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Make Education Roman Again

Ryan Hammill | Pavlos Papadopoulos

Today’s universities are increasingly self-destructive, hell-bent not only on deconstructing the Western canon in the classroom but on dissolving the American nation itself. Conservative reformers can’t be satisfied with turning the clock back to the 2010s—or even the 1950s. The classical education tradition that formed the American Founders was repudiated long ago. But there is hope that it can be restored and, with it, our constitutional republic.

As we argue in a new report, progressive schools and the administrative state have worked in tandem since the Progressive Era to remake America. Progressive educational reformers followed the playbook put together by their originator, John Dewey, who hoped to detach education from the past to form subjects suited for bureaucratic rule.

Americans are now awakening to the radicalism of both projects and are pushing back against administrative conquest in politics while reviving (non-Progressive) classical education in schools.

Both the Founders and the progressives recognized the political and civilizational stakes of education. They agreed that certain kinds of schooling prepare students to be citizens of a republic while others incline them to be members of a centralized state ruled by expert administrators; they disagreed on which goal was desirable and, thus, which educational scheme should be preferred.

The local, classical education that characterized early America, that formed most of the American Founders, and that many Founders prescribed for the new nation reinforced the principles of a free federal republic.

Classical colleges taught Americans that human nature was fixed and purposive; that human........

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