Article: Matthew Post on Character Education

Introduction

Is there an important place for the “great books” in character education? Or is it sufficient or even preferable to focus on more relevant content, e.g., realistic and age-appropriate moral quandaries, moral exemplars drawn from students’ contemporaries, and so on? To put it in sharper terms, why waste a student’s time and exhaust a teacher’s efforts speaking about Homer’s Iliad, composed in daunting verse and obscure diction, and animated by the concerns of an 11th c. BCE Myrmidon king, as far removed from today’s student as possible, when we could share a short, engaging video about a young person who opposed cyber-bullying in their school? I will explore possible responses by discussing the classical education movement.

The number of K–12 schools in the United States claiming to offer “classical education” is growing at an exponential rate. But what distinguishes a curriculum or school as “classical”? Classical education is not exclusive of elements found in almost all curricula and schools, such as education in athletics, the fine arts, the social sciences, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). What distinguishes it is its seemingly counter-cultural emphasis on the traditional liberal arts and great books, and, in particular, its goal to cultivate not just skills, but intellectual, moral, civic, and (sometimes) theological virtues. Classical education is therefore a form of character education. In addition to using the language of virtue, it also uses other expressions current in character education such as “education of the whole person,” etc,

But what is now called “classical education” in the U.S. was once simply called “education.” It gave major place to canonical literary and philosophical works from the European continent, informed by the deep study of Ancient Greek and Latin, and focused on the Old and New Testaments, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Vergil, and onward to the luminaries of the Enlightenment era, including John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, and William Blackstone, contemporaries of the American founding generation. By 1945, Harvard University’s famous “Redbook”—outlining the principles and practices of “general education in a free society,” by which the authors meant liberal education for all—identified the study of the liberal arts and great books as the key means by which human beings could learn to balance the skepticism of inquiry, including scientific inquiry, with the humanistic commitment to values, essential to avoiding the dangers manifest in World War II, of turning to ideology, totalitarianism, and the destructive and dehumanizing use of technology. For the authors of the “Redbook,” the person who has become either too skeptical of or too unreflectingly attached to traditional values can become easy prey for ideologues, such as were the Nazis and fascists (“General Education in a Free Society,” 1945). 

And yet, under a variety of pressures—some from the rising importance of the physical and social sciences, technology, and technical training, others from the claim that the past may have been too deeply marked by superstition, prejudice, and oppression—this form of education receded from the United Kingdom and Europe (Kirby & van der Wende, 2016; Tubbs, 2014) as well as the U.S. (“General Education in a Free Society,” 1945; Kurtz, 2020; Lee, 2020; West & Tate, 2021). And, more recently, as it has entered a phase of renewal in the U.S., there is also interest in it in some quarters of the UK and Europe, leading to fruitful collaboration across the Atlantic (Dirksen, Kontowski, & Kretz, 2017; Kirby & van der Wende, 2016) and to the potentially surprising situation in which Americans are assisting Europeans in establishing—or reestablishing—an education that, from the American standpoint, is fundamentally European in origin and content.

Of course, it is worth noting up front that even if the renewal of which I speak includes an interest in the liberal arts, great books, and character, not every British or European program adopting expressions such as “liberal education,” “liberal arts education,” or “education in the liberal arts and sciences,” is interested in the traditional liberal arts, the great books, or character education. Despite the traditional expressions, some programs are distinctly contemporary in outlook and approach, focusing more on trends such as, e.g., deconstructing power structures, problem-based learning, etc. My purpose is not to give an overview of such programs (interested readers may learn more about them from a variety of sources, e.g., “ECOLAS Partners,” n.d.), but rather to discuss select programs that are interested in recovering a more traditional notion of the liberal arts, great books, and character education.

My paper will be divided into two major sections. In the first part, I will discuss what classical education is and how it relates to character education. While there are many elements of classical education, in this paper, I will focus almost exclusively on one of the most common: the great books seminar, sometimes called (whether appropriately or not) the “Socratic” seminar, premised upon Socrates’ method of learning through a continuous process of question and answer. In the second part, I will discuss my own work with British and European teachers, in K–12 and higher education, who are embracing elements of classical education, the great books seminar foremost among them, as well as the concerns and aspirations these teachers have shared explaining their interest in an education that had seemed, until recently, to have receded to the point of obsolescence. In the process, I will make the case that classical education is an exemplary form of character education.

In the first part, my discussion will be based partly on my own observations of schools and teachers who identify as “classical,” partly on research into character education. Presently, in the U.S., there is very limited research exploring the growth of classical education (Cheng & Syftestad, 2023) and assessing the practices and outcomes of classical education (Cheng, n.d.; Goodwin & Sikkink, 2020). There is an increasing body of literature on classical education, not research based, but rather comprised of statements of principle or, on occasion, handbooks by practitioners on pedagogy and content (Coupland, 2022; DeCelles-Zwerneman, 2023). This literature is by no means exhaustive and focuses almost exclusively on classical Christian education (e.g., Clark & Jain, 2019; Glass, 2015; Hicks, 1999; Veith & Kern, 2001; Wilson, 2022), omitting extended engagement with classical education in its secular, Jewish, and Muslim forms1. One potential exception is the first academic journal dedicated to classical education, Principia (see, in particular, Williams, 2022, for an excellent overview of classical education). However, Principia, launched in 2022, is only just getting started as of the time of writing. Thus, as someone who has conducted observations and spoken to teachers, school leaders, students, and parents at many dozens of classical schools over several years, I will not restrict myself to these published works, but will base my account upon what I have observed. By contrast, there is an extensive body of research into character education and I will reference it as appropriate.

In the second part, my discussion will be based entirely on my time working with and observing the activities of educators in the UK and Europe who have sought to reclaim and reintegrate a form of classical education into their work in K–12 schools or institutions of undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate education. To understand why some people wish to reclaim classical education, it will be informative to consider what they themselves say. My purpose is not to confirm or to contradict their remarks, but merely to offer the reader some insight into their thinking on the subject. I will name organizations, but not individuals, and I will not quote individuals word for word, but rather paraphrase and summarize their remarks, which include criticisms of their communities and the education they see offered in these communities as well as some concerns with classical education itself. If leaving the source of these criticisms vague leads my account to be disregarded, let it be so. I offer the account for what it is worth.

Finally, in making a case—perhaps in a short paper, it can only be a prima facie case—that classical education is an exemplary form of character education, I am not seeking to establish a specious either/or, to claim that classical education is the only exemplary form of character education. Thinking of the great books seminar specifically, in my own experience, only the most extreme advocates think that education begins and ends with great books seminars, and such advocates are few. All other classical educators agree that there is a place for different approaches and that the great books seminar is an important, but not by itself a complete form of character education. Thus, my goal is to argue that the great books seminar has a crucial, perhaps even an indispensable, contribution to make, but not to diminish the value of other excellent approaches, which may have their own crucial or indispensable contributions to make.

1. Classical education and the great books seminar

1.1. The great books seminar as the anchor of classical education

There are many schools and homeschooling curricula in the U.S. that explicitly identify themselves as “classical,” encompassing a great diversity of approaches. It is therefore impossible to give an accurate description of classical education if the purpose is to account for the content and methods used or recommended across all organizations. And then there are those schools and curricula that may share one or more features with classical education, but do not identify as “classical.” Thus, for the purposes of a brief account, I will focus on all the major elements that are adopted or endorsed by classical educators, describing them in accordance with what I have observed as most commonplace or else most respected, even if not always achieved.

Classical education typically approaches the cultivation of character through one or more of the following elements: (a) an explicit faith commitment, (b) the study of ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and/or Latin, (c) great books seminars, (d) the integration of the liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and, far more rarely, the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony), and (e) an emphasis on core knowledge or the study of facts, in history, the natural sciences, the social sciences, etc. Grounding these elements are certain commitments, including a respect, albeit not an uncritical or chauvinistic respect, for tradition and for outstanding works and deeds from the past; the claim that human beings can attain to some degree of truth, in a variety of disciplinary areas, e.g., in history and aesthetics in addition to the natural sciences, and thus a rejection of certain forms of relativism and subjectivism; and the cultivation of character, not just performative qualities, such as resilience, or intellectual virtues, such as critical analysis, but often moral, civic, and theological virtues, as well. Classical educators tend to summarize these commitments as the traditional pursuit of the true, the beautiful, and the good, or, in more formal language, they seek to offer an education in intellectual, aesthetic, and moral excellence.

