Despite fears about the decline of the liberal arts in the West, the educational renaissance sweeping America should inspire great hope. At a number of flagship public universities, for example, the traditional liberal arts are being revitalized through newly established schools of civic thought, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida or the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership. And at the K-12 level, bolstered by sound school choice policies, classical education is flourishing. The Deweyite method of mass-produced education and the progressive ideology of twentieth century, both explicitly opposed to the moral, spiritual components of liberal education, are fading away as parents, students, and educators rediscover something better in the liberal arts tradition.
All the same, this educational renaissance’s march through the institutions is not on totally uncontested. The recent tragic deconstruction of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College is but one example of how progressive liberalism and vulgar material self-interest combine to undo the emergent movement advocating more classical education. Unless its proponents rally around a shared vision for genuine reform, the tragedy at Tulsa will certainly be repeated. Educational renewal must offer something more than a mere counter-ideology or repetitive slogans to have a lasting effect on the Republic.
David Hein’s new book Teaching the Virtues does not aim at articulating such an all-encompassing vision of the future of education – but it nonetheless offers serious wisdom to those fighting for the classical education renaissance. In his introduction, Hein humbly announces that his intention is merely to provide a “primer” for how teachers might use the framework of the Western ethical tradition to help students become their best selves. This may seem a somewhat limited objective, but to truly spark a renaissance in American education the principle of human excellence Hein argues for must take center-stage.
Hein’s approach to education is animated by Russell Kirk’s humane conservatism. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote that “Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.” The educational ideology of the twentieth century took exactly the opposite path – as Woodrow Wilson put it, the progressive establishment believed that “the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Conservatism is necessary in education to undo this baleful trend and remind us all what is worth preserving about our civilization.
For Kirk, and for Hein, this can only be achieved through the exercise of the moral imagination. Taking the phrase from Edmund Burke, Kirk meant a kind of “ethical perception” that comprehends universal truths without obliterating the particular obligations constituting the fabric of our moral lives. The Sage of Mecosta identified this faculty with the foundational thinkers of the West such as Plato, Virgil, and Dante. Hein especially draws out its literary character. “As Russell Kirk knew,” he writes, “the moral imagination, aligned with right reason, does not receive its impetus from ideas and concepts so much as from concrete images and stories derived from art, drama, sacred scripture, fiction, history, and biography.” By acquainting students with the fundamental symbols of the Western tradition, teachers give them a sort of map by which to orient themselves ethically.
The concept of a “Great Books” canon is no doubt essential for this kind of liberal education – Western civilization must be understood as an unending conversation in search of perennial wisdom. But Hein does not believe that real education consists merely of a long list of old books. Rather, he argues, every classroom is different and requires its own set of guiding images. Hein gives examples of how the biographies of the West’s great men, or novels, or even film can shape the moral imagination, and he encourages readers to set out to find their own examples to use in their own classrooms or families.
This kind of particularism ordered toward the universal is precisely what makes Hein’s vision of education so profoundly conservative – and refreshing compared to many approaches to classical education. He shows a truly humane interest in the local and the personal throughout the book, and attempts to inspire the same in his readers. By contrast, other advocates of educational renewal, or the restoration of the language of virtue more broadly, can become too busy crafting an abstract theory of the good to concern themselves with particulars. This attitude is not only displayed through the moralizing scolds of the “woke” left, but also among the integralists and religious nationalists of the “New Right.” Both the far-left and far-right act as though the accumulation of power can set society back on the path to virtue.
That may sound like a noble aim, but Kirk himself taught that this universalizing error had more in common with the revolution fervor of “the Parisian coffee-house intellectual” than “the habitual high old Roman virtue.” In an essay which Hein references, “Can Virtue Be Taught?,” Kirk railed against “ideological preaching” and efforts to centrally plan a virtuous society or otherwise coerce one into existence. As with the greatest conservative minds, he believed that no theory could supplant love as a source of strength for a regime. As such, Kirk argued, we must reconceive the teaching of virtue as “a kind of illative process [rather] than as a formal program of study.” Teachers must not only give students what they consider the right images of moral virtues to imitate, but also images they can truly love.
Teaching the Virtues is not only a fine introduction to a conservative tradition animated by a regard for the Permanent Things, but also a promise of more to come. It is the first book published by a new imprint of the Russell Kirk Center, Mecosta House. “At Mecosta House,” publisher and Kirk Center CEO Jeffrey Nelson writes in an introductory note, “we hope to foster an intellectual community dedicated to exploring the wisdom of our predecessors while forging a new conservative humanism.” Alongside new works in this tradition such as Hein’s, Nelson announces Mecosta House’s intention to republish many of the neglected classics that constitute the canon from which Kirk himself drew. Such a thing is desperately needed in times as disjointed as our own.
Conservatism, rightly understood, has never been solely concerned with politics. It is also a philosophical school in its own right, and a literary tradition embodying the best the English-speaking peoples have to offer. The West faces a truly daunting set of challenges, from a brewing global security crisis to the moral deracination of society – but the conservative humanism Mecosta House and the Russell Kirk Center represent offers the answers that can save us. The advocates of educational renaissance would be wise to take note.
