A revolution due, and well past due.
It took the post-war prosperity and a culture of pleasure to finally throw off the verities of Western Civilization, and in that process the throwing away of education in real things in favor of notional things that would serve a progressive agenda. The liberal arts were repurposed to a radical form of groupthink, a new anti-liberalism in education. At its best in the last fifty years, higher education serves only Mammon, getting the graduate good connections and high-paying careers. Thus the liberal arts became servile arts.
When the liberal arts seemed destined for shipwreck, three men stood up and decided to do something radical at a state university. They decided to engage in an Experiment in Tradition.
These three men were John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick, and their experiment was the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas. This writer was a student in this program in the seventies in Kansas. It started small. But I have seen it grow into an international educational movement, with many colleges, primary schools, and curricula based on the educational philosophy of John Senior and the practice of the IHP.
Their revolution was to expose students to real things, to delight in memorizing poetry, song, stargazing, observation of nature, and the great books. This brought out a dormant sense of awe and wonder in students. This was the necessary ingredient to philosophy and all true education, according to Plato and Aristotle, and to Newman.
Students were not taught to dissect the great and good books of Western culture, but instead to understand them, to be receptive to ancient wisdom – in the sense of really seeing as Joseph Pieper explains in Leisure: the Basis of Culture. The emphasis was not on mastery over the world, but on loving the works.
In the IHP students learned that truth was knowable, in nature, great books, poetry, great art, and science. This sort of education allows for experiential or connatural learning, focused on internalizing what is studied, attuned to the senses as well as the intellect. Students came to realize they had been indoctrinated in ignorance of real education, and the IHP provided a remedy. In fact, John Senior said what they were doing was remedial, since students lacked the necessary preparation for a traditional classical education.
Other professors and administrators were threatened by this highly successful program. It had to be suppressed. You just couldn’t allow students to run around talking about truth as if it could be known. It was the beginning of what we now know as political correctness, the liberal orthodoxy that admitted of only one direction – “progress” away from the West and the jettisoning of our Judeo-Christian patrimony.
The university held hearings, parading students to testify about Jewish conversions, attitudes about women that were too traditional, education that was too retrograde, not open to new ideas. In short, after nearly ten years of success, this program had to be done in, because it was too “controversial.” The radicalism of the sixties was not too controversial, nor was sexual experimentation, nor the embrace of every odd philosophy and cult. But a return to our roots, or at least an exploration of what was good or potentially worth knowing in Western Culture – that was revolutionary. The experiment in tradition had to be killed, as it were, death by administration.
But as with all excellent ideas, it is harder to kill them than you might think. The great revenge of IHP is that this experiment in the liberal arts bore great fruit, and it continues to bear fruit in numerous vocations to marriage and large families, in two American bishops and numerous monks and nuns, in a monastery in Oklahoma where vocations are exploding, in the founding of a college based on the great books in the great outdoors, and in the many other returns to sanity based on their pedagogical experiment.
Many have retreated in the face of cancel culture on campuses. But it is not a time for retreat. It is a time to re-engage, to start a new revolution of the liberal arts, the kind Newman had in mind, one program at a time, one school at a time, one repurposed curriculum at a time, at the primary level, and in colleges or universities that seem moribund and incapable of a return to education in real things.
We’ve discussed many times around these here parts the essential first step of reclaiming the academy from the iron clutches of the Left gargoyles who have, to our enormous cost, so effectively usurped it, if we seriously hope to reclaim our country over the longer term. It is heartening indeed to learn of a successful campaign aimed at doing precisely that. Even so, Porretto sounds something of a somber, cautionary note.
Too many are talking about rebellion as if it were exclusively a political act. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebellion may end in arms, but it begins in the mind…
The cited column ends on a hopeful note, but be warned: hope looks not to the present but the future, and the future is not fixed in shape. The mental rebellion kindled by those three daring educators – real educators this time, in contrast to the sort that usually parade the title – might have left seeds, if not at the University of Kansas, then perhaps elsewhere, that will germinate yet.
We can but hope. Regardless, hats off to Senior, Quinn, and Nelick for their most noble effort.
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They are neither liberal nor arts now.
No, they are not.
It’s possible to get a good education through the public schools and universities, at least in this area. That requires full time diligence of the parents to slap down the BS they come home with and an insistence they take the advanced thinking courses. In middle and high school you have to keep them in math, physics, chemistry, and biology. Those are harder to screw up by left wingers. But as soon as you get a bad one you have to change their schedule and get a different teacher or different class. Same thing applies to the university. I’m not sure how to deal with the elementary system anymore, it was too long ago and my 4 went through that without issue. With one exception, my wife was there every day volunteering in something, usually helping students learn to read. Parents at school change the equation. Which is one reason they want both parents working…
That will not work for every kid obviously. I don’t know what other methods will work and stay public.
Agreed. I talked with my eldest every day and luckily he was at a conservative private school in Hong Kong for a while. So Woke is like Vampirism for him. He avoids it studiously and kept me up to date. We have to spend a lot of time with the younger one on schoolwork. So far, Middle School was more Woke than High School. But it’s early yet.
Around here the privates are as bad, maybe worse than the public’s IMO. Those that can mange a home school system probably do well, but that’s a full time job plus another half.
Just lucky, but at $20k a year, we were not going to afford K-12 for two kids anyway…
My dad offered to split the private with me. With 4 kids and the cost here that’s a lot of $$$. The problem is, IMO, that I would have had to move to a place with what I considered a decent private school. My favorite is where my Dad lives. But that was a long time ago and I have no clue what it is now. I can send kids to UNC for less than the private schools.