The great books seminar is, in many ways, the anchoring element of classical education. As a practical matter, when a school transitions from a non-classical to a classical model, the great books seminar is typically the first element implemented, often under the course name “Humane Letters,” which is the cornerstone of numerous classical schools and networks. But what is the great books seminar? In all cases, it entails learners engaging with questions about a text. But, beyond this, opinions differ, e.g., How do we determine what is or is not a great book? Is it sufficient for the teacher or student to find educational value of any kind in the text under discussion, is a great book decided by tradition, or is there some other standard? And what is the purpose of a seminar? Is it to develop the ability to ask great questions, to deconstruct all possible answers, to express opinions, to achieve consensus, to discover truth, etc.? Answers to these questions obviously influence what is read and discussed and how the seminar itself is conducted, whether led by a teacher or a student or by whomever happens to speak (to get some sense of the diversity, see Brooks et al., 2022; Lee, 2020).

Because of the great variety that emerges here, I will outline key features of the great books seminar based on Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman’s A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method (2023). DeCelles-Zwerneman, who works at Cana Academy, is one of the most sought-after and accomplished teacher educators in the American classical world when it comes to leading great books seminars. For her, a proper great books seminar takes a different approach to imaginative literature and to philosophy, the former focusing on the narrative, the latter on argument, and does not impose the method appropriate to one genre upon another. Thus, e.g., one should not look for the moral “message” in Homer’s Iliad as they might in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Moreover, proper great books seminars guide by questions about the reading alone, eschew the author’s biographical details, refrain from making connections to events outside the text, especially contemporary events, avoid inviting students to consider what they would do in a character’s or writer’s place, defer from heavy-handed moralizing and didactic instruction about the “true meaning” of the text, and yet they should nevertheless cultivate in students rigor in their pursuit of truth, moral virtue, and community. Thus, according to DeCelles-Zerneman’s argument, a great books seminar whose highest goal is to see the diversity of views on a topic, to allow people to express their views, or even to just have a fun time talking and arguing over issues, is not a proper great books seminar. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but a great books seminar’s highest goal is to let these things serve, at most, as incentives and catalysts for the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtue, by encouraging students to themselves actualize their intellectual and moral potentialities, not by telling them what to think or do.

To be sure, DeCelles Zwerneman is in such demand not because every classical school offers the great books seminar that she describes, but because her description most closely aligns to the classical school’s aspirations, e.g., the classical school’s stance on truth is not served well by a seminar that simply deconstructs arguments or presents opinions, but by one that is guided by accuracy and precision in analyzing the text in a way that attains some truth concerning human nature and the world. And insofar as a classical school aspires to cultivate intellectual and moral virtues, the cultivation of these virtues would be a key desideratum for the great books seminar, as well. But these are high demands and sometimes deconstructing arguments or presenting opinions is what one gets, and attempting to force the issue with respect to intellectual and moral virtues risks being self-defeating because it turns into a highly moralizing, didactic approach, no longer a seminar in any recognizable way, and prone to undermining students’ motivation to cultivate these virtues at all.

We will return to this latter concern below. For now, informed by an authoritative description of what I will, for convenience, call the classical great books seminar, let us see how it is connected with the other four elements of classical education I mentioned above.

I will begin with core knowledge or the study of facts, as it is least distinctive of classical schools. In the U.S., many classical schools stressed memorizing facts or adopted E. D. Hirsh, Jr.’s Core Knowledge curriculum, in part to show a commitment to objective truth by emphasizing facts, in part as a reaction against constructivist trends in public education that rejected memorizing facts and encouraged students to “create meaning” instead (see, e.g., Hirsch, 1996; Martin & Loomis, 2013).2 Of course, teaching the facts of, e.g., history or physics is by no means unique to classical schools, and this element is insufficient for most schools to consider themselves “classical” without more of the elements mentioned above. That said, the Core Virtues Foundation offers a K–6 curriculum to complement E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Core Knowledge curriculum (Core Virtues Foundation, n.d.). Though Core Virtues is not a full-fledged great books program, it is focused on teachers guiding discussion by means of probing questions about core texts. The texts and questions are intended to highlight a variety of performative, intellectual, moral, and civic virtues by drawing the students’ attention to virtuous activities and exemplars. Thus, core knowledge or the study of facts is neither a matter of great books or character education per se, but core knowledge is important enough to classical schools that Core Virtues provides a partial bridge between it and great books and character education

Let us turn, then, to those elements of classical education that are more definitive of it and become so through attention to great books.

What may distinguish the faith commitment of the classical school from the non-classical school is the former’s emphasis on the reading of original sources, from scripture and theology. In the classical school, the reason to study ancient languages is not primarily or solely because they potentially improve students’ scores on college entrance exams, even though this has been argued many times, but because learning these languages enables deeper engagement with great books, the vast majority of which, up until a few hundred years ago, were written in Latin and were responding to earlier works written in Ancient Greek (e.g., Frohlich, n.d.; Society for Classical Learning, 2016; “A Word about Latin,” n.d.). In select schools, classical Hebrew or Arabic might be studied for similar reasons.

The trivium—encompassing grammar, logic, and rhetoric—concerns the fundamental elements of communication. Rhetoric includes an interest in the argumentation, character, and emotional investment of the author and the audience (following Aristotle, 2019: logos, ēthos, and pathos). And grammar and logic are crucial to understanding any great book, not just philosophic, but also literary, historical, etc. Rhetoric originally concerned public speaking, and thus placed great emphasis on the speakers themselves, whereas in great books seminars, less or no attention is paid to the writers (DeCelles-Zwerneman, 2023). At heart, though, rhetoric is about how the author’s words influence the thoughts, character, and emotions of the audience (Aristotle, 2019) and this is very much at stake in the great books seminar.

As for the quadrivium—encompassing arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony—as mentioned above, it is far more rarely integrated into a classical education. Even so, its order of studies are intended to show how the mathematical understanding of nature reveals that truth becomes accessible through the study of patterns. Patterns are not purely sensory even though our perception of patterns makes sense experience intelligible. Patterns admit of greater or lesser coherence in terms of symmetry, development, organization, etc. And, at the highest level, the patterns that we discern, including patterns in the natural world, in works of art, in human psyches, and in communities, admit specifically of greater or lesser harmony, order, and integrity. Because harmony, order, and integrity in nature, works of art, psyches, and communities are at the heart of traditional definitions of beauty, justice, and moral character, these are not mere “values,” but have some basis in objectively real patterns. And, by extension, ugliness, injustice, and immorality have some basis in the deficiency of these objectively real patterns. So, e.g., upholding justice engenders enough social harmony in the midst of tensions for communities to work together, whereas permitting injustice increases social strife and polarization, not just as a matter of your or my opinion, but as a matter of observable reality.

Though the quadrivium looks at first as though it only concerns mathematical reasoning, its emphasis on uncovering objectively real patterns or their deficiency in human thought, action, development, interaction, and so on, reveals its importance for enabling readers to distinguish in what way a great book conveys truth, whether it clarifies, refines, and expands our ability to notice these objectively real patterns, e.g., by helping us to better understand other human beings, human community, the world, etc., or whether it distorts, misleadingly oversimplifies, or otherwise simply misrepresents reality such that it inclines us to adopt superficial, prejudicial, or simply false (mis)understandings about things. But, beyond the concern with truth in general, the quadrivium may also sharpen our perception of objectively real patterns or their deficiency with respect to genuinely graceful or graceless style, excellent or faulty reasoning, or moral virtue or vice (for the philosophical basis of these claims, see Plato, 1991; for the problems of attempting to assess character from patterns without this foundation, see Chappell, 2008; and for the contribution Plato’s philosophy may make, see Chappell, 2014).

1.2. Can the great books seminar give glimpses of transcendent truth? The role of problem-solving, tradition, and liberty

Reflecting upon the above, we might say that the quadrivium helps us to understand that there is truth, the trivium how we convey that truth to others as intellectual and emotional beings. These liberal arts do not need to be treated as a propaedeutic to the great books seminar or related to those books at all. And if the quadrivium, which is perhaps the most relevant to the classical pursuit of truth in nature and human nature, is the least common among classical schools and curricula, a discussion of the quadrivium reveals more about what classical educators want than what they have concretely attained. This may seem to be a serious objection, but let us remember that what an educator aspires to do or to be, especially in an area that is in the process of development and improvement toward a goal, such as is classical education, can be even more revealing than what an educator currently does or is.

With this caveat in mind, I will discuss how reflection upon what the traditional liberal arts promise to bring to the great books seminar may help to reveal how that seminar can become a powerful means for character education.

