Classical Education, Bad Behaviour and Building Character

If the discourse in Australian education is to be believed, our classrooms have never been more inclusive, collaborative, interactive, empowering, and fun. At the same time Australian primary and secondary students have never been as disruptive, aggressive, disengaged, and miserable.

In classroom behaviour Australian students rank thirty-third out of the thirty-seven OECD nations, leading to calls for classroom behaviour to be explicitly taught as an academic subject alongside English, maths, and science. Several longitudinal studies have also reported an increase in anti-social behaviour and violence committed by students against fellow students and staff. The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) comparing similar first-world nations has also shown that Australian students experience the second-highest level of bullying, only ranking behind Latvia. Predictably, this rise in misbehaviour has coincided with the increasing instability of student mental health and school refusal.

Students are not the only ones dealing with violence, false rumours, and emotional abuse, as this rampant misbehaviour has had a withering effect on the teaching profession. Over 70 per cent of Australian teachers are considering leaving the profession, 35 per cent of new teachers leave within five years, and the fast-tracking of ill-prepared university students into classrooms is set to worsen this. Greater salaries may make a small difference to this shortage but consistently the calls from teachers have been for change to the culture. However, more than just a culture change, what is truly needed is a change to the entire philosophy of modern schools.

None of the facts I have listed above are unknown to school leaders, but consistently the proposed solutions have been calls to return to the chaos of open-plan classrooms, to the neglect of whole-language approaches, back to woke ready-made texts, back to glib positivity, harmony days and other celebrations from an ever-expanding secular book of days, back to student-centred learning, back to restorative justice. To many school leaders, these solutions still have the glamour of being progressive and cutting-edge, which might have been understandable two decades ago when they were conceived but not now. The truth is they are ineffective now and were twenty years ago, only serving in the long term to justify the expansion of bureaucracy in schools and exacerbating the problems they were meant to fix.

It is beyond frustrating to be a teacher in today’s schools and watch young lives slip by into mediocrity because you have only been equipped with word-salad fads. There are a number of questions that I ponder each day in the classroom. What is going on with my students in their hearts and minds? Why have Australian schools been so ineffective and, in some cases, why do they seem to exacerbate the issues plaguing our young? Why were schools of the past not as affected by these issues? But the number one question I have been asking is: What has changed in how we educate? Fortunately, I now know that I am not the only teacher asking this question.

For several years across Australia a quiet revolution has been taking place in networks of teachers and parents with a great passion to see the restoration of a genuinely intellectual, moral, and spiritual education for our nation’s young. This movement has come under the umbrella term of “Classical Education”, a movement that originated in the United States in response to a similar increase in violence and disillusionment in their schools due to the same modernistic changes to education we have adopted in Australia.

Despite what associations the term classical might have, it is not an elitist or atavistic throwback to days of yore but rather setting the foundation of our education on treasures old and new. Classical education attends to the whole person by focusing on the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. This is accomplished through the study of great books through mimetic and Socratic instruction, in the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is typically structured around the seven traditional liberal arts with an explicit focus on language through the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and number through the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music as the study of number across time, and astronomy as the study of number across time and space).

Classical education, or a liberal arts education, has produced an extensive list of brilliant individuals. Classical liberal arts helped guide the genius of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Dante, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot; philosophers such as Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hume; scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Agnesi, Pascal, Darwin, and Galileo. It also cultivated the talents of such musicians and composers as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Rachmaninoff and Chopin, and artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Klimt, Matisse and Picasso. That many of these figures could equally be placed in an adjoining category points to the tendency of classical education to create polymaths or at the very least individuals with an expansive view of the cosmos. The sheer diversity of such figures is evidence of classical education’s dynamism.

Classical education uses tried-and-true methods that serve students as whole persons in contrast to the current schizophrenic treatment of students which alternates between viewing them as economic units and as angelic beings untarnished by civilisation. The US has seen a huge growth of classical K-12 schools: in 2010 there were 100 in operation and now there are over 1000 with further growth expected. Australia looks poised to follow this rapid growth, with conferences and forums being hosted across the country by Campion College, Australia’s first liberal arts tertiary college, and the Australian Classical Education Society. A classical education forum is hosted by Dr Kevin Donnelly every spring at ACU Brisbane. Far from being gatherings for empty talk and kvetching about the state of the modern world, these parent and teacher networks have resulted in the opening of two new classical schools in Brisbane, St John Henry Newman College and St John of Kronstadt Academy. And recently St Philip’s School in Melbourne has also proposed a shift to a classical model.

