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Mankind has used levers, pullies, and gears for millennia to move large masses with little effort. Despite the cheap and easy access to these tools, coaches today have no difficulty getting athletes to spend hours in the gym lifting weights without their help. “No pain, no gain” is demonstrably true in sports. Those who believe otherwise fail.
Artificial Intelligence cheats us, and especially our children, with the promise that our intellectual development will be enhanced when it does the heavy lifting for us. Less obviously, digital technology pushes us to misunderstand education simply as the transfer of information, not, as Plato argued, “a turning around of the whole soul.” Our students’ willingness to swallow these lies stems from the failure of teachers in the humanities to demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books. Worse, the dominant approaches to teaching in these fields conspire to hide and even deny this power. The classical academy movement was born in response to a catastrophe in liberal education that has been long in the making.
When Frederick Douglass discovered that his master wished him to remain illiterate, he devoted all his energies to learning how to read. He somehow knew that books and writing could be the means of his liberation. I left an elite liberal arts college last fall to teach at a classical academy when I found that students there could no longer read his Narrative, or any other difficult book, and that my institution would punish those who tried to remedy this defect. An article written by Rose Horowitch for the Atlantic confirmed my conclusion. Andrew Delbanco at Columbia no longer teaches Moby Dick. Victoria Kahn at Berkeley has been reduced to assigning short selections from the Iliad. Students can no longer attend to details or keep track of the overall plot. Sonnets prove too long to sustain their attention. These high-scoring test takers are increasingly beyond the help of remedial efforts. Reports from the front can no longer be ignored.
An immediate cause of our failure has been the turn to the “student-centered classroom.” Its advocates aim to “empower” students, to give them “agency” by having them decide on the topics and activities that interest them and then allow them to set their own goals and measures of achievement. Self-evaluation takes the place of grades. “Let a thousand blossoms bloom.”
This is a noble, if rarely achieved, aim for advanced graduate students. Elementary, high school, and even undergraduate students do not have the requisite information or strength to be left to themselves. Doing so isolates them in their own narrow interests and limited experiences, cutting them off from a broader understanding of the world and themselves. The clearest sign of this is their stunted vocabulary. We cannot think without language. With limited words come limited thoughts. In these student-centered silos, there are no communities of learning. Picture a child gazing at a Chromebook supplied by Google and attached to the internet. Scrolling alone. With earbuds.
The classical academy movement returns the written word to its place of honor. We stress grammar, logic, rhetoric, and often Latin. At my own school, Emet Classical Academy, Hebrew takes pride of place, but with the same intention of increasing our appreciation for language by stepping outside our native tongue. And because the student is the center of our concern, at the center of the classroom is the book.
Picture instead a room of 9th graders all reading the same work, focused on understanding an author who is almost certainly their intellectual and moral superior. We don’t study the Iliad to learn what “Greeks” thought about this or that, as if its author were a typical representative of the kind. We are eager to learn as much as we can about Homer because we want to learn from Homer. Most of the evidence is in his books. The poem opens with the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles over command of the army. Who is right? Which side does Homer take? What is the standard of his judgment? There is only one rule: students must base their claims on evidence taken from the text, not on their personal opinions or feelings. “I think” takes the place of “I feel,” and leaves itself open to rebuttal.
To master a text, readers must first become its slave, abandon their own views to adopt those of the author. Humility in the service of pride. This approach allows students to gain some distance from and thus perspective on themselves. The task isn’t easy. The self-criticism required to acknowledge our betters is not always or initially pleasant. And a good author’s intentions are not always clear, often intentionally so. This is a good thing. Passages must then be marshaled against each other and competing claims evaluated. Arguments break out. Discussion ensues. Here is a community of learning. Just as important, it is also a group of potential friends united not by a common opinion but by a common struggle and the common good of understanding, as well as by the pleasure of liberation from their unexamined and often incoherent prejudices. Laughter, most often but not only at ourselves, is a constant companion. Conversations, not chats, continue outside the classroom. Not always. But they happen.
Classical academies work best when students enroll early. The founders of Emet had planned to begin with just fifth and six grade, but opened the school to ninth graders in response to Oct. 7. This posed a problem. Like the students at Columbia and Berkeley, ours too struggled with the rigor of the classical curriculum. I insisted on reading the Iliad in its entirety as is done in other classical academies. Those who had never read a book before simply could not do it. Some turned to AI for shallow, easy to digest summaries that further hindered access to the book. It produced for them even shallower essays with no effort and less gain. AI may sometimes prove a useful tool for those who can already read and write. But the effect on the young is to prevent or stunt their growth, to short-circuit the development of their potential. Our principal suspended these students for their own good. But everyone, even those doing their own work, was unhappy. Parents complained. Administrators asked that I do something more “fun.”
I persisted. We went much more slowly, and, in doing so, I discovered that with patience (and frequent quizzes) those who had somehow acquired a taste for reading, even if they had consumed nothing but drek, could be converted to more substantive fare. A break-through came when someone noticed that Homer calls Agamemnon a fool for trusting in a dream sent by Zeus that lures him into a defeat with the false promise of a victory. “Does Homer think it’s better not to trust the gods?” Another student pushed further down this path. She saw that Agamemnon’s own foolish efforts to implement Zeus’ plan threatened to ruin it altogether. “What kind of fool picks a fool to carry out his will? Does Homer think that Zeus is a fool?” This got their attention. From here it was not hard for them to see that Homer also had some pointed criticisms of his apparent hero, Achilles, who likewise puts his faith in Zeus. They wondered: What kind of author can provoke them to think by not directly telling them what to think? Are there other books written like this? Good questions. But not for ChatGPT.