Building on what we saw before, the quadrivium can be used to help us appreciate that pattern recognition, in the physical sciences, does not begin and end with gravity, electro-magnetism, etc., but also concerns principles of harmony and beauty. And the trivium can be used not just to help us understand the psychology of human communication, but also to see how communication can be deeply integrated into character. Yet neither the quadrivium nor the trivium is by itself entirely indispensable for these purposes, e.g., Su (2020) arrives at observations about beauty and harmony by means of mathematical reasoning about reality that are highly similar to those attained by means of the quadrivium, only without familiarity with the quadrivium or any of its philosophical sourcesprings, a fact that, rather than discrediting the quadrivium, may in fact reveal its merit: If others can discover highly similar roads to the truth, that suggests that the road is not a mere matter of prejudice for Medieval or ancient “wisdom,” but real.

Still, if neither the trivium nor the quadrivium are indispensable, should we not perhaps dispense with them? I would argue “No” because, by bringing them together, we may discern truths that would elude us otherwise.

The patterns we observe in nature by means of the quadrivium seem to be of necessity, e.g., a body that is healthy of necessity exhibits greater harmony between the parts, one that is unhealthy, dying, or dead, of necessity shows distensions and ultimately the dissolution of its parts. However, the realm of human language is the realm of various systems of sounds and rules employed to convey meaning, of logic applied to deliberate upon what we may or may not do and upon what may or may not occur as a consequence,3 and of modes of persuasion that act upon our thoughts, feelings, and character with varying degrees of effectiveness. It is a realm that admits of some freedom, for not all languages use the same sounds or rules and the diversity of languages is reflective of a degree of creativity; logic does not always determine what we will or will not do; and persuasion is properly persuasion and not force precisely because it can be ignored in a way that force proper cannot be. In other words, to bring the quadrivium and the trivium into dialogue, and noting the patterns that are manifest across the two sets of arts, helps us to reflect upon the relationship between a realm of necessity in nature and human nature as well as a realm of freedom, which seems to belong only to human nature, or at least only to the nature of living beings capable of creativity, deliberation, and persuasion, not just communication, calculation, and force.4

We might see this in human activities that combine immovable principles of nature and works of human creativity, e.g., in our engagement with music. Music concerns mathematically describable, objectively real harmonies, which are channelled into free and diverse expressions of culture, and which, when appreciated fully, actuate our intellectual perception of those immovable principles of harmony, our computational ability to parse out chosen melodies, chords, and rhythms, our dispositional potential to respond to the music with any number of passions, as well as our music provokes and shapes our desires, aversions, pleasures, pains, and preferences. It is in this realm of music, which draws together the necessitous natural realm revealed by the quadrivium and the free cultural realm revealed by the trivium, that human beings may have encounters with works of art so powerful that they shake us to our core.

Through the objectively real patterns of harmony and tension manifest music, we can discern a truly transcendent beauty and, at the same time, through the cultural dimensions of this or that specific musical creation, we can make that transcendent beauty not just discernible intellectually, but something that becomes a part of ourselves, something that actuates the rest of our psyche, rendering that otherwise transcendent reality accessible, something in which we actively participate, and ultimately human, without sacrificing music’s ability to point beyond ourselves toward that greater beauty.

Let me unpack this further: To observe a pattern in nature, whether directly or indirectly by means of art, and to be moved by it in an intimate and profound way is another way of describing what it means to encounter transcendent beauty, to sense a power within ourselves that is connected to a power greater than ourselves. Some people, certainly, respond to this with reverence, evoking the divine, but they need not do so. Either way, the experience is often attended by a deep sense of calm, insight, humility, and connection with others and the world, leading to what some researchers call “epiphanic moral conversations,” though there is no reason why such experiences must necessarily be “conversions” as opposed to powerful aids in developing and sustaining different elements of character (see, e.g., Frey & Vogler; Kristjánsson, 2020; Su, 2020). Insofar as we become cognizant of real patterns, outside and within us, we are developing our intellectual perspicacity, discerning both what we can say with some clarity and what remains mysterious but coherent enough to be capable and worthy of further inquiry. The sense of grandeur inspired by such experiences can help us to overcome petty impulses and to see clearly the importance of maintaining integrity, e.g., in keeping our promises, telling the truth, treating others with kindness, etc., in short, in adopting a posture suitable for cultivating moral virtue or perhaps akin to possessing moral virtue (e.g., Aristotle, 1998, argues that certain musical harmonies, though they are not passions and virtues, are imitations of them by means of their beauty and nobility or lack thereof; I will discuss this further below).

Still, there is a debate over whether there are reliable ways of provoking such experiences of transcendence (Kristjánsson, 2020). If there is a way of provoking them, it seems connected to two major elements, one, that we seriously engage our minds at a high level, e.g., in intense problem solving, and, two, that we work through something revealing of some kind of truth. Experiences, such as feeling one has encountered something vaguely transcendent by means of some physical task, such as a hard day-long hike that culminates in a beautiful view, may be analogous, but they are not quite the same. And such experiences, though beyond the banal range of idle pleasures, do not, by themselves, provoke a pronounced encounter with transcendence. That said, experiments have managed to provoke such experiences with transcendence with mathematicians and engineers precisely by challenging them with problems of increasing, nearly impossible-to-solve difficulty that involve real patterns (Su, 2020). However, to pursue such experiences in a way that is truly expansive would, almost by definition, need to go beyond disciplinary boundaries, encompassing virtues of intellectual perspicacity and humane sensitivity.

The potential for the discussion of a given book to facilitate such profound experiences (i.e., demanding of great analytical rigor, evocative of powerful, usually but not always positive emotions, and revealing of a transcendent truth) is what makes a great book great. In other words, such a work includes not just banal truths (e.g., sometimes romantic relationships do not work out and people get upset) but truths that genuinely inspire us to wrestle with seemingly unsolvable problems and at once awaken our minds, quicken our emotions, and shape our desires in a way that achieves a degree of harmony between them all (Bohlin, 2000). Following Su (2020), we should note that not every problem is sufficiently challenging to inspire an experience of transcendent beauty, and, similarly, not every book is “great,” even if it presents truth or plays on our emotions. That the truth must truly challenge us—not just seem to challenge us in ways that are lauded as revolutionary but are really just trendy and conventional—is one reason the classical educator eschews relevant and contemporary works, though there is obviously no reason why a book written this very year, written by someone far away or next door, could not be a great book. The qualities required depend upon the complexity and depth of the questions, problems, and insights the great book provokes, and if these qualities can genuinely provoke an experience of transcendence, then they do not depend upon a particular time and place, even if they do depend upon having real insights into human nature and the world.

But if all this is so, then why does not everyone have these grand transcendent experiences while reading the great books or during a great books seminar? How is it possible that some students might even find these works tedious or walk away from them with their faith in God or their interest in virtue impaired, which some advocates of character might regard as counterproductive or corrupting, and which more than one student has attested while reading the great books, whether explicitly challenging of traditional virtues, such as Nieztsche’s, or held to endorse those virtues, such as the books of the Bible?

There are three major factors to consider here: (a) The teacher may not be teaching the great book so as to provoke such experiences. (b) The student may not be prepared, or perhaps able, to engage with this particular great book with the rigor and depth necessary. And (c) this great book alone may be insufficient to cross the disciplinary boundaries needed to approach a more broadly transcendent experience. So, e.g., if a teacher does not know how to guide a student to find serious questions, identify difficult problems, or uncover genuine insights in a given great book, but remains at the level of superficial questions, lazy criticisms, and trite observations, if the teacher makes the seminar about showing off one’s opinions or airing grievances, then the teacher’s approach is actively derailing the possibility of discerning the greatness of the great book. The student’s discovery of this greatness will depend upon their, not the teacher’s, ability to engage with the work. And sometimes this indeed happens. As for the student, there are many obstacles that can emerge. Some are not the student’s responsibility, e.g., if they have not been educated to read carefully or analytically. And some are the student’s responsibility, e.g., if they choose to engage in idle distractions and not put the time and effort into engaging with the great work. And, finally, if a singular great book is rarely by itself sufficient, then the effect of a great books education would depend upon a variety of books, touching upon theology, philosophy, history, psychology, physics, etc., not picked at random, but put, as classical educators say, into “dialogue” with each other, so that the questions, problems, and insights of one great book speak to and enhance the student’s engagement with the questions, problems, and insights of another great book. When we put this together with the requirements placed upon the teacher and upon the student, we can appreciate why the effectiveness of the great books education depends upon a holistic and perhaps rare educational culture and community.

