We often hear from parents who are looking for a school that “shares their values.” And to be honest, we often represent ourselves that way—as a school community “committed” to a common set of “values” and with shared “desires” for our children. So, what’s wrong with that?
Well, nothing. And everything.
In the 1987 essay How Nietzsche Conquered America, Allan Bloom describes how “[e]ven those who deplore our current moral condition do so in the very language that exemplifies that condition.” It turns out that “[t]he gradual, unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in peoples’ articulation of the world.”
Have you heard anyone express an “opinion” recently? It doesn’t matter what the subject is, the sentence invariably begins with “I feel that….” This was not always so. But the Nietzschean revolution, as Bloom observes, was ushered in by intellectuals like Freud in the psychological realm, so that as Philip Rieff notes, “‘I believe,’ the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to ‘one feels,’ the caveat of the therapeutic.”
Why should we care? Because “[k]nowledge of this fascinating intellectual history is required in order to understand ourselves”; because we must “heighten awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting”; and because, quite frankly, it has quietly become the language of education in America.
American schools constantly talk about “empowering” students; cater to their unique “personalities”; study different “worldviews”; encourage respect for other “lifestyles”; and of course, emphasize the need to find common “values”—yet many of these words are all “easily traced to Nietzsche [and] are now practically American slang….”
What that means is that “the dominant idea of our time—that all beliefs issue from the self and have no other validation,” has come to us by way of “the language derived from nihilism [and] has become a part of [our] education[ ]. * * * Americans today pursue happiness in ways determined by that language.”
By contrast, the ancients sought happiness—eudaimonia—by seeking virtue—arete. And the language they employed reflects that. This is why classical education is concerned with what is true, and good, and beautiful. It does so by acknowledging objective reality, by recognizing the role of divine revelation, and affirming the importance of the faculty of human reason.
As Bloom makes clear, “[v]alues are not the product of reason, and it is fruitless to seek them in order to find the truth or the good life.” So let us start by acknowledging that we don’t need schools that “share our values”—we need schools that are simply and objectively good. It is our mission to ensure that Columbus Classical Academy is and remains just that.
