negotiate political minefields. 

I do not think public schools as such are the enemy. Many of them are excellent and filled with dedicated teachers. I know this because five members of my immediate family have made their careers in public schools. Too many public schools, however, have not shown an appropriate restraint and have alienated families with their aggressive politics and their contempt for the religious beliefs of students and parents. They lack the civil virtues, a deficiency that, sadly, has become a general one in our hyperpartisan society. That is one reason why somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of public school parents (and 15 percent of black parents) have withdrawn their children from non-charter public schools since 2020 and have sought classical alternatives. It is also one reason why, according to the latest Gallup poll, trust in American public schools is at historic lows. K–12 education is best served when teachers and parents work together with mutual respect, and party politics is kept outside the walls of the school. That, unfortunately, is not the case at present in many school districts.

The past is a foreign country, but no educated person should want it turned into enemy country, the exclusive preserve of “white supremacists” and “right-wingers.” The Western tradition is too valuable for it to become the foster child of one political party. It should be handed down, with all candor and suitable critical rigor, to future generations. The current tendency on the illiberal left to subject it to ignorant attacks and demonization is destructive of civilized values. 

James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article claimed that the NYRB did not publish Hankins’s letter. They later published it in the December 7, 2023, issue.

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After decades of mediocre results and skyrocketing spending in American education—lately compounded by unscientific Covid school closures and politicized classrooms—parents, taxpayers, and policymakers have had enough. Across the country, states are reforming their outdated bureaucratic systems and giving schoolchildren more and better options than the failing status quo.

Seven states now have established universal education choice programs that fund students, not school districts and their cadre of self-serving special interest groups. More than one million children left U.S. public schools between 2020 and 2021, while private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling have seen unprecedented enrollment growth. 

And why not? Private, charter, and homeschool students outperform their peers in public schools on standardized tests and are more likely to volunteer in their communities and share their parents’ values when they grow up. 

That’s where classical learning—one of the fastest growing branches of America’s education revolution—comes in. 

Classical education eschews pedagogical fads. It instead steeps students in the great works of literature, philosophy, history, and science—what the poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Instead of Critical Race Theory and Marxist claptrap, children learn about Greece and Rome, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and the glory of the American founding.

Drawing inspiration from Greek and Roman academic traditions, classical education seeks to ground students in the good, the true, and the beautiful. Its highest aim is to form virtuous students grounded in the best of the Western canon. Classical schools instruct students through the sequence known as the “trivium,” guiding them through grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They first establish a knowledge base, then learn how to evaluate arguments, and finally how to articulately express their thoughts.

As such, classical education is interested in more than forming good students; its charge is forming students who are good. 

More than two hundred new classically oriented schools have opened across the country in just the last two years. Classical learning is being adopted by charters, start-ups, and homeschooling parents. And classical education networks will only grow further as states embrace parental choice. 

It should come as no surprise that, amid this conservative reform rebellion, the education establishment empire is striking back. The ideologues who run America’s leading academic institutions and interest groups will not surrender their privilege and power without a fight.rnPowerful teachers’ unions are fighting reforms across the country, even in red states like Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

More than 1,800 U.S. colleges have already gone “test optional,” dropping long-standing requirements for applicants to take the SAT or ACT exams. Even liberal pundits admit this move is just colleges “burning the evidence” of their long-standing discriminatory admissions practices. 

Leftist elites are also leveraging their control of Advanced Placement tests—which allow high school students to earn college credit—to marginalize educational alternatives. A draft of the AP African American Studies course, for instance, was stuffed with CRT and anti-Americanism—exactly the kind of nonsense that parents pull their kids from public schools to avoid. The proposed curriculum would have (deliberately) put classically educated students at a disadvantage. Luckily, conservatives led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fought back, threatening to drop the course and forcing the College Board to revise it. 

The Sunshine State recently gave classically educated students another huge win by putting the Classic Learning Test—classical education’s standardized test for high school juniors and seniors—on par with the SAT and ACT for district-wide assessment and eligibility for the state’s competitive Bright Futures Scholarship program. Additional rule changes are in motion to make sure students of truth, beauty, and goodness are at no disadvantage in the state. Further, Florida’s New College already announced it would accept the CLT for admissions—the first Florida public university to do so. 

