Andrew J. Zwerneman
In this coming year, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we should all be encouraged that the classical education movement is well positioned to lead a celebration of America’s remarkable achievement. I don’t mean that our schools should hold parades and set off fireworks. There will be plenty of that from other corners, and we should embrace it. Classical academies, however, should lead this coming year from their exceptional strength: we should lead from within. Given what others have done before us over the course of our history, we should resolve to stoke the fire of interior freedom, for freedom is the very purpose of genuine education and the surest foundation of the life of freedom we share in America.
A sense of history
We begin as classical leaders should, with a turn to anthropology: Who are we? Regarding history, Shakespeare’s Warwick says, “There is a history in all men’s lives.”(Henry V) The historian John Lukacs reminds us, we are by nature historical beings and uniquely so among all beings. History, he teaches, has a hold in this world through human memory. As the remembered past, history is what we remember.
Zooming in on America, we find in our history that history itself has played a seminal role in the order of American freedom. Works by Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, and Livy were part of the Revolutionary generation’s regular literary diet, and Plutarch’s Lives prevailed among all forms of history. More recent histories were highly popular too. Between 1770 and 1776, William Molyneaux’s The Cause of Ireland (1698), the story of another people subject to Britain, was so widely read by American readers that three new editions were printed in order to keep up with demand. While Locke and others played crucial roles in shaping the Revolutionary mind, our Founders, in fact, read more history than political theory.
The Revolutionary generation measured their lives by heroes from antiquity, Cato and Cicero among the most notable. Washington came to be known as America’s Cincinnatus, since like the great Roman, twice he answered the call to lead, and twice he willingly stepped down and returned to his farming.
The chief model for America’s new republic was the Roman Republic. The Founders knew all too well, however, that Rome collapsed from within. The loss, they knew, was a matter of forgetfulness, that Romans had neglected their customs, then let them slip away from the heart of their life together. That sober story, among others, convinced the Founders to recognize the necessity of character. They knew that American freedom required republican virtue. They knew that freedom meant more than being out from under tyranny; it was ordered freedom, ordered to what permanently fulfills our nature as humans.
Moving on from the Founding, and particularly at times of crisis, Americans have benefitted from their sense of history.
