How Centers for Classical Education Can Save the Humanities

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Nov 13

Civics centers have been established in 13 public universities across 8 states. And more are coming. These Civic centers can revive the humanities. They will revive the humanities. And this needs to happen, because the humanities are in trouble.

Vocational, skills-based, and technological training are in demand. Majors in STEM fields attract students, because students think those majors will serve as a ticket to a stable job and a good salary. And universities direct students toward these majors, because universities are judged by how many of their graduates are employed and how much money they make.

We see these trends, away from the humanities and toward the sciences, continue apace when schools like Tulsa cut its honors program, when the University of Chicago, because of its heavy investments in new scientific research, new technologies, and new start-ups, begins to gut its once renowned humanities offerings.

Some academics, even in the humanities, cheer on these trends. One, for example, who has—wrongly—predicted the civics centers will fail, contends that “AI might well be the best teacher” for general education courses. By enlisting AI as a gen ed teacher, universities can cut costs, use the financial gains to fund laboratories and train faculty to develop expertise in writing prompts to feed into AI models. This is an emaciated vision of the humanities and of the university. It is one reason—among several—why the number of Americans expressing “no confidence” in U.S. higher education has more than doubled in the last ten years.

Universities must attend to the practical needs of a dynamic, scientific, and technological order, such as ours. It is necessary. But it is not everything.

If we are to revive the humanities, we must remember what the humanities are. We must distinguish the humanities from the natural and social sciences. And we must restore a prominent and privileged place to the humanities in our universities. And the new Civics Centers can help us do just that.

So what are the humanities? And what are they for? The humanities concern the permanent things, those questions that we humans cannot help but ask, about life’s meaning and purpose, our origin and destiny, the nature of reality. It is through the humanities—the study of philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and history—that we educate our humanity. It is through the humanities that we gain wisdom. It is through the humanities that we learn what it means to be excellent—intellectually and morally—to perfect our capacity for mental and practical activity.

Insofar as human nature is unchanging, we can consult a fund of masterworks, from Greek, Roman, and Christian civilization, to train us in these matters, to guide and improve our thought and action. We can train under the tutelage of these masterworks. And this is where enculturation happens—this is where education happens—the passing on of a tradition of thought and a way of life. The humanities provide us with a link, stretching backward to a shared past, stretching upward, toward a universal and transcendent truth, and stretching beyond us to a shared future. There is continuity in humanistic education. There is no continuity in scientistic education.

The sciences are dynamic, changing, progressive. Scientific methods are designed to discover the laws of nature and of society and to develop technologies to exert control over nature and society. Such studies are useful. They foster health and material welfare, without which the good life cannot be lived. But such studies cannot tell us what the good life is.

In the natural and social sciences, change is the norm. One hypothesis takes over another. New methods, new discoveries, and new information are acquired and dispersed. Old ways of thought are challenged and unsettled. The natural and social sciences, alone, are progressive forces that foster a progressive mindset and form a progressive civilization. They cannot be left alone. They must be accompanied by, shored up by, and informed by, the permanent things, by the historical and philosophical continuity provided by the humanities, when done well, as they should be done well, and will be done well, in the civics centers.

There is no way you can have a national conservative university and skimp on the permanent things, devoting yourself entirely to the dynamic, open, progressive, utility-oriented aspects of a scientistic education. This will leave you with a dynamic, progressive, utilitarian society with no piety, no knowledge of or appreciation for one’s heritage, namely, one’s Western and American heritage. This will leave you with an uneducated population.

An educated person is one who has been given a liberal education. This kind of education is prior to education in science and technology, because it teaches us how to use science and technology properly. It offers a fixed standpoint from which to judge that which is always changing. Liberal education is an education fit for a free person, one who finds his or her freedom through submission to the proper authority, namely, reason. The Civics Centers can rescue reason and restore its primacy in the university, and in so doing, form good men, good women, and good citizens. To accomplish this, they should do the following:

First, and most obviously, the Civics Centers must develop curricula that expose students to the masters of thought. These masters of thought, as St. John Henry Newman wrote, teach us to discriminate between the precious and the vile, beauty and sin, truth and sophistry, what is innocent and what is poison. These master works of human thought should be drawn from the fonts of classical civilization—from Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem—from Christian civilization and from our American tradition.

You can’t understand America without the West. And you can’t understand either without the Hebrew Bible and Christianity. Any civics and leadership majors that these Civics Centers offer should be supplemented by majors or minors in Western civilization, in Jewish thought, and in Christian thought and culture. Civics alone, while valuable, will give you one piece of a longer conversation. Bring students into the whole conversation, not just a part of it, because, again, this is what an educated person is, one who can think well about Western history and America, and understand his place in it, in that broad, colorful history, which is his patrimony.

