Few Americans today would deny that we live in a society marked more by transition and change than by stability and tradition. From 2020 onward, with online classrooms made endemic by the response of public health administrators, parents have become much more aware as to what their children are being taught, from the K–12 level to that of college and university. Restrictive COVID masking requirements and progressive, anti-American ideology led many parents to withdraw their students from mainstream public schools, leading to a rise in both homeschooling and classical charter schools. Such charter schools have been around for some time, drawing the ire of public teachers’ unions and some politicians, but new circumstances have led to increased interest on the part of parents, leading to welcome competition for Catholic schools, which, though many had for some time been enthralled with a secular liberal educational paradigm, are increasingly turning to a classical model. While this can mean different approaches in practice, those who have some familiarity with the movement may instinctively think of the “Great Books” model of liberal education, such as that to which Bishop James Conley alludes in the beginning of his recent pastoral letter on Catholic education. This model includes works of authors across the Western tradition—Plato, Chaucer, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky—which Jared Zimmerer argued are “essential reading for evangelists.”
A recent controversy about the Great Books model can help us understand the unique strengths of Catholic education, and how and why a particular approach to reading the great works of the Western tradition would fit well within Catholic schools. A former professor of Classics, Alex Petkas recently wrote a provocative article titled (somewhat misleadingly) “‘Great Books’ Is for Losers,” urging his readers to ask themselves: If they turn to Great Books to help “restor[e] American culture . . . what exactly is being restored?” Petkas concludes that the Great Books approach—as he believes it is evidenced by St. John’s College and the program at the University of Chicago founded by that institution’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler—is critically flawed because it focuses on the discussion of ideas to the detriment of human formation, and disregards the study of the classical languages, Greek and Latin, which should be central due to their role in helping students imitate the great men of the Western tradition through understanding how they thought in their own native tongues.
“There is no reason in principle why a sound educational curriculum can’t have both an emphasis on mimesis and an emphasis on understanding of ideas as such.”
While Petkas critiques the Great Books model on behalf of American patriotism, it had been previously criticized by a Catholic philosopher as an unfit replacement for philosophy. Frederick Wilhelmsen, who taught at both the University of Dallas and Christendom College, wrote in 1987—almost 40 years ago—that the Great Books approach (he cites the same institutions as does Petkas) ignores the original audience of these works, which is “its history.” It is not only that the books in question are read in translation (a concern Wilhelmsen shares with Petkas), but too often without reference to their history, and, finally, with a kind of idolatrous love: “These books are often treated with the reverence and awe properly restricted to the Sacrament on the Altar.”
It should hopefully be clear after reading these criticisms that Petkas and Wilhelmsen are not opposing the reading of primary works by brilliant authors, such as Plutarch and St. Thomas Aquinas (whom they respectively appreciate), but a pedagogical method which eschews personal formation of students through study of the classical languages, and a semi-divinization of a list of authors who radically disagree with one another on many important issues. While a study of the history of philosophy may assist one in thinking philosophically, Wilhelmsen argued, it does not substitute for thinking philosophically; one might say the same about Catholic theology, which is focused on the truth of Scripture and Tradition, not only the meanings of the individual works of the Fathers of the Church, worthy as they are of study. Another University of Dallas professor and the founder of its core curriculum and Great Books PhD program, Louise Cowan, hesitated to use the term “canon” to describe the solidity of the core curriculum she saw as essential to undergraduate and graduate education, both because it stood to compete with the canon of Scripture, and because it suggested too much a curricular fixity which was not open to changing when truly great new works of literature, philosophy, and politics were written and the culture of the society changed.
Thus, for a Catholic classical school to teach Great Books, teachers must strive on the one hand to avoid what Pope Benedict XVI called “the dictatorship of relativism,” which in the classroom would disable students from searching for truth by redirecting them to know only what the author of a given text meant, rather than also providing them with the tools to assess that meaning in the light of nature and revelation. But in teaching, we should strive also to avoid what scholar Annemarie Krall has called “monophonic culture,” wherein we find ourselves unable to engage our students as persons, so as to bring them and ourselves closer to the truth. She writes,
“Truth comes to us by way of struggle through our own limitations, various and changing perceptions, as well as the contrasting opinions of others. As human beings, part of the pilgrimage of coming to the truth is through polyphony . . . listening to the many voices around us and working through them, rejecting some, discarding others that have served their purpose, keeping some close along the way until we reach our final destination—union with God.”
For Catholic education to be polyphonic, it needs not only the wide array of great thinkers, artists, statesmen, and saints contained in the Catholic and Western traditions, but also a conductor to direct the various parts the works of these men and women will play: the teacher. For while Petkas points to the importance of mimesis (imitation) in education, particularly with reference to the formative role of Latin and Greek study, he does not address what St. John Henry Newman, in his fifth Oxford University sermon, called “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth.” Newman knew that the teacher’s personality was important; so, too, did the Italian priest Fr. Luigi Giussani, who in The Risk of Education called the teacher the “point of the tradition,” a “place of the hypothesis,” an “authority (from auctoritas, ‘what makes one grow’),” even writing that “the experience of authority begins within us as the encounter with a person rich in knowledge of reality. This person strikes us as enlightening, and generates in us a sense of novelty, wonder, and respect.” Louise Cowan, likewise, wrote that “the good teacher is on the alert for [the awakening within students of the ‘powers of the mind that enable them to learn’], for the good teacher knows that not the mere mastery of material but understanding is the aim of teaching.” The good Catholic teacher, like St. Paul, is a testament to Christ, urging students to “be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1), such that the mimesis that a good Catholic school should give rise to occurs not only within language study, but within the personal relationship of teacher and student.
For the Catholic teacher knows and will teach his or her students not only to come to the truth intellectually, through a careful examination of the rich polyphony of our tradition, but also how the truth of things corresponds to our heart’s most fundamental desire—to know God—and what consequences the truth has on how we choose to live in the world. As Jason Jewell, director of the Great Books PhD program at Faulkner University, wrote in a response to Petkas, “There is no reason in principle why a sound educational curriculum can’t have both an emphasis on mimesis and an emphasis on understanding of ideas as such.” This is true, precisely because truly human imitation presupposes intentionality and understanding, rather than mere reproduction of another’s actions; this understanding may come developmentally later (Catholic school children are taught when to stand and kneel at Mass perhaps before they understand why each moment in the liturgy warrants such a response) but is necessary for a developed intellectual and spiritual life, which our Lord desires that we have “abundantly” (John 10:10).
So, let me end with a suggestion as we enter Catholic Schools Week: When we consider the need for and the great good that is Catholic education, let us not only remember the curriculum (important as it is), but also the need for great teachers. Such teachers will not simply be those who have secular credentials—especially given how schools of education frequently indoctrinate their students, future teachers, in woke anti-Christian and anti-Western ideology, rather than encouraging them to lead students towards the excellence of virtue. Rather, those leading Catholic schools should seek out teachers who strive for sanctity and excellence, seeking to educate students for citizenship both in the City of God and the earthly city, so that those students may go out and “restore all things in Christ” (Eph. 1:10).