What is the classical difference concerning student behaviour? In the first place, there is a difference in how the concept of misbehaviour is treated from a classical education point of view. In our current system, misbehaviour tends to be seen from a utilitarian point of view as an inconveniently human part of our student, to be addressed by ad hoc interventions which do not interrupt the essential assembly line. In contrast, in classical education discipline and good behaviour are achieved not only in ad hoc measures when required but are attended through the very spirit of the classroom in content and pedagogy that are grounded in authority and taught with authority.

Australia has been classified as a “low power distance” nation, meaning that hierarchy holds less importance for the average citizen than in a “high power distance” nation. The Australian tendency to question powers-that-be is not something in contention here; what does need to change is the low regard for authority in our schools. The terms authority and power are often used interchangeably, but as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued, this is the result of Enlightenment thinkers acting excessively in their defamation of all authority as merely a pretence for abusing power. Before the Enlightenment, the classical understanding was that power is part of authority but, by necessity, all true authority is freely recognised and given. Hence true authority has little to do with its corruption, authoritarianism.

The ghost of the tyrant haunts the modern teacher. In an effort to fly as far as possible from the justifiably detested authoritarianism of the post-industrial classroom, ruled by fear and modelled on the factory, modern teachers have dashed to the other end of the spectrum and abandoned discipline altogether. Here they have thrown themselves to the supposed perfect innocence of children to rescue them from the burden of authority. In its most distilled form this movement is called student-centred learning (discussed by Raymond Burns in the May edition of Quadrant). Rather than bring about a blissful utopia this movement has generated an epidemic of misbehaviour that we seem unable to fix. But can we act surprised that our students are misbehaving to an extreme degree when we refuse to lay down rules of discipline or promote the authority of their teacher and the value of their education? How can a teacher expect her students to respect her authority as a teacher when she is constantly presenting herself as a friend, a collaborator, or a personal growth consultant? When students misbehave they do not recognise the authority of someone guiding them away from their excesses, they have not been habituated into recognising a teacher as someone greater, not merely in institutional power, but greater in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. For them, the teacher is a friend to joke around with when everything in the class is progressing as they like it, but a tyrant the moment the teacher is an obstacle to their whims. It is only logical. And teachers are under far more stress when subconsciously viewing their students as pseudo-equals. After all, who is easier to forgive and maintain patience around: a child or a rude and incompetent colleague?

Our hypocrisy in bemoaning this behaviour crisis has been best summarised by C.S. Lewis’s treatise on education, The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Like a hanger-on friend who is irritating but tolerated because they have the latest video games, most students also tolerate the buddy-teacher because they are a gatekeeper of grades, or give a student a sense of self-importance. In this arrangement, where the teacher has become the pet, affection is occasionally given by students but never respect.

The problem is compounded by parents who act like their child’s friends rather than a father or mother with natural authority. Such parents often demand that teachers also become the friend of their child. Likewise, other teachers can exacerbate the issue. In schools with a strong attachment to student-centred learning certain teachers can develop Stockholm syndrome, acting excessively lax with students but then overcompensating by exercising excessive force over teachers trying to reassert the traditional hierarchy.

Attempts to redress disrespect in schools after an incident are also sabotaged by the student-centred orientation. This has been demonstrated clearly by the “restorative justice” practices which most Australian schools fail to implement properly. Restorative justice seeks to replace the traditional punitive discipline approach with its top-down structure with a “community-owned” practice which stresses that everybody gets a voice—hence its popularity in our student-centred paradigm. Yet at its core is an inaccurate romantic philosophy, descending from Jean-Jacques Rousseau by way of John Dewey, that children are intrinsically innocent and students only misbehave because they either do not understand the situation or have been mismanaged by their teachers. “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man,” asserted Rousseau in his educational treatise, Emile. In many instances, it has allowed school leaders to avoid taking responsibility for our spiralling discipline crisis by blaming student misbehaviour on teacher failure. To a degree this is correct, because a share of authority does need to rest in the teacher, however since student-centred learning is pushed incessantly in modern teacher training and professional development this is yet another case of “bidding the geldings to be fruitful”.