We can now see why classical teachers often define a great book as “what stands the test of time.” In itself, this is a hollow, meaningless criterion because intellectual, moral, civic, and performative vices are sufficiently common that these too stand the test of time, e.g., the human capacity for lying, cheating, stealing, showing contempt, etc., and all the things that foster human misery, not only seem as capable of standing the test of time as do alleged experiences of transcendent beauty, but they obviously stand the test of time better. And yet a book evocative of nothing but how people lie, cheat, steal, etc., does not provoke transcendent experiences so far as I know. No, experiences of transcendent beauty are rare, whereas experiences of oppression and pain are overwhelmingly more commonplace. Thus, it is natural to suppose that what gives a great work its endurance is not the evocative power of the questions, problems, and insights that it inspires, but is rather one of the most enduring of human vices, the desire to make oneself look superior to another, or élitism, and great books education is often considered élitist. Thus, “standing the test of time” is not by itself a meaningful standard, though “standing the test of time” may point toward the standard. If a great book has a greater potential to inspire vigorous reflections and edifying revelations, and if it takes the conjunction of rare and outstanding factors (the right teaching approach, the right disposition in the student, and the right combination of great books, in the right culture and community) then it would stand to reason that distinguishing the great book from the non-great book would be easier if we had, to put it in modern terms, a lot of data points from which to draw, and this will necessarily require time.

Thus, we see why the great books, almost of necessity, must emerge from a tradition.

But there are two further considerations, one an objection, the other a question. The objection: Does not all this talk of objectively real patterns of beauty, morality, and justice risk inspiring oppression, of empowering those who wish to lord themselves over and coerce others into an allegedly “virtuous” compliance, on both a personal and a social level? Without losing ourselves in the details of the philosophical arguments underpinning the above claims concerning objectively real patterns of virtue and vice, it may be sufficient to observe just how often, throughout history, some people have tortured and murdered, or else mistreated and degraded, others in the name of objective morality. Any account of character education that does not acknowledge and moderate or obviate this danger would, prima facie, seem deeply suspect.

And the question: Why a great books seminar? If the classical version of this seminar is about truth and right conduct, why is not the lecture sufficient or even preferable?

These may be easier to answer than it seems at first. If the study of the great books must entail both wrestling with the most difficult problems and attaining to some real insight, then the teacher can neither force the student to do these things nor do them for the student.

There is plenty of research showing that a controlling teaching, whether by means of rewards and punishments, or the subtler use of praise and blame, because it undermines intrinsic motivation, also undermines the development of the intellectual capacities and affective responses necessary to sustain continuous improvement over time and thus to attain to excellence, e.g., in academic achievement, mental health, relationships with others, etc. The student must be invited and inspired; they must perceive their engagement with what they are learning as something that they have opted to undertake. Controlling methods cultivate obedience to a human authority, which persists so long as the controlling pressure persists, only appearing and never truly becoming a habitual (Deci et al., 1991; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009; Ryan et al., 2013; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Vansteenkiste et al., 2004). Such methods never cultivate habits of intellectual and moral excellence or an openness to transcendent truth. By its very nature, a transcendent truth transcends the human world in some way and thus it is not grounded in a human being’s insistence that you accept what they say.

Moreover, even if the teacher lays forth the argument with clarity and concision, the student does not struggle with the problem. If the teacher does not point beyond their own explanation to an objective truth that the student uncovers for themselves, if the teacher rather makes it about honoring the teacher’s own words and rhetorical skill, then the student may feel charmed and they may even “love” the teacher, but the student will neither grow in excellence nor attain to any real truth. They will only have lesser facsimiles of these by observing the excellence of the teacher and becoming attached to what the teacher has said. Only the seminar, which depends upon asking incisive questions and allowing students to puzzle through and struggle with those questions for themselves, can foster the conditions necessary for a transformational experience. This is not to say that a lecture has no place in classical education, but rather that it is ancillary to the kinds of self-initiated problem-solving that occurs more easily in seminar, even if students can find other ways to doing this, e.g., in discussions outside of class, in protracted self-reflection, etc.

And so, we see that even if the lecture has a place, it must be complemented by the great books seminar that gives room for respecting human liberty and for the student to foster intrinsic motivation to pursue the questions, problems, and insights for themselves. This is not a mere addendum to our earlier consideration of how the trivial arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric speak of a realm of human freedom. That human beings have freedom does not by itself establish that freedom, to any degree, must be respected. Freedom could be an obstacle to be removed. However, it seems that the nature of human growth in virtue cannot occur apart from some space for freedom and choice.

There is perhaps nothing surprising here. If we turn to the great thinkers who stand at the foundation of the European tradition of moral philosophy, i.e., Plato and Aristotle, both of them emphasize that character education depends upon avoiding coercion and giving room to choose, e.g., as the Platonic Socrates argues, “Will you be able to produce a greater sign of a bad and base education in a city than its needing eminent […] judges not only for the common folk and the manual artisans but also for those who pretend to have been reared in a free fashion? Or doesn’t it seem base, and a great sign of lack of education, to be compelled—because of a shortage at home—to use a justice imported from others who are thus masters and umpires?” (1991 [405a–b], my emphasis) and as Aristotle argues, “But whatever deeds arise in accord with the virtues are not done justly or moderately if they are merely in a certain state, but only if he who does those deeds is in a certain state as well: first, if he acts knowingly; second, if he acts by choosing and by choosing the actions in question for their own sake; and, third, if he acts while being in a steady and unwavering state. […] But when it comes to the virtues, knowledge has no, or little, force, whereas the other two criteria amount to not a small part of but rather the whole affair” (2011 [1105a32–b3], my emphasis).

Somewhat revealingly, when it comes to character education, the Platonic Socrates places great emphasis on grasping to kalon, which includes both aesthetic beauty and moral nobility (see, e.g., 1991 [400d–e, 420b–421c, 475c–480a, esp. 479a1, 508e–509a, 529c–531d, note that the translator renders to kalon as “the fair”]), and Aristotle claims repeatedly that “choosing the actions in question for their own sake” means choosing to kalon (2011 [e.g., 1115b12–14, 1119b15–17, 1120a24–16]). Because the beauty and nobility of to kalon can be found in various actions and in nature, and because it is discerned not only by the senses but also by a kind of super-sensory intellectual perception, there must be an unchanging, transcendent principle of beauty, as we discussed before (Plato, 1991 [507b–508d, 518b–519a, 523a–525a, 531d–533c]; Aristotle, 2011 [1141a7, 1142a26–31, 1143a36–b14, 1169a15–23, 31–33]; Aristotle, 2016[1013a20–22, 1072b30–1073b13, 1078a32–b6]). And while we might argue that neither Plato nor Aristotle speaks of a great books tradition, both in fact see important moral valence in the study of poetry (Aristotle, 2002; Plato, 1991), or what we call literature, and presumably both of them wrote works and founded schools where their works were discussed because they thought that something important could be gleamed by reading and speaking about works of philosophy.

To summarize the account thus far, the classical great books seminar is grounded not just on the pursuit of an ever elusive truth, but in the confidence that some degree of truth can be discovered by means of reading and discussing a great text, led by a teacher, in a community of learners. Such an education, the more that it encourages students to engage deeply with challenging questions, problems, and insights, and the more that it brings great books into dialogue with each other, increases the chance that students will awaken to the possibility of transcendent beauty and nobility, even if it does not guarantee such an experience. Such an experience, in turn, increases the participant’s ability to distinguish genuine truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, in nature, human productions, human psyches, and communities. The traditional liberal arts of the trivium and the quadrivium have something important to contribute. Though much of their insights are being rediscovered in other ways, in combination they offer important insights into the role of necessity and freedom in the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues, indeed of all kinds of virtues.

2. Cross-Atlantic collaboration

2.1. Is the classical great books seminar European?

In the opening, I claimed that I will discuss a form of education that came from Europe to America and is now returning to Europe. Of course, neither the centrality of the great books seminar in American classical education nor the importance of Plato and Aristotle within a shared American and European tradition proves that the great books seminar is European. So is it? The authors of the Harvard “Redbook” claim that the great books seminar emerged from the Protestant rejection of Catholic theological authority, the sola scriptura turn to reading the Old and New Testaments directly, and the growing secularism of their society that substituted other “great books” for “the Great Book,” i.e., the Bible (“General Education in a Free Society,” 1945). There is surely some merit to the latter part of this claim. The study of “Christendom” became the study of “Western Civilization,” during the period leading up to the Harvard “Redbook,” not, as some insist, to justify Americans fighting in Europe by propagandistic claims of a “shared civilization,” but rather because Christianity was no longer seen as definitive of American culture (Kurtz, 2020).

