A False Enlightenment

Dr Arbery defends the classical education model of Wyoming Catholic College against the vocational model of most universities today.

From The Imaginative Conservtive

By Glenn Arbery, PhD

Last week, a great friend of ours said that “the moment is good” for Wyoming Catholic College. Since much of higher education no longer sustains traditional wisdom, WCC, which does not take government funding, and which has a rare “A” rating for its curriculum, shines ever more brightly against this Orwellian backdrop—and the classroom is only part of the story. I loved the explanation that a recent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal gave to statistics showing that levels of anxiety have skyrocketed: “God doesn’t exist, climate change soon will extinguish humanity, watch out or you will be canceled for what you say, and everyone on social media has a better life than you.” Witness our students riding horses or backpacking into the wilderness, rafting rapids and climbing sheer cliffs, and you might see the difference between real hope and this contemporary dread.

Nevertheless, the nature of the education that we offer often raises a practical question: whether our students can get good jobs after they graduate. Of course, they can. The question itself is misleading, because it focuses worriedly on an immediate financial return on investment or some illusion of guaranteed job security. There is considerable interest now in schools that offer a basic Catholic liberal arts background for students and also prepare them for certification in a trade—an attempt to mediate the old quarrel between vocationalism and liberal education. WCC has ongoing conversations with these emerging schools, but we remain firmly committed to this education that offers the broadest range of possibilities and the greatest hope for educating our future leaders.

When the famous black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois asked, “Does education pay?” in 1891, he meant a classical education like ours. He thought it paid more handsomely than the trade or industrial training promoted by his rival, Booker T. Washington. Du Bois looked to advantages for black students higher than immediate financial ones. As David Withun, headmaster of a classical academy in Florida, puts it in a recent essay, “Du Bois defended classical liberal education against vocationalism in his own day because he knew that denial of access to liberal education was a denial of access to leadership and full civic equality.”

In fact, denying students a liberal education insures the continuation of a caste system. Making them conversant with the great tradition, on the other hand, gives them an ever-broadening perspective on their own time and place that prepares them for positions of leadership, regardless of their backgrounds. Having read Homer and Plato, Euclid and Apollonius, Livy and Augustine, Aquinas and Dante and Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Hobbes and Descartes, Milton and Darwin and Dostoevsky, each student at WCC is a kind of Odysseus who has seen “the townlands/and learned the minds of many distant men.” Studying the Odyssey with freshmen this semester, I am struck in a new way by a passage that I have read many times. When a vain young Phaiakian taunts the older, travel-worn stranger for not competing in any of their sports, Odysseus (not yet identified as the famous veteran of Troy) responds with a perfect defense of the well-formed mind: “In looks a man may be a shade, a specter, /and yet be master of speech so crowned with beauty/that people gaze at him with pleasure. Courteous, /sure of himself, he can command assemblies,/and when he comes to town, the crowds gather.” As if to substantiate his authority, he then hurls a heavy discus much farther than any of the Phaiakian men.

Du Bois has a passage in The Souls of Black Folk, justly famous, in which he explains how reading the great thinkers opens a communion beyond the present moment and its prevailing prejudice. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas…. I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

Underscoring Du Bois’ point about educational expectations, David Withun shows that “the current practice in most [secondary] schools emphasizes young adult books whose ‘relevance’ is excruciatingly obvious. With simple plots, basic sentence structure, and limited vocabulary, this practice does a grave disservice to today’s young people. It limits their exposure to complex texts and stunts their intellectual growth.” This “presentism” deliberately prevents students from having any imaginative experience of other historical cultures and ways of living. It keeps them “from seeing how the emotions, injustices, and tumults of their own lives are part and parcel of a much bigger human drama.” Such a preparation leads students to dismiss inherited wisdom and even salvation itself as mere modes of power, to be countered by ever-new modes of cancelation and endless attention to the entitled self.

Many educators today have fostered a false enlightenment, a so-called “wokeness,” that actually closes off inquiry and darkens the mind. Perhaps I may be forgiven a paraphrase of what Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “Woe to you, scholars of grievance! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.” Surely a recognition of this spiritual destitution will convince more and more people to look for real alternatives. At Wyoming Catholic College, in all humility, thanks to the wisdom embedded in our curriculum and to the donors who help sustain us, we hold out hope.

We tend to think that our cultural decline is recent, but back in the 1850s, the English poet Matthew Arnold described the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith. Many good things have happened since then, of course (as discussed in Dr. Jim Tonkowich’s current series), and Wyoming Catholic College is certainly one of them. Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.