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“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Such are the profound words of Jesus as told by the Apostle Matthew (NIV 16:26). At least one educator in the country believes that’s precisely the problem with education today, and he’s championing that message via the small private school he founded and runs in northern Westchester County, New York.
Joseph Pagnozzi, founder and president of The Montfort Academy, has been an educator for thirty-eight years. His school is a Catholic one, teaching boys and girls of the high school grades 9-12. But although students at Montfort attend masses and study theology, Professor Pagnozzi’s school is unlike most Catholic schools, not to mention most public and private schools these days, in a significant way. Their method of instruction is known as Classical Christian Education, and centers around the Trivium, a teaching methodology dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
This stands in stark contrast to the design of much of today’s school system infrastructure, which moved away from the Trivium largely through the efforts of John Dewey in the 1930’s. Dewey’s imprint on American education institutions lives on through today. Pagnozzi’s convinced that’s a mistake. I sat down with him recently and had a fascinating talk. What follows are excerpts from a lengthy conversation, with all italics being Pagnozzi’s words except where noted.
We began discussing what became known as a “classical liberal” education, and the history thereof:
Two events in the history of civilization, of mankind, happened. The formation of city-states in ancient Sumer, Sumeria, Mesopotamia, that instead of being hunter-gatherers we came to be an organized structural society and that developed over generations, a culture. And the purpose of civility is, how do we get along decently with each other, for the benefits of all of us, in that community? How do we protect against those that want to take things that we worked hard for? How do we want to promote civility, good works, that keep the well-being of all of us?
So, culture, comes about. We’re talking about 8,000 years ago. Now, the formulation of that, the challenge of how you continue that culture, how it permeates, how you send it off to other generations, is the beginning of education.
We spoke further about the need for writing, to document a speaker’s thoughts in a way that overcome a listener’s otherwise limited memory.
But what was its [education’s] purpose? Its purpose was that so this inheritance is continued, of civil society, and all the culture that that entails. So now we have to teach the writing, but it’s not for the “writing”, per se. It’s not to teach that. It’s for the ultimate purpose that they (the learner) know what civility is. Because the outsiders were still barbarians, “at the gates”, wanting to take this over. They weren’t educated yet (and the word ‘education’ in the Romance languages means to be mannerly), they didn’t understand this, they didn’t have this. To them it was just survival of the fittest, living day to day, whatever you can get.
In Western Civilization, the height of these “city states” became the empires of the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, as Pagnozzi continues,
The key to perpetuating this good stuff, was, why even bother? Why not just live day to day, why continue to educate? You educate the truth. And what is truth? Is truth in the emperor, is it in the king, is it in the tribal leaders, the head of the city state? Where is this truth, because you wouldn’t want to teach falsehoods. So the culture – the ultimate goal of the education was to perpetuate the culture, to continue the culture. But I think there’s something a priori, inherent, in human nature in that it seeks, ultimately, good, things that are good and truthful.
So Rome and Greece had it right in terms of sort of the “hard drive”, that material parts. But they were missing the ultimate purpose… what do we seek? What do we aim at? It’s not we aim at the emperor, or the material thing itself, because that wouldn’t motivate. So, what’s going to be the motivating factor?
DZ: Although it does motivate a lot of people, the purely material.