Certainly, as I note above, attention to a canon of great works goes back, in pagan times, to the aristocratic appreciation of drama, poetry, and history and to the production, preservation, and transmission of great works of philosophy by the various philosophic schools. We can learn something about the state of education during the time of the early Church Fathers by looking at the example of St. Jerome. he was extremely well versed in a variety of great books, pagan and Christian both, though this troubled him deeply as he still felt a strong attraction to the outstanding eloquence and argumentation of pagan works, devoid of Christian spiritual truth, as opposed to the almost rustic simplicity of the Christian works, rich in spiritual insight. His own writings often showed the influence of these pagan works upon his style and thought (the literature on this is voluminous, but see, e.g., Pease, 1919). As we jump forward in time, one need only glance at the sources presented by Dom Jean Leclercq in L’amour des lettres et le désir de dieu (2008) to see the robust methods of exegesis, informed by the trivium, applied to a variety of texts considered great, both ancient and contemporary. Or, if one wants to go directly to one of the Medieval sources, they can turn to Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (1961), which discusses in detail the importance of the trivium and quadrivium, among other arts, for the appreciation of texts and works of art, and which draws extensively from and is based upon the careful reading of pagan and Christian great books. To be sure, the Renaissance may have transformed the appreciation of ancient works in particular, advancing a competence in Ancient Greek that had languished a little during the Medieval period, but someone like Philip Melanchthon, in his “Preface to Homer” (1999), is nevertheless advancing an interest in ancient literature and philosophy that was informed by a Medieval interest in ancient literature and philosophy (think of how not only Homer and Vergil influenced Dante, but also Plato, Aristotle, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas Aquinas, in addition to the many sources from which Albert and St. Thomas were drawing). Even if Philip himself may have wished to set aside certain Medieval sources, he was nevertheless embracing ancient literature and philosophy that had been preserved and passed along precisely because some among the educated though them great and worthy of preservations. This is, of course, notwithstanding the continuous process of discovering new texts, and some rising in prominence while others fall out of fashion (e.g., through the Medieval period, Plato’s Timaeus was considered the apogee of his philosophy, as read through Cicero’s and Calcidius’s partial Latin translations; now, that apogee is usually considered to be his Republic.)

Let us make no mistake, though: The attitude toward these great works, whether the pagan had greater or lesser worth, and the precise methods of exegesis to be employed, whether more literal, allegorical, anagogical, etc., differs from time to time and place to place. We do not find among these European thinkers, as we find among later Americans, the notion of reading the great books for themselves, or that their primary value was for educating a critically-minded citizenry, or that discussions of them should always privilege the big questions over possible answers to these questions (Lee, 2020). The concern raised by the authors of the Harvard “Rebook” came to pass, perhaps: The ensuing relativism and aversion to moral commitments—commitments that presuppose that we privilege not just big questions about meaning, justice, and the common good, but also compelling answers to those questions—is one consequence of this period of American education that especially provoked the rise of classical education in the 1980s. Similarly, in the older European tradition, the great works were always read, and the methods of exegesis were always in service to, apprehending some greater truth beyond the great books that made them great. And so, prior to the modern era in Europe, we find an interest in the close reading of great books, by means of several or all of the liberal arts of the trivium and the quadrivium (whether articulated in these terms or not), placing the great books in dialogue with each other, seeking to grow in intellectual, moral, civic, and spiritual virtue, and pursuing a better grasp of a transcendent truth, typically understood as the study of being or God.

While great books were certainly studied by means of question and answer, guided by a teacher—e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, which gives both the questions and the answers, is an outgrowth of the approach—they were not necessarily studied by means of the seminar as it is conducted today in many classical schools, which is deeply indebted to the work of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler (“History of the Great Books Foundation,” n.d.). To be sure, it would be a mistake, perhaps even an absurdity, to think that American classical education is a pure or wholesale recovery of educational practices from any earlier time in history (see, e.g., Roberts, n.d.). And whatever is meant by “classical,” whether simply a foundational respect for certain works from Ancient Rome and Greece or also a sense that the education on offer is exemplary, it refers neither to a singular nor to a fully settled form of education. As I noted before, the American classical movement admits of considerable diversity and ongoing development. Even so, the common elements, between past and present, have sufficient continuity to establish that the features of the classical great books seminar have deep and numerous European roots that were carried over to America.

2.2. How has the classical great books seminar been returning to the UK and Europe?

I have already cited works that chronicle the rise of liberal arts and sciences programs in the UK and Europe (Brooks et al., 2022; Dirksen, Kontowski, & Kretz, 2017; Kirby & van der Wende, 2016; Tubbs, 2014), noting that some of these programs are not necessarily interested in or focused on the classical great books seminar, even if there remain similar features, e.g., problem-based learning clearly sees value in problem solving and giving students space for freedom and initiative, but it entails no firm commitments with respect to the accessibility of truth, the desirability of moral education, or the salutary value of a tradition, among other things. It has sufficient differences from the American classical model that we might say that it is not just distinct, but potentially even antithetical to it.

My purpose rather is to discuss British and European programs with which I have worked who are attempting to establish something akin to the classical great books seminar, and I will briefly discuss each in turn—COAS in Spain, BISLA in Slovakia, ELSS in the UK, the Kolégium Antona Neuwirtha in Slovakia, and Landmerk / the Pascal Institute in the Netherlands—noting what educational problems they are seeking to address and which elements of classical education they are seeking to integrate and why, to the best of my knowledge.

I will begin with the most recent work first. Launched in 2022 through the efforts of José María Torralba, the Civic Humanism Center for Character and Professional Ethics at the University of Navarra responds to social challenges by advancing best practices, conducting research, and fostering inter-institutional partnerships to promote liberal education and character education. In the spring of 2023, the Center brought a small cohort of teachers from Opus Dei high schools in norther Spain, part of the COAS Educational group, to the University of Dallas.

Our workshop entailed a preliminary encounter with the classical great books seminar, with one session focused on a selection from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2011) on the character of virtue and on courage specifically and another session on Stephen Crane’s short story, “A Mystery of Heroism” (1963), which offers a detailed portrait of a young man in combat that illustrates with psychological and situational complexity different dimensions of Aristotle’s account of courage. I chose these texts based on a one-day high school program I was privileged to participate in at True North Academy in Miami in the spring of 2022 and I cannot take any credit for the idea to choose these texts or to put them into conversation with each other.

I began with a brief introduction, explaining the various ways great books seminars may be conducted, including those that do not adhere to the classical commitments mentioned above. We then undertook the seminars, following DeCelles-Zwerneman’s (2023) advice with respect to genre, the kinds of questions to be asked, allowances for silences, when the seminar leader can intervene to clarify a point in the text, etc. Once we had explored both selections, we then put them into dialogue, using Aristotle’s remarks on virtue in general and courage in particular to inform our analysis of Crane’s short story.

To be sure, I did not pursue any pronounced development in intellectual or moral excellence, nor did I seek to provoke an experience of transcendence. In my experience, these are not reasonable goals for either a brief series of two seminars or for people who are learning about and experiencing seminar for the first time. Indeed, putting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Crane short story into dialogue circumvented the lengthier and more complex ways of cultivating intellectual and moral virtue that might occur through full-length seminar courses and programs of courses: We spoke about and explicitly reflected upon virtue, courage, psychological states, circumstances, etc., by using a work of imaginative literature as a concrete, incarnate instance of Aristotle’s principles. There are some in classical education who would no doubt find this a questionable strategy, one that denied participants the full immersion in each text on its own term, perhaps one that rigged the discussion by choosing texts so well suited to such dialogue that they eliminated much of the hard work for searching out such connections on one’s one, which seems essential to the classical great books seminar I described above. But, again, this was only a very limited and preliminary introduction. 

My understanding is that teachers were interested in this because of an interest in character education as well as in reconnecting with a form of education more respectful of tradition. Participants did not share any explicit criticisms of the education that they had been offering, in some cases, for decades. However, they indicated, ever so gently, that they hoped that the classical great books seminar might enhance the education that they offered students. Objections to it, insofar as they were shared with me, were that it could be difficult to find time to teach such courses and to make them align with government regulations in Spain. That said, the Civic Humanism Center will soon be hosting its second conference introducing teachers and aspiring teachers, largely in high school and higher education, to the great books seminar.

Next, I will discuss the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA). Founded in 2006 by Samuel Abrahám, BISLA in located in Bratislava, Slovakia, and offers bachelor’s degrees in political science. I had the privilege of teaching there full time from 2010–2013. Dr. Abrahám allowed me to design a five course cycle in political philosophy, beginning with a course on Plato’s Symposium (2001a) and moving through ancient, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern, and postmodern texts (omitting Medieval). All courses had a lecture and seminar component, with weekly sessions set aside explicitly for seminars.

