Volume XXXII, No. 2
By David Seibel
Healthy bodies have strong immune systems that recognize and respond to attacks from foreign invaders like parasites and bacteria. The human immune system is involuntary, like breathing when asleep, so a healthy 39-year-old never thinks about the silent army protecting the body from barbaric infections that would wreak havoc. For many years, classical Christian schools have been in a race to see who can come up with the best definition of classical. In Passing the Torch by Dr. Louis Markos, he moves beyond mere definitions to a conscious apologetic in order to strengthen the defensive immune system of K-12 classical Christian schools. Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education reminds the guardians of classical Christian education that the well-intentioned K-12 barbarians are at the gates, and they exist within. These progressive and child-centered modern instincts are friendly, well-intentioned, and likely lie buried unconsciously in your own thinking; Markos awakens classical educators to hidden dogmas regarding the nature of children and conflicts within K-12 education. This book will help public, private, and charter school educators because every educator has to deal with well-intentioned and friendly people who want to massage, tweak, refine, balance, and calibrate the school curriculum, admissions standards, marketing language, teacher training, etc. In this review, I offer an overview, five strong features of Passing the Torch, and one minor qualification before offering a hearty recommendation of Markos’s work.
Overview
Dr. Louis Markos is a professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. He is a frequent conference speaker and author of many books, including The Myth Made Fact, Atheism on Trial, and From Achilles to Christ. The book is split into two parts: part one on the nature of education and part two on the nature of the debate. Part one and part two could easily have been separated and expanded into their own respective books, but bringing them together will actually help unite the philosophically-minded and practically-minded people within a school community.
Markos is the perfect author to write this apologia because he is neither a centrist appeaser nor a contrarian agitator. He embodies the magnanimous spirit of a Christian gentleman in his writing and champions the preservation of the liberal arts in K-12 education (both charter, public, and private). In part one, Markos presents seven contrasts over about 100 pages: liberal arts versus vocational, canonical versus ideological, books versus textbooks, history versus social studies, humanities versus social sciences, and virtues versus values. Markos does far more in this section than present superficial marketing material, but instead clearly draws the distinctions between modern education and the classical tradition.
Markos frames the debate of part two by explaining, “Progressive pragmatic education privileges experience over authority, prefers child-centered classrooms to teacher-centered ones, and dismisses established (ready-made) curricula as flawed, backward-looking, and reactionary” (104). In part two, Dr. Markos helpfully surveys influential voices shaping classical education: Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Dewey, Lewis, Sayers, Mason, Adler, Hirsch, and Postman. In his bibliographical essay, he explains that Gamble’s anthology, The Great Tradition, was a primary text he utilized throughout the book. Passing the Torch also includes a concise bibliographical essay to guide earnest readers through the Classical and Medieval periods, Renaissance and Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern eras. Markos also makes frequent reference to Harvard Professor Werner Jaeger’s book on paideia, which has grown in popularity in recent years. In the final pages, Markos reviews The Black Intellectual Tradition by Parham and Prather to demonstrate that an educational embrace of the Western liberal arts tradition does not negate ethnic identity, nor does it eliminate any real historic suffering due to ethnicity.
Five Strong Features of Passing the Torch
Clear Anthropology that Compares Mason, Sayers, Montessori, and Rousseau
Markos writes, “Though both Sayers and Mason honored the traditional Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian paideia, Mason’s theories factor in a more Romantic, Wordsworthian view of children and nature” (183). Markos illuminates some subtle differences of emphasis that have existed within classical Christian education for some time. He continues, “[Mason] favored a less rigid curriculum that achieved the goals of the trivium in a more organic way that trusted the child’s innate ability for self-education” (186). Markos also draws out Mason’s critiques of Rousseau and Montessori in order to distance Mason from those who did not hold a biblical anthropology. Markos concludes that Sayers is “better adapted to an ordered classroom, while Mason’s lends itself more easily to small groups of children taught in the home.” While some would take issue with that conclusion, Markos has broken new ground in evaluating various authors through the prism of a biblical anthropology. Matthew Bingham’s recent book, A Heart Aflame for God, makes a similar friendly critique of James K.A. Smith’s work by using biblical categories when speaking of formation. In my view, Markos is uniquely qualified to apply the Scriptures to various ancient voices given his pedigree in apologetics. We need more of this so that we do not uncritically cling to one individual in order to define and defend classical methodology and material.
