Most of the time the unintended consequences of liberal polices are terrible, mostly because the people who make the decisions don’t have to live with the consequences and intentionally engineer the most immediate consequences to benefit themselves, leaving others to live with the adverse effects that come later.
The Common Core educational curriculum is a pretty good example of something that looked promising at first but quickly lost its luster as people had some experience with it. Parents were alarmed to see their kids coming home with very odd math homework, fewer novels to read, and more “Time magazine for kids.” While 45 states initially adopted Common Core, many have since reversed those decisions after realizing that public education was going to be made even worse than it already was.
But then something wholly unexpected happened, something the proponents of Commmon Core never intended. Classical education in the United States had started growing long before Common Core came on the scene, but the response to Common Core was to dramatically acceleration the Classical Education movement, especially in Charter schools.
In a new book, Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, by Gene Edward Veith and Andrew Kern, the authors state their purpose in writing the book this way:
When applied to education, [progressivism] dictates that students are no longer to be taught to know permanently true, good, and beautiful things because such things do not exist (at worst) or are simply unknowable (at best). Instead, the children are taught to adopt to their environment…
If the truth cannot be known and does not govern human societies, then there is nothing to restrain the rulers. If rights are not derived from truth, then they are granted by the ever-changing state. Liberty and knowable truth are interdependent.
Joy Pullman writes at The Federalist about Ridgeview High School, a charter school in Ft. Collins, Colorado, that is at the forefront of the classical education movement. She writes:
Ridgeview is a classical school, where children learn phonics, traditional math and science, Latin, and the Western and American heritage. They study the great books and receive explicit instruction in art and music. In other words, they study the real liberal arts: what centuries of Western leaders, including America’s founders, have considered necessary instruction for free men who govern themselves.
‘We believed everybody should have access to a good public education, and is capable of it.’
Because it’s a public charter school started and managed by a board of local parents, students attend for free—if they can get in. U.S. News and World Report consistently ranks Ridgeview’s high school among the best in the state and nation, based on test scores faculty consider a joke because the tests measure disjointed collections of factoids.“We went the charter route [instead of starting a private school] because we believed everybody should have access to a good public education, and is capable of it,” said Peggy Schunk, a mother who helped found the school and who now runs the school’s admissions and human resources.
As the true liberal arts evaporate from college campuses, they are blooming within younger soil. Terrence Moore, Ridgeview’s founding principal, now travels the nation starting other schools modeled after Ridgeview for an initiative spearheaded by Hillsdale College (my alma mater). The newly released third edition of “Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America” succinctly details classical education and its recent boom, which includes the Hillsdale-supported charters and others, as well as a spike in classical private and home schools.
‘Classical education is the means to freedom, the sine qua non of a free people.’
In the Common Core era, many parents have taken to classical education for respite, opening new schools public and private and flocking to homeschooling organizations such as Classical Conversations (disclosure: my son attends a CC co-op, and my husband ran one for two years). Catholics, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelicals have in recent years started and expanded societies for classical learning that offer teacher training, curriculum, publications, and seminars. “Classical Education,” the book, succinctly details its subject’s prominent expressions.“Classical education is always inclined, by nature, toward decentralization, toward localism, towards connecting authority with responsibility,” said the book’s coauthor, Andrew Kern, the founder of the CiRCE Institute, which publishes curriculum and holds seminars for classical educators. It, too, is growing. “You’re not self-governing if you can’t rule yourself. Classical education is the means to freedom, the sine qua non of a free people, because it trains people in self-governance, in perceiving and living with the truth.”
Classical education has always prepared young people for the task of forging a good life for themselves and for their fellow citizens. The hope for a future America that will not be the one the likes of Barack Obama dream of will be made possible if the movement back to classical education keeps up and gains even more steam. Ironically and very propitiously the Common Core movement is helping to give it momentum.
Barack Obama’s “hope and change” turned out to be what liberal slogans always come to represent, just the opposite of what purport to convey. Hope and change became hype and chains, anger and division, spite and revenge, discord and confusion. The Classical education movement in America holds our real hope and real change for the betterment of all citizens.
Finally, an unintended consequence of a liberal public policy that we can all appreciate.
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