BISLA is funded by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation (CAJEF), based in New York, NY. Dr. Abrahám was inspired in part by the liberal arts, great books education offered by institutions like St. John’s College (SJC) in Annapolis, MD, and CAJEF is interested in funding liberal arts programs in the U.S. and abroad, in former communist countries like Slovakia, as a means of encouraging a better civil society through education.

During my time at BISLA, the leadership undertook a series of partnerships with programs and institutions in the U.S., e.g., the Bringing Theory to Practice initiative, then under the Association of American Colleges & Universities. Part of the call to action included cultivating character and this inspired robust discussion between Slovak faculty and leadership and those of us familiar with liberal arts, great books education in the U.S. Some Slovak staff were concerned that such aims were akin to communist “citizen building” and thus a form of heavy handed indoctrination. I learned much later that, during communist times, there was the option to take religious education or character education in K–12 schools. The character education option was the explicitly communist choice. Be that as it may, that Slovak high schools have courses in character education has allowed Slovakia today to become ripe for the robust expansion of character education, rare in other EU states.

At the time, I argued that we had little to fear of indoctrination from the American understanding of character education in a liberal arts, great books context, especially on the SJC model. The purpose was to foster intellectual virtue in the form of free, rigorous inquiry. Such inquiry is surely a matter of intellectual virtue because it is difficult to undertake, takes time to cultivate, and liberates students from parochialism and prejudice, in part though not completely, which also has moral significance. I also pointed out that great books seminars required students to learn to understand each other’s perspectives, to disagree respectfully, and to trust each other, among other things, which are the kinds of virtues that have moral dimensions and are, or should be, uncontroversial (see Brooks et al., 2022, which makes several similar points).

BISLA’s students have attended various prestigious institutions of higher learning, including the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Purdue University, the London School of Economics, Glasgow University, Central European University, KU Leuven, and many others. However, perhaps more tellingly,. BISLA graduates have gone on to do such things as found the first independent news journal in the country or to launch a nonpartisan center dedicated to teaching regular citizens how to stand for office, organize a political campaign, etc. In other words, BISLA graduates both excel academically and undertake projects that serve the common good of their community.

Third, I will discuss the work of Mark Taylor, Vice Principal of the East London Science School (ELSS). I first encountered Mr. Taylor at the European Liberal Arts and Sciences conference hosted by Amsterdam University College in the fall of 2015. There, he presented videos of high school students discussing works like St. Augustine’ s Confessions. I next met Mr. Taylor and select colleagues at two two-week series of seminars mounted by the Association of Core Texts and Courses. One was called “Tradition and Innovation” and was focused on great books seminars. The other was called “Reinventing and Rejuvenating the Liberal Arts” and focused primarily on the trivium with less attention paid to the quadrivium. Out of the first series of seminars, Mr. Taylor and his compatriots were inspired to expand their implementation of great books seminars and to increase students’ discipline with respect to keeping focused on the text, discussing it accurately, and analyzing it with insight, and less on allowing students to share opinions or to find relevant, but extraneous connections to the text (though such things will occur in any great books seminar that allows freedom of speech, more so when a school is in the process of developing a great books seminar culture). Out of the second series of seminars, Mr. Taylor became interested in finding ways to integrate different elements of the trivium and the quadrivium across the ELSS curriculum. While it would not be appropriate to go into the details here, his proposal was one of the most thoughtful I have seen, in particular because of its intelligent integration of parts of the quadrivium into STEM and humanities education.

I had the pleasure of visiting ELSS twice as a guest, during which time I got to speak to faculty and leadership and to lead one seminar with high school students on Book 7 of Plato’s Republic (1991). Among the topics I discussed with school faculty and leadership were the principles that animated the American classical education movement, in particular how it approached character education, and my thoughts on why character education was relevant to studies in science, and why studies in science and the humanities could and must be more deeply integrated so as to help educate principled professionals. My remarks followed, in part, some of what I said about the trivium and the quadrivium above, though I presented it without getting into some of the technical details I have shared in this paper. ELSS’s Principal at the time was uncomfortable with the notion of character education, since it seemed too prone to open the door to indoctrination. I used some arguments employed by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues staff, concerning, e.g., how character education is inevitable and we can only choose whether to be deliberate about it or not, not whether to do it or not (Arthur et al.2016). The Principal did not disagree, but these statements did not assuage his concerns, and, looking back on it, I can see why they did not. Claiming that we are doing character education no matter what and that we should be deliberate about it is not a plan for doing it responsibly; it is only a request that we figure it out. The overall account of character education seemed to resonate with some faculty members more.

That said, I know that several of members of ELSS were concerned that there would be opposition, from other faculty and parents. I walked through how classical schools in the U.S. had faced a variety of such obstacles, so their concerns were entirely justified, but that those schools that had “stuck to their guns” managed to get through the painful transition period to enter a period of greater success, both in terms of building community on campus and measurable student outcomes. The last was also important to ELSS faculty, since they, like many people who first hear of employing methods of classical or character education, fear that it will come at the cost of academic achievement. I was able to share with them research from Arizona showing how the growth of public charter schools, including many classical schools, led to progressively improving academic outcomes. These seemed, over all, to hearten and inspire many faculty to take seriously classical education and character education. I know that Mr. Taylor continued his work to expand liberal arts, great books education, although this work may conclude now that ELSS has been acquired by a school management organization, the Harris Federation.

Fourth, I would like to return to Slovakia and discuss the work of the Kolégium Antona Neuwirtha. Named after the accomplished doctor, teacher, and diplomat Anton Neuwirth, who was persecuted for teaching non-Marxist doctrines in Slovakia, the Kolégium was founded in 2009 by Martin Luterán. The Kolégium offers non-credit-bearing great books courses in a residential environment, emphasizing not only accuracy and rigor in discussing the great works of the Western tradition, but also a commitment to cultivating character and serving the community by means of deepening one’s appreciate of truth and faith, specifically, the Catholic faith. What is remarkable is that it seems to be flourishing in terms of attendance despite lacking all the normal extrinsic means of motivating students to study such works, namely, the hope of getting credits, a degree, and eventually a job. Its course offerings are purely voluntary affairs, which adds a layer of freedom on top of that included by virtue of the seminar format. Students are there because they really want to be.

Dr. Luterán and his team subsequently launched the Great Works Academy, which employs a similar model to the Kolégium insofar as its course offerings are all voluntary. Founded and led by Miroslava Duranková, Great Works Academy coaches high school teachers in designing and conducting extra curricular great books seminars. Last I asked about its success, in 2021, they were working with approximately 50 schools across Slovakia.

They have also launched an elementary classical Catholic school. Led by Slávka Kubíková , it now has two locations, one outside Bratislava proper and one in the heart of the city, just outside the Old Town. This elementary classical Catholic school, like its counterparts in the U.S., has enjoyed impressive growth, requiring a new location after only a couple of years.

I had the privilege of giving a talk to the faculty and leadership, discussing American classical education, outlining the relationship between the trivium, the quadrivium, and the great books that I discuss above, with the added element including Catholic faith and culture within it. While they were kind in their interest and praise that they had learned something from the talk, the truth is that as I got to know their work better, I was astonished by how advanced their classical curriculum and pedagogy was, especially at the elementary level, which, in the U.S., usually adopts largely non-classical approaches because the standard classical elements seem suited only to more mature students. By contrast, the elementary school launched by the Kolégium exposed students to great works, albeit with care and restraint, used a question-and-answer approach when giving feedback and soliciting the student’s participation in evaluating their own work, and even used classical music during assignments to awaken students’ minds and emotions to the beauty and power of such music. The teachers found that the students would rather work on a writing assignment while listening to classical music than to enjoy recess, an outcome that I think would astonish many American educators. While the faculty and leadership explicitly said that they were inspired by the classical movement in the U.S., they seemed to have integrated its approaches and even to have gone beyond them while also integrating research into character education, motivation, etc.

The leadership of these initiatives are concerned about what they see as a loss of intellectual rigor, moral virtue, faith, and familiarity with one’s own culture in their broader society, and they see their work as beginning to address these concerns. They did not express any reservations to me about classical education; their key concern here, stated in a humble way, was that they still had so much to learn.

To my knowledge, the Kolégium and all of its initiatives are flourishing. 