On the last day we spent with Homer, everyone felt a sense of accomplishment at having completed a difficult task. For some, this was now tinged with the sadness of parting from an old friend, even if one that they had originally disliked. Three months later, these same students recalled that experience. When they learned our curriculum took on only half of Virgil’s Aeneid, they turned my arguments for Homer against me and insisted we read the whole thing. They were up for a challenge. But more important, they now feared to miss the opportunity of making a new friend. I had no choice but to comply.
My favorite class occurred the day a broken tooth sent me to a dentist chair. In my absence, a colleague delivered a topic to discuss then left the room to teach her own: “Why does Socrates misquote Homer in the Apology?” The students tackled the question on their own and two hours later produced, unbidden, a hand-written record of their deliberations and conclusions. They did so not for credit, and they received none. But they were proud of what they had done on their own. They enjoyed the exercise of their new strength. One later told me that nothing like this would have happened at the beginning of the year without a teacher in the room. Or, perhaps, they now had had the experience that with a good book in their hands, the teacher is never absent. It never leaves them alone.
What I have described here might remind some of a college liberal arts course from the 1980’s or earlier. Fair enough. The classical academy movement has simply rediscovered what earlier ages knew and practiced: such courses can profitably be taught to fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. Today, however, students must take these classes in high school. Most universities will not, no, they cannot, provide them. Covid did real damage to the education of our children. Phones make everything worse. But the “mind virus” antedates both the respiratory one and the explosion of social media. The roots of our distaste for books, our inability to see their use for self-liberation and empowerment, lie more in the unintended consequences and contradictions in contemporary educational theories and ideology. Teachers, not AI, are most often the vector of infection.
Multiculturalism has been a path to greater self-understanding at least since the time of Homer. His wily and multifaceted Odysseus became that way by traveling and studying the ways and minds of men in many cities. Herodotus perfected the approach. From two eyes come one vision, but with depth. Yet when we graft multiculturalism to the view that all cultures are equally worthy of respect, a presupposition of our own culture’s egalitarian relativism, we deprive students of the most powerful motive for their study: the hope of discovering ways better than their own. The hallmark of so-called “Western civilization” was once its relatively greater openness to and distinctive interest in other ways of life, to say nothing of its own internal diversity. Today, we still, like Plato, teach students that their culture is a kind of cave. But, unlike Plato, we now insist there is no escape. If there is no place left to go, who you are and where you are from, your unchosen racial, gender or class identify, becomes infinitely more important than where you are going. When “cultural appropriation” becomes taboo, so too does genuine engagement with other people. “Stay in your own lane.” Multiculturalism becomes monolithic. Binocular vision succumbs to the flattening gaze of the one-eyed Cyclops.
Conversely, too great a stress on openness and a wish to avoid conflict have also taken their toll. The lively discussion and sorting out of contradictory views is discouraged in elementary and high schools as impossible, and, worse, likely to injure someone’s feelings. The habit of arguing falls into disuse. Students are miserable at it, not for want of intelligence, but from lack of practice. The inability to argue makes them distrustful of reason. This distrust turns into a belief that reason gives no guidance at all on any important questions. Our principle of equality assures them that everyone else is in the same boat. Contentious issues can therefore be determined only by authority. But whose?
The “sovereignty of lived experience” fills the vacuum. A writer’s ethnic identity, gender, or personal history can be important and compelling considerations for understanding any work. But when they trump all others, and when a writer’s claims cannot be challenged or questioned by those who do not share the proper traits, the effect is to create an authority beyond dispute. Learning ends when we believe that without direct experience we can never really understand, as if thoughtful reflection on what others say were itself not the most important or authoritative experience. When we must simply accept and respect what we are told, all books become predictable and boring. These doctrines dig for us a cave beneath the cave, turning every author into a potential tyrant, a master who cannot himself be mastered. No one can blame students for fleeing such chains, or for turning to AI to lighten the burden. Yet this effort to escape only deepens their enslavement. Machines can liberate us from toil, but not from ourselves. That’s what books are for.
The best way to stop a thief is to demonstrate that what he most desires cannot be stolen. To experience the expansive and liberating power of books, we must read them not by ourselves, but for ourselves, with humility, care, and, ultimately, defiance. The process, like lifting weights, is painful, especially at first. Developing this capacity is the task that classical academies have set for themselves.
AI and the digital information it feeds on will not go away. Nor should we wish them gone. But if you want your children to avoid being enervated by them, to avoid falling into a state of unredeemable dependence, you must provide them with experiences that support and vindicate the claims of genuine intellectual effort. Read to them when small. Encourage foreign language study. And start them in a classical academy as soon as possible. Set them to heavy lifting, one page at a time.
Chris Nadon (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago) writes on the character and history of republican government understood as self-rule in authors such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Sarpi, Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, and Lincoln. He has taught political philosophy and Humanities at Emet Classical Academy, Claremont-McKenna College, Trinity College, and Kiev-Mohyla Academy. He is a visiting professor at UATX.
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