In With the Old: Valuing the Classics

With my oldest group of students in the latter half of their junior year, I am reminded of my own experience reaching the last stages of high school education and preparing for the steps beyond with what felt like endless applications, standardized tests, and admissions essays. As I began looking at colleges and comparing their relative merits, I was struck by how one particular claim appeared over and over in their promotional materials. Nearly every school advertisement I received touted their organization’s “innovation” as one of its top achievements. Some even claimed to have been rated “top innovators” or the “most innovative college” in their region. Innovation appeared as a selling point more frequently than grade averages, student to teacher ratios, or post-graduation employment statistics, to say nothing of the school’s values or the virtues of its students. Innovation seemed to be the ultimate object of higher education. Eventually, this trend started to rub me the wrong way.

There is a logical fallacy known as “chronological snobbery” wherein we assume that new is better than old, or old than new, on account of its oldness or newness. Age alone does not determine value. The old, however, does have the advantage of having stood the test of time. The ancient classical works and the writings of early church fathers that still exist today have lasted for two millennia because the scholars of the past saw fit to preserve them on account of some merit they saw in them. These works have shaped human thought for hundreds of years. 

In fact, Lewis advises readers to read as many old books as new ones, not because they are inherently better, but because they do not make the common assumptions and thus commit the common errors of our own time. He writes,

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

The antidote to chronological snobbery, Lewis suggests, is to acknowledge in humility that the writers of the past, though not free from error, may well be free from our errors, and that is precisely why we ought to read them.

In classical education, we read the classics for these reasons. Our educational model is based on one that was used for centuries because it proved effective. Of course it is wise to try new things to see if they work better than what we’re already doing, and we naturally do this in our own lives all the time. Both as educators and as people, we have never fully arrived but are always continuing to learn. But we also believe that an institute of education should be focused on teaching students in the best way we know how to teach, not on always trying new things for the sake of doing something new and hoping it works out. When we choose how to teach, we do not choose in a vacuum—our content and pedagogy have real and tangible consequences for our students’ formation as they pass into adulthood. So should our number one priority be innovation, or cultivating virtue? Experimentation, or raising more informed people? Creating adults who are different from their predecessors, or adults who are better equipped to live full lives as citizens of a free society? 

It shows the arrogance of modern man that we believe the most valuable things are new things, and that they are valuable because they are new. Because we invented them ourselves. Because we didn’t have to borrow them from the people of the past. Old books, old methods, and old ideas are not more worthwhile by virtue of their being old. But when a school makes “innovation” their primary selling point, they suggest that it is their primary value. They suggest that new is better, and they assume that people seeking an education believe the same.

People seeking an education should endeavor to be the best that they can be no matter the method, always seeking to become not only more knowledgeable and capable but also more virtuous, with a greater love for God and their fellow man. Here at Pinnacle, we believe that letting great thinkers of the past instruct us will help us towards that end.


Laurel McLaughlin
Upper School Teacher

Next
Next

Artificial Intelligence in Education