2.3. Is the classical great books seminar an exemplary form of character education?

Before turning to the last European group that I will discuss (the people who have founded Landmerk and the Pascal Institute), I would like to return to the question with which we began: Why waste a student’s time and exhaust a teacher’s efforts speaking about Homer’s Iliad, composed in daunting verse and obscure diction, and animated by the concerns of a 11th c. BCE Myrmidon king, as far removed from today’s student as possible, when we could share a short, engaging video about a young person who opposed cyber-bullying in their school?

Recall that I said that it need not be an either/or. The time that K–12 teachers, especially public school teachers, have to teach anything, given the pressures of government regulations and standardized testing, can be oppressively brief, so brief, in fact, that it is easy to say that the issue is an either/or. Yet, there are groups in the U.S. (e.g., the MacMillan Institute), the UK (e.g., the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues), Spain (e.g., the Civic Humanism Center for Character and Professional Ethics), Slovakia (e.g., Great Works Academy), and elsewhere, who have practical advice for how K–12 teachers can integrate great books and/or character education in ways that operate within regulatory limits. The MacMillan Institute and Great Works Academy, in particular, have launched great books programs in high schools serving poor communities, also often assumed to be incapable of benefitting from this ostensibly “élite” education. So let us grant, for now, that one could have both the video on the young person opposing cyber-bullying and Homer’s Iliad, even in a public school serving students who face serious social and economic challenges.

But, even if we can get past the logistical problems, why teach Homer’s Iliad, a work that portrays wrath, pettiness, prejudice, and violence on a grand scale? Does it offer any of the key elements of character education, such as a blueprint for living a flourishing life, clear definitions of virtues, moral exemplars, increased emotional regulation, friendships of mutual accountability, etc. (see, e.g., Arthur et al., 2016; Brant et al., 2020; Brooks et al., 2022; Darnell et al., 2019)? Does it offer any of these in a way that speaks to our lives today?

To answer this question, I wish to discuss a course I taught in the summer of 2022 in Rome, attended by several members of Landmerk / Pascal Institute in the Netherlands. But, first, a few words about these organizations: Led by Niko Schonebaum and Jordi Wiersma, Landmerk offers short great books seminars—e.g., Rhetoric in Rome (focusing on Cicero), Shakespeare in the Boardroom, etc.—intended for students and young professionals, in law, journalism, and K–12 education, among other fields. Landmerk’s mission is help young people foster intellectual, moral, and civic virtues, to facilitate their own flourishing and to serve the common good. As with the other European organizations described in this paper, the leaders of and participants in Landmerk’s programs argue that contemporary materialist pursuits, though incredibly successful in generating comfortable, pleasant lives, nevertheless overlook something extremely important in terms of finding genuine meaning and purpose in life, crucial to flourishing. The Pascal Institute, begun by Andreas Kinneging and Jordi Wiersma, serves the same mission by similar means, only it offers a cycle of more intensive, semester-long great books seminars, intended largely for graduate students in Europe and abroad.

Five members of Landmerk / Pascal Institute joined two intensive summer courses offered by the University of Dallas as part of its Classical Education in Rome program. My own course was entitled “Fine Arts and Liberal Arts” and it explored whether the study of the fine arts, encompassing music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, could serve, as do the great books, to cultivate intellectual, moral, and civic virtues. That said, we began, as in a more conventional great books seminar, with literature and philosophy, reading selections from Homer’s Iliad. During the ensuing seminar, students concluded that, for Achilles, the fact that everyone dies revealed that all ostensible goals of life, especially glory, were meaningless, and that Achilles’s famous shield, wrought by the god Hephaestus, upon which was portrayed an image of the cosmos, was intended to mollify Achilles’s despair. By means of this shield, Homer offered Achilles, as us, a grand natural order as a salve for the meaningless of human existence. The students concluded the seminar with the question of whether Homer was discovering or inventing the cosmos. While many of them seemed to feel a little guilty at the claim that Homer was inventing the cosmos, it seemed difficult to avoid, since no one was really persuaded that the image of the cosmos on the shield was true, except in a qualified way. Its order of nature was debunked, but some of the human activities, such as wedding celebrations and sieges were real; they just were not matters of profound importance any more for us, being relevant to the time of the Ancient Greeks during which Homer was the source for culture.

We then read selections from Plato’s Republic (1991) and Timaeus (2001b) and Aristotle’s Politics (1998) and Poetics (2002). This portion of the course was more lecture based, though it still included ample discussion, as well. The purpose of reading these sections was (a) to see the arguments for why Socrates and Timaeus think that there is transcendent beauty and nobility, its relevance for engendering intellectual, moral, and civic virtue, and how we can come to glimpse it, and (b) Plato’s and Aristotle’s advice for how to appreciate beauty in works of art, especially literature and music. These readings approximated the insights drawn from the quadrivium and the trivium we considered above, albeit not explicitly in the same terms, even if the Republic Book 7 was a source for the quadrivium. It is perhaps obvious that the purpose of these readings was to transform how we might approach a text. However, at no time did I instruct students to use what they learned this way and they remained free, of course, to ask whatever questions they wished and to explore the texts and works of art however they wished.

We then had a second seminar on Homer’s Iliad and it went very differently. Students were no longer all that interested in the cosmos depicted on Achilles’s shield. Instead, they focused on a concluding episode, in which the Trojan King Priam sneaks into the Greek camp, approaches Achilles, kneels before him, embraces his knees, and kisses his hands, supplicating him to return the body of Priam’s slain and most beloved son, Hector. Priam and Achilles are deadly enemies. As Priam says, “I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone through; / I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children” (Homer, 1951 [24.505–506]). Priam asks Achilles to think of his own father. Achilles reflects upon the pain he feels at the death of his beloved friend, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector and upon the misery that Achilles has and will cause his own father. Remarkably, he then reflects upon Priam’s intense pain and sorrow at the loss of his son, Hector, whom Achilles hates with a burning rage. Discussing this passage, students argued that the epic poem is about wrath, how it severs the bonds of human community, leading Achilles literally to separate himself from his comrades; how this severance provokes a profound loss of meaning; and how community may be healed by a particular kind of empathy and forgiveness.

However, because the students had reflected upon patterns of harmony and discord in nature, works of art, human psyches, and communities, because they understood this harmony not just as some static order, but rather as an activity of harmonizing, that is more powerful the greater the tensions that it must address, and because they were directed to reflect upon how they would feel if they stood before someone who was responsible for the slaughter of someone they loved deeply, they experienced the encounter between Priam and Achilles in a new and powerful way. One student suddenly exclaimed, “Is this what it’s like to encounter transcendent beauty? I’m getting chills.” Other students concurred. In the days following, several students approached me to discuss what this moment meant to them, how it led them to reflect upon their disputes with family members, friends, and colleagues, and how it provoked in them an intense desire to set aside their grievances and to think of how to assuage wounds they had nursed within themselves and to reconcile with others.

When I have discussed the experience of this seminar with other teachers, they often ask what questions I offered to lead the students to this conclusion. I can appreciate this question, but may miss the point. I did not need to have a questioning strategy. Several students had become persuaded that transcendent beauty and nobility is real, had some sense of how to understand it, in the abstract at least, and had considered different ways, from Plato and Aristotle, to discern that beauty. Accordingly, they pursued for themselves a way to encounter that beauty through an protracted reflection upon pain and suffering in the text, albeit one that inspired them and gave them hope. I did not lead them there. Informed by the insights of Plato and Aristotle with respect to truth, beauty and nobility, and confronted by extremely challenging questions, problems, and insights, they wrestled with the text in a way that gave them a glimpse of something greater. 

Now, to be fair, this was one test of the classical great books seminar. And if anyone wanted to object that the circumstances were unusually favorable, I would have to agree. I followed the advice of Plato and Aristotle, which I presented directly to the students, and those students, for their part, were open-minded, serious, and solicitous of learning. Plus, the texts at our disposal were among the greatest ever written. That said, it was not pure luck because some prior understanding of the conditions was required to facilitate this seminar and, as I said above, I do not think this could be done with just any text, though I do think it could be done with other great texts.

So is this an exemplary form of character education? The reader, with this as with perhaps all such questions, must judge for themselves. But let me offer a few suggestions:

(a) While a video of a child who stood up to cyber-bullying is worthwhile, it would not be appropriate to attempt to enter into all the details of this child’s psyche, in particular those dimensions of it that may make the child look less than heroic or open the child to serious criticism. A work of imaginative literature, when its characters are drawn from a profound understanding of human nature as well as of individual people’s natures, can give us insights into the internal processes of another human being, the good and the ugly, in a way that is helpful for struggling to exercise virtue, but inappropriate to do with a real child put forth as an exemplar.