The irony is that the ground for true friendship between student and teacher lies in the embrace of authority, not in its rejection. In classical education this is accomplished by the teacher taking on the responsibility of a master and the student taking on the humility and eagerness of a disciple. Teachers may also be “mediators” and “facilitators” in specific moments of a pedagogic sequence, such as a Socratic dialogue, but ultimately they must set themselves up for the office of teacher as fitting persons for students to emulate in both their academic and moral standing. In classical education, the school is constructed around this authority, which takes its legitimacy not from power proved in punitive measures but in the virtues its teachers embody and extol to their pupils.

This virtue is held not as a social construct to be performed in an arbitrary game but as essential to human nature, and ultimately as divine. As David V. Hicks writes in his seminal book on classical education, Norms and Nobility (1999):

 

Classical education challenges both teacher and pupil: the one to justify his superior wisdom and intellectual skills; the other to win his teacher’s praise by matching his performance … [In this] the pupil becomes part of his teacher’s own pursuit and study, making him more than an observer—an assistant and participant in the ongoing inquiry.

The reverse occurs in the modern classroom, where the personal element is measured by admin and parent according to the teacher’s understanding of the student’s mind and their whims—while the students themselves are not interested in understanding their buddy-teacher or their academic pursuit.

None of this is to suggest changing our student-centred education to a purely teacher-centred one. Rather it is centring the classroom on the actual objects of learning, wisdom and virtue. And the pursuit of wisdom and virtue should carry an authority superior to both teacher and student, thus uniting them in a common goal. This means the curriculum is essential. It is no coincidence that the behaviour crisis in Australia has coincided with a curriculum lacking in authority which does not inspire respect or serve to cultivate wisdom and virtue. Most of our curriculum designers subscribe to a modernistic disregard for our traditions and, as Chesterton described, “a submission to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”. This is epitomised in the decline of classic literature in the classroom in favour of inferior contemporary texts that pander to student whims. These texts fail for the same reason that the buddy-teacher fails; as with eating candy, there is a momentary excitement which dissipates as quickly as it arrives, leaving a hunger for something more substantial, which over time turns to resentment and disillusion. Attempts are inevitably made to give more depth by taking equally shallow but initially exciting ideas from the realm of political activism, particularly those issues that inspire the most excitement, anger, and fanaticism. Thus, through a natural evolution, the child who regards themselves as the centre of the classroom becomes also the centre of the world. With the world as a footstool, the student soon becomes bored with the universe and loses their natural curiosity for anything that doesn’t immediately deliver excitement and distraction.

Merely restoring classical texts to a syllabus will not automatically bring reverence back into the classroom. When Shakespeare is studied in a school governed by modern pedagogy there may be a few bright sparks that go on to love Shakespeare, but this is either a phenomenon that is independent of the general class, or the result of a beloved teacher who teaches in a manner independent of progressive pedagogy. But what is happening in these exceptional instances? First, it is worth asserting that not all classical teaching is occurring under the banner of classical education; the necessity of neologism has only arisen because of the severe divergence taken by modern education from the perennial and successful principles that are unique to Western civilisation.

In the history of Western education this has manifested in a common pursuit of the transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful on which the normative essence to education pivots. As it stands, most students in Australia are restricted to studying analytically while neglecting the normative dimension. Rather than studying Shakespeare or Dante and making a serious inquiry into what it means to live a good life, we take our students into a desert empty of any moral or aesthetic nourishment. In this sophistical desert, all ideas are relative and none deserving of any wholehearted allegiance—it is a wasteland that many of our young emerged from with impoverished souls. As Hicks writes:

The old books, when not burnt out in an arid analysis, will not suffer the student to close his eyes to the author’s normative concerns. The normative concerns of the old books run against the spirit of our present age, not a terrible spirit, but a lost and pathetic one, imagining its greatest freedom to lie in the anxieties of a moral vacuum.

In practice, this normative approach in the classical classroom takes the trivium as its guide. The trivium consists of three modes of learning: grammar (the foundational truth or the “what” of the topic at hand), logic (the working through the “what” towards the “how” and the “why”) and finally rhetoric (the art of eloquence and presentation of the truth). In the study of a single topic, a student might pass through all three of these modes in a week or in a single lesson, though the progression of grammar through to rhetoric is always followed.