There is a reason Florida ranked first in The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card last year. Other states are well-positioned to follow Florida’s lead, including Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. But perhaps no state could accomplish as much as Virginia, which has long been home to a thriving homeschooling community and classical schools. 

Gov. Glenn Youngkin was elected in 2021 on the issue of parental rights and education reform. His administration worked closely with classical educators to reform the state’s social studies guidelines. There is no reason, in this environment, for Richmond not to bring the CLT into parity with them in state admissions offices. 

Classical education is not a fad: It’s been around for thousands of years. Students who graduate from classical programs succeed academically, professionally, and spiritually—that’s why classical programs from elementary to higher ed are growing. A standardized test measuring classically educated students’ aptitude already exists and is accepted at more than two hundred colleges and universities around the country.

Having founded a K–12 classical school and having led a classical college myself, I can attest to the superiority and timelessness of the classical method—and not just for the best students, but for every student.

“The best that has been thought and said” is precisely what conservatives should be conserving. Classical education is an indispensable mechanism for doing so, and conservative policymakers owe families the right to access it.

Kevin D. Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation.

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As I discussed in a previous article, classically minded colleges are enjoying historic levels of success. It’s revealing that the trend is just as strong, if not stronger, at the primary and secondary level. These classical K–12 alternatives are rapidly expanding while conventional schools struggle with chronic absenteeism, plunging achievement, and an enrollment decline not seen since World War II.

Fifteen years ago, Tom Bengtson and Dale Ahlquist recognized the need for a high school in the Minneapolis suburbs that would use the Socratic method in a broad, liberal arts program designed to hone critical reasoning skills. The level of demand for the Chesterton Academy became so intense that they had little choice but to expand into the Chesterton Schools Network. Most of the network’s forty-four schools located across the United States and Canada were established in the last five years. That total is on track to climb to sixty later this year.

The Chesterton schools fill a void parents have observed in the education of their children. “One of the great scandals of modern public education is how much money is spent and wasted,” Ahlquist explained. “The COVID shutdown also exposed the fact that students were not learning anything because nothing was being taught.”

At the primary level, Maryland’s Divine Mercy Academy offers a traditional, Catholic education from kindergarten through to eighth grade. School founder Ali Ghaffari insisted parents be actively involved throughout the learning process. “We believe our role is to partner with parents to foster a love of truth, beauty, and goodness, and to form disciples of Jesus Christ, who are made free to realize their full potential by living joyfully in accordance with the truth, revealed by God, through nature and the Catholic Church,” he explained.

Many of these classically minded schools turn to the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE) for support in fulfilling their mission. That includes ongoing development opportunities for teachers. The group provides resources to more than 6,600 educators in primary and secondary schools across 102 dioceses.

ICLE data show both faculty morale and student engagement rose at more than 80 percent of the schools that reinvented themselves with a classical curriculum. That improvement accompanied a significant rise in the enrollment and academic success of students—in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. “There was little surprise to us in our recent survey that one of the most common words to come back to us, when leaders were describing their schools since the adoption of this ‘ever ancient, ever new’ philosophy of education, was ‘joy,’” ICLE President Michael Van Hecke said. “It is no wonder it is starting to spread by word of mouth, across the nation, and, increasingly, around the world.”

Sometimes that word spreads in a big way. David Goodwin co-authored a new book with Pete Hegseth exploring the underlying causes of the decline in conventional education. Battle for the American Mind topped the New York Times bestseller list in July as desperate parents sought answers to how things could be done better. Goodwin also serves as president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), where membership increased from 335 schools to 465 in the past two years.

Such results aren’t merely a side effect of COVID. Public charter school enrollment was on the rise even before the pandemic. After it hit, however, the trends accelerated. The number of parents turning to homeschooling doubled, according to the Census Bureau.

The main reason that classical schools are thriving in the current environment is that parents aren’t interested in enrolling their children in grand social experiments. When they weigh the available options—“modern” schools that embrace the latest educational fads, and classical schools that rely on tried-and-true teaching methods that have worked for centuries—the choice is clear, and the numbers speak for themselves about what parents really want.

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