(b) Because, in the seminar described above, the students were prepared to look for objectively real patterns of beauty and nobility in human words, thoughts, feelings, and actions, as well as for the deficiency of those patterns, they were able to perceive and distinguish virtue from vice, not in a cheap, moralizing way, but in a careful and complex way, sensitive to how human beings can inflict grievous harm upon each other and to how pride, insecurity, victimhood, humaneness, love, etc., all collide and inform those words, thoughts, feelings, and actions. This complexity may be of greater value in navigating the real-world of moral challenges than are more attractive, but simpler moral exemplars, even though those are important, as well. This overall approach may also be at least of complementary value to exercises asking students to analyze moral quandaries, no matter how realistic, because, again, students may be able to analyze the implications and consequences for various stakeholders in the quandary, and even to empathize with different people in the situation, but they will not necessarily be in a position to understand the obstacles, in terms of the complex and ambiguous motivations that mix more virtuous and nobler with more vicious and pettier traits, in a sufficiently sympathetic way so as to reflect upon strategies to identify similar or related obstacles within themselves. While more research is certainly required here, the lack of a means to go insightfully into the vices of realistic characters, without demeaning them, but rather to see them in ourselves and reflect upon the incredible difficulties of negotiating with these deficiencies, may be one reason why character programs have not yet managed to show significant moral improvement (as discovered originally by Blasi, 1980).

(c) As I discussed above, the seminar mode itself fosters a certain exercise of liberty and intrinsic motivation, in this case, in the direction of students learning to analyze situations with sensitivity and discipline; to dispute with each other civilly; to appreciate not just others’ arguments and responses, but also the tenor of their emotional investment in those arguments and responses; to find areas of common concern, often difficult to discern in the midst of disagreements, which can actuate our pride and pettiness; to overcome these obstacles and to trust each other; and, finally, to become a community. The community of the seminar came together over a shared glimpse of a struggle for harmony that is at once transcendent and intimate, something that came to light even while reflecting upon the darkest of experiences, a shared experience that did not require participants to define themselves over and against others—as, e.g., progressive vs. conservative, classical vs. non-classical—but that helped them understand how to connect with others, in particular those that they might otherwise find unworthy of such connection.

Arguably, we have here several important intellectual virtues, e.g., rigorous analysis and logical argumentation; moral virtues, e.g., civility and kindness; and pro-social or civic virtues, e.g., friendship and community. But we might also have key elements of practical wisdom or phronēsis, including the ability not just to define, but to actively discern virtues, to see them in complex characters and situations, to understand how different traits influence specific people over time, contributing or distracting from their flourishing, etc. (Aristotle, 2011).

Again, some of what I have said above, in particular as concerns entering the psyche of another through the empathetic study of imaginative literature and through the practice of discussion, has been made insightfully by others (e.g., Brooks et al., 2022; Nussbaum, 1990, 1996, 2001; Urtasun, 2022). And there are so many calls for empathy today, it is hardly necessary to argue that empathy is a virtue (Brooks et al., 2022; though see qualifications in, e.g., Crisp, 2008; Hunt, 2006; Kristjánsson, 2018; Weber, 2005). There are important distinctions to draw here between empathy, sympathy, compassion, pity, etc. Empathy, strictly speaking, means not to feel bad for someone else’s misfortune or to understand their perceptive, but to feel what they are feeling. But I must reserve an in-depth analysis of these for another time. For now, I will restrict myself to observing that empathy does not appear to be either a moral virtue or a moral emotion. If it is a virtue, it would be a performative virtue, like resilience, in that it can serve moral or immoral ends. As Steven Pinker (2012) and others have elaborated, empathy can “go wrong” in any number of ways, e.g., when someone wishes to inflict pain, an awareness of how that pain feels can sometimes increase rather than decrease the desire to inflict that pain (sometimes called “dark empathy,” Heim et al., 2021); empathy, rather than sympathy, for certain kinds of emotions, like humiliation, can often make us become distant, unsupportive, or even hostile to the one for whom we are feeling empathy because humiliation tends to provoke such unsympathetic responses; and, finally, the kind of empathy most called for today is empathy for the victim. Yet, though this is not widely acknowledged in public discourse, such empathy is also a key driver of victimizing. The person who feels empathy for the one they perceive as a victim often feels a powerful desire to inflict great pain upon the one or ones they perceive as the victimizers, regardless of whether the alleged victimizer is actually a victimizer (Breithaupt, 2019; cf. Nussbaum, 2013, who recognizes these concerns, but still considers empathy intrinsically moral).

Of course, the solution may be to guide empathy by reason (Kristjánsson, 2018; Pinker, 2012; Nussbaum, 2013; cf. Darnell at al., 2019). But there might also be other kinds of empathy. What kind of empathy is revealed by Achilles? He filters it first through the the pain he is actually feeling over the death of his friend, then the pain he imagines his father may feel at his conduct, and only then does he look to... his enemy. This is not the only kind of empathy, and one should hesitate to ask any genuine victim to feel empathy for the one who has victimized them. But Achilles was not forced; he has elected to feel empathy for an enemy. He can only do so, though, by first reflecting upon the greatest experiences of love, a father whom he admires and his closest friend. If Achilles’s and Priam’s brief act of reconciliation speaks to profound truths about harmonizing patterns in nature, human nature, and human community, and if it also insightfully reflects the realities of flesh-and-blood human beings, animated by fear, hate, anger, sorrow, love, friendship, etc., then, for these, and for many more reasons that cannot be stated here, I think that a classical great books seminar on the Iliad—one informed either by the trivium and the quadrivium or else by learning that cultivates similar dispositions with respect to a morally-salient truth and human freedom in the seminar participant—offers a rare opportunity for character education, albeit one that can be undertaken with any number of great books and that becomes all the more effective the more great books it brings together.

While I can take no credit for this, the Pascal Institute will integrate courses on the trivium and the quadrivium into their course of studies in the great books.

And, as I have argued above, such an education is very much European in origin, even if it has analogues in other cultures, as I know it does. Thus, for Americans and Europeans to work together in learning how to teach a classical great books seminar is a case in which a European form of education went to America, was changed in some respects, but perhaps not in any major respects, and has now returned to Europe.

Footnotes

1. To learn more about secular K–12 classical education, interested readers may look at growing classical networks, such as Great Hearts America in Arizona and Texas, Founders Classical Academies in Texas and Arkansas, Valor Education in Texas, and True North Academies in Florida. This list is by no means exhaustive as there are many individual secular classical schools across the U.S. To learn more about Jewish K–12 classical education, see the Lobel Center for Jewish Classical Education, launched by the Tikvah Fund, and about Muslim K–12 classical education, the Revival Ihya School in the Lehigh Valley, PA, and Muslim college-level classical education, Zaytuna College in Berkeley, CA.

2. Many classical schools adopted the Core Knowledge program by working with the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) at Hillsdale College, during the tenure of its founding director, Phillip Kilgore, from 2010–2019. That said, BCSI, then and now, advances a variety of approaches to support the growth and development of outstanding classical teachers. To learn more about BCSI, see “Barney Charter School Initiative,” n.d.

3. Of course, there is also a logic deployed to assess whether something is true or not. Such logic shares so much with mathematical reasoning that, for some, it is branch of mathematical reasoning. This kind of logic I would relegate to the quadrivium, whereas the kind of logic that entails deliberation about action I would relegate to the trivium. Aristotle (2011) certainly recognizes an important different in reasoning upon truth, upon principles that cannot be otherwise, and upon actions. Even so, the divide two kinds of logic, as I have proposed, may be a controversial claim for some reader. As the present essay is focused on a broad overview of classical education, not an in-depth interrogation of it elements, I will set aside this potential debate for another time. 

4. Some readers may wonder whether this account could not be refuted by some form of determinism, e.g., that holds that everything is a matter of necessity and chance, not of necessity and freedom. If everything is a matter of necessity and chance, then what any of us thinks is true, including what we think is true but is not true, is also a matter of necessity and chance. In other words, on this account, if I take seriously an Einsteinian account of gravity, it is not because I freely deliberated upon the evidence, but because I was predetermined to take it seriously, either by some necessity of the manifold causes that have led to me or equally by some randomness in the unfolding of those causes. Either way, whether anything I happen to think happens to be true or not is irrelevant because my thoughts are not determined by the perception or analysis of truth, but by predetermining or random causes. But this would also apply to the claim that everything is determined by necessity and chance. It, too, could not be the result of my perception or analysis of truth, but must be something I think because of predetermining or random causes. In other words, if determinism of the kind I am describing here were true, it would be impossible to know if anything were true, including determinism itself.

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