In this manner, a student could familiarise themselves with the story and background information surrounding “The Union Buries its Dead” by Lawson, being sure to memorise moments and crucial turns of phrase. They would then be provided with prompts but then go on to set out upon their own inquiries, in dialogue with the text and not in an unrelenting dissection which breeds a false superiority. Finally, they would deliver a presentation on one of these questions, for instance, “What aspects of human dignity does Lawson’s story reveal or purposefully obscure? Answer with reference to another text or historical era you have studied.” A question such as this is normative, intertextual, and integrative with other subject areas. A student’s presentation would be supported by past structured practice in exercises such as the progymnasmata and by the canons of rhetoric. Through this the personality and voice of the student are honed by truth and rigour without being overly conformed to an arbitrary format, such as we find in the overdone five-paragraph essays of modern English classrooms.

Much in the same way that Rousseau’s romantic anthropology has not managed to abolish authority from classrooms but merely reversed its hierarchy and elevated the student, progressive pedagogy similarly reverses the sequence of the trivium and elevates falsehoods. The modern classroom begins at the wrong end with rhetoric, but this is a rhetoric not built upon grammar and logic (that is, truth and rigour). A topic or text is chosen either by the unexamined appetites of students or out of the ether of equally unrefined public rhetoric, for instance out of pop-culture or activist politics. The modern educator then assists students in the logic stage, not in working through real ideas in rigour but in equivocating justifications of points they have decided on in advance. Finally, an inverted grammar stage consists in nothing but the crowning of a false truth. Here we can point to the progressive world’s lack of coherence across its atomised principles, where feminism is crucially important but womanhood cannot be reliably defined, where experiencing subjective pleasure is the chief purpose of life but also where a fanatical and collectivist commitment to inconsistent ethical causes is non-negotiable. The outcome of this brand of education is a conflicted soul and a stunted worldview.

“You have your truth and I have mine” is the fashion of the day and seems egalitarian at a glance. However, when life inevitably demands a fundamental position be taken, the choice between your truth and mine suddenly has no objective standard to measure it against and merely comes down to force. In a world where might makes right, a bully will only ever see a teacher correcting them as the more powerful bully. For this reason it was entirely predictable that restorative justice practices would fail in most schools. Even restorative justice experts like Professor Linda Graham, director of the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Inclusive Education, admit that “restorative justice” has never truly been about justice but merely “restoring the peace”. But what is this peace dreamed of by progressive educators? Perhaps it is the same kind of coerced and superficial peace that Christ asserted He was not bringing, instead stating he was bringing a sword to split truth from falsehood, and the righteous from the wicked.

It is precisely this sword that has been dulled by the removal of the normative from our schools. Instead of a sense of true justice, we have management theory dulling our students and band-aid fixes applied to symptoms as they arise while the disease remains untreated. The common characteristic of these band-aid fixes is their reactive and shallow nature. Students will occasionally be brought aside and told not to bully and to be nice to each other, to respect their teachers, to be safe online, to not abuse drugs and alcohol, to not develop eating disorders or self-harm. These sessions come around about four times a year at least and last an hour or two. Then students will return to class, where they will spend a semester analysing A Christmas Carol without once being seriously asked if being selfish has ever closed them off from the people they love; they will spend a year studying the history of violent revolutions without ever reflecting deeply on the notion of justice. While progressive parents and teachers still hold on to the vestiges of a fading Christendom, pathetically requesting niceness, their wards have taken the next logical step. Not only are religion and the family mere social constructs, as their parents’ generation has concluded, but so too are all the common virtues and truth itself. As such they are more than cynically aware that the reactive, ad hoc wellbeing classes only aim to keep them docile enough to get through their thirteen years without disrupting the system.

In the end, we can bemoan the behaviour crisis plaguing our schools for as long as we like but we will never be in a position to fix things until our schools adopt a truly human education, such as that found in classical education. Our young will never find the inspiration to become self-governing virtuous people while they are given a distorting mirror in which they are atomised into a collection of matter, sapped of free will and made to believe that their class or identity marker cements them as either a guilt-ridden oppressor or a hapless victim forever.

The greatest thing I can say about classical education is that it is not an easy fix, as so many educational fads promise to be, namely because it is not a form of coercive management but instead risks all upon the human person in all their glory and depravity. Perhaps this is a risk some would hesitate to take, but for me the choice is clear. The only alternative is to go on hopelessly, as T.S. Eliot wrote, dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Conor Ross is a Melbourne-based secondary school teacher. Parents and educators interested in learning more on this subject should look into the Australian Classical Education Society, Classical Conversations, Via Classica, and the CiRCE Institute.