Not Wobbly on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
In a phone call with President Bush in 1990, the English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said, “This is no time to go wobbly.” When it comes to the DEI conversation, Markos never goes wobbly, nor does he ever punch below the belt. Markos writes,
“Does that mean that all the educational initiatives of the last century and a half should be discarded? By no means. America continues to be an immigrant nation, and it is one of the duties of our public schools to welcome those immigrants into the grand American experiment that has been going on for 250 years. If we are to continue, however, we must revive an understanding of and a respect for the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian traditions that gave birth to that experiment.” (206)
Markos remains unapologetically committed to the Western tradition as a professor in one of the most ethnically diverse places in the country. Moreover, Markos is cheerfully inhospitable to the folly of intellectual wokeness that places race and power lenses over all of the great books. He calls out the ideological capture of the humanities in higher education by means of various infections of postmodernism, marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, critical race theory, and queer theory. These modern theories are what emerge when psychology, sociology, and political science replace more traditional disciplines like philosophy, theology, and economics. Unbiblical Books like White Fragility by DiAngelo and Anti-Racist Baby by Kendi breed suspicion, resistance, and strife rather than humility, magnanimity, and unity. Markos’s review of Black Intellectual Tradition at the end reflects his magnanimous approach that does not wobble.
Inhospitable to the Tyranny of Tolerance
In the history of American education, it has been business forces that have reshaped the administration of public schools. One way that this shows up is the utilization of “core values” as a means to shape staff culture. While this is well-intentioned, the unintended consequence is to imply that institutions can individually decide what is true, good, and beautiful in terms of right behavior. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, along with the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, are a more time-tested classical Christian measuring rod. This may seem like definition-mongering to distinguish between values and virtues, but Markos illustrates the implications of departing from virtue and embracing values. He explains that the artificial distinction between gender and sex that has grown out of the sexual revolution is a result of values being fluid and socially constructed. Markos writes that virtues “confront us with an external measure and rule to which we must conform ourselves” (115). This is the same argument that Lewis makes in Abolition of Man and Augustine makes with the ordo amoris. In order for our schools to have strong immune systems against fluctuating standards of approval and outrage, well-defined and joyfully defended virtues rooted in Scripture are the best paideia.
Champion of Christians Reading Virtuous Pagans
On page 134, Markos highlights how Jerome had a startling dream where Christ accused him of being a follower of Cicero more than Christ. I have observed that Jerome’s fear of idolizing academic pursuits is not uncommon among modern evangelicals. With so many K-12 schooling options available, classical Christian parents can easily lose sight of how the classical method and material develop discipline and discernment within their students for a God-glorifying aim. Markos writes, “All things being equal, educated believers bear more fruit than ignorant and slothful ones.” Families need a perpetual vision of greatness, full of noble and courageous heroes put before them in order to elevate them above their ordinary circumstances. Much like Athena in Odyssey posing as Mentor to elevate Telemachus from boyhood to manhood, exposure to a long line of noble heroes elevates students and ultimately points to the flesh and blood incarnate Logos in Jesus Christ. We do not look to any human hero as the ultimate model, but instead look to a noble vision of truth, goodness, and beauty in service to the glory of God.
Hangs onto Sayers’s Trivium
Markos highlights the triple corruption we see in humans after the fall in the Garden of Eden. There is a corruption of language (especially after Babel), mind, and soul. Markos writes,
“In order to restore the corruption of language and bring about eloquence, we must apply the grammar phase of the trivium. To restore the corruption of the mind and thus bring about wisdom, we must follow with the rigorous teaching of logic. To restore the corruption of the soul and thus bring about virtue, we must foster an understanding of theology and of things that cannot be seen to provide the discernment necessary for the rhetoric stage.” (149)
He also highlights the K-12 triple exposure to the stages of world history (Ancient, Medieval, and Modern) in the grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages. While Markos clearly demonstrates that classical Christian education reaches back much further than the 1947 Sayers essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” he clearly affirms the value of her unique interpretation and pedagogical application of the classical trivium.
One Qualification
One possible shortcoming of the book is that Markos did not contrast STEM education with the classical emphasis on math, science, Latin, and logic to teach the quantitative and linguistic skills that students need. While some may say that this is because he emphasizes the ages and stages approach of the Sayers trivium at the expense of the quadrivium, it is more likely that Markos simply focused on what he knew as a humanities professor and author of popular-level books that run a shorter page count. The book does not purport to offer a comprehensive defense, and this omission does not take away from the overall effectiveness of the apologetic in the areas that Markos does cover.
Passing the Torch is a book that should be included in teacher education programs in both colleges and K-12 training programs. In the Classical Movement Sweeping America, Veith and Kern assert that there are three types of classical education: moral and Platonic (Hicks), democratic (Adler), and Christian (Wilson). Markos’s great-souled articulation of classical Christian education draws on the best of each of these three, given the inclusion of a Wilsonian emphasis on Sayers, the attention given to Plato’s Forms, and the chapter devoted to Adler, Hirsch, and Postman. While less polemical in tone than Battle for the American Mind and some of Wilson’s books, Markos presents a lucid defense that will refine our thought and practice. Although it is less comprehensive than The Liberal Arts Tradition and does not include Latin and Greek like Climbing Parnassus, Passing the Torch belongs on the shelf of every serious classical educator.
Featured image by Weichao Deng on Unsplash