I’ll brag on the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida for a moment. We offer majors in Great Books and Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law, American Government, History, Literature, and Law, and War, Statecraft, and Strategy. These are interdisciplinary majors. We plan to offer a minor in Christian Thought and Culture, and we offer a program in Jewish Classical Education. Hamilton School graduates will be educated people. We focus not only on civics, but also on the classics. And that is essential.

The Hamilton School also plans to launch a Masters and PhD in the History of Ideas. Graduates from these programs will be highly sought after to fill faculty positions in other Civics Centers across the US and to teach at K-12 schools, particularly classical schools, around the country. We need great teachers, and this is the place to educate them. Aspiring teachers should not go to colleges of education, but to Civics Centers.

Second, a great curriculum and fitting majors and minors are great, but an educated person does not simply take a set of classes and receive a diploma. That’s not enough. Students at these Civics Centers must be formed—not only in the classroom—but also in the hallways, in the corridors, in the faculty offices, in student clubs. Faculty must invest in their students, starting and sponsoring oratorical societies, Greek and Latin reading groups, philosophy and theology reading groups, poetry recitation nights, classical cinema viewing, study abroad trips to Oxford. There should be classical music and classical art in the shared spaces of these Civics Centers where students and faculty can spontaneously gather.

This is central to our mission and vision at the Hamilton School, to create these beautiful, shared spaces for faculty and student interaction, for the mentorship of students, for the handing on not only of ideas, but also of habits, rituals, and traditions firmly tethered to our Western and American heritage, of which we are immensely proud. Thanks to the investment of the state and the university and the support of Governor Ron DeSantis, the Board of Governors, the board of trustees, and private donors, the University of Florida will have a beautiful space that will be bubbling with intellectual and social life, that will be home to future local, state, and national leaders—it will be a veritable Oxford in the Swamp. Go Gators.

Third, in addition to curriculum and majors – in addition to buildings, spaces, and clubs for student activities and mentorship – we need to think about recruiting and retaining world-class faculty. To do so, however, we might need to get creative, granting tenure and promotion not only for specialized academic research, but also for popular writing and public service. Specialized academic research is important. We want professors who are masters of the masters of thought, professors who are knowledgeable, who can train students in intellectual excellence. But we also want professors who are good men and women, who can serve as models of moral excellence inside and out of the classroom. We need professors who can go out and help train K-12 teachers, who can speak about liberal education to parents, civic leaders, and business leaders, and who can be confident that doing so will help, not hurt, their case for tenure. We need professors who can enliven public conversation through op-eds, through podcasts, through books intended for the broader reading public, and who can be confident that doing so will help, not hurt, their case for tenure. Specialized research has a place. But it deserves a smaller place than it is currently given.

Fourth, after curriculum and majors, buildings, spaces, and clubs, and proper standards for recruiting and retaining faculty, universities should do all they can to funnel general education in the humanities through the Civics Centers. Make these Civics Centers a privileged place for the study of permanent things, a place for the education of our humanity, rather than the expression of our individuality, a place for contemplation, not activism, a place of solidarity and virtue, devoted, as were universities of the past, to the glory of God and to the better ordering of ourselves and our communities, a conservative haven, where we can invest in—and regain our hope in—the continuation of our Western and American heritage.

John Dewey, the early twentieth-century educational reformer, tried to flatten university education, to stamp out the hierarchical relationship between student and teacher, between student and civilizational wisdom. The Civics Centers can serve as hubs for new reforms in higher education, to correct Dewey’s mistakes. With adequate support, we can serve as the leaven of the university, enriching, expanding, and elevating the educational experience and restoring the hierarchy between student and teacher, between student and civilizational wisdom, and by restoring, ultimately, the most important hierarchy of all, the hierarchy of reason, or logos, over all. This is how you revive the humanities and restore trust in the university. And you can look at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida as a model.

I call on governors, state legislators, and university leaders to grow and protect these new Civics Centers. Again, the state of Florida has been exemplary in this regard. It is undoubtedly the leader in education reform. It is a model. Most humanities programs aren’t dying, they’re already dead. The Civics Centers have arisen just in time and more will form. They are the new houses of the humanities, built on piety, love of one’s country and civilizational heritage; built on truth and goodness, the proper objects of the intellect and the will. These centers for classical and civic thought will serve as the foundation we need to reinvigorate our country’s great project of self-government. Now is the time to build. Thank you.