Classical education, done properly, is about love. It is about teaching our scholars to love the right things, in the right way, and in the right order. Indeed, as Augustine tells us, “it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love….”
And part of having virtue is loving one’s country. Despite what many will tell you today, America is a right and proper object of our love. Peggy Noonan’s article in anticipation of Memorial Day is about that very thing—instructing our children to love their country at a time when it is fashionable to teach them to do the very opposite.
Reflecting on the Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York published back in 1900, Noonan observes “[w]hat a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic,” as she catalogues some of the practical ways schools were to encourage children to love their country: memorizing and reciting poems and songs; telling the story of our flag; reminding them that America is unique in the world because it is a nation with an actual birthday; and reenacting those great events from our history. Schools today would rather churn out cynics than idealists, forgetting as Noonan reminds us that, “[k]ids live on dreams.”
I am proud to say that much of what the Manual of Patriotism suggests, we do here at Columbus Classical Academy. In our inaugural year, our scholars memorized and recited Emerson’s Concord Hymn and the Gettysburg Address; the Spring Concert was a walk through the history of our nation, with stories of the Underground Railroad and music by Aaron Copland; we started each day of school with the Regent’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance and a song, like America the Beautiful.
The bureaucrats and ideologues whose mission it is to disabuse children of any notion that America is lovable frequently level accusations at classical schools like ours, that we are nationalistic and right-wing political enterprises. Those accusations are ignorant, inaccurate, and unfair…most of the time. But they are a reminder, as well, of the importance of keeping our eye on true virtue—the proper ordering of our loves—so that teaching a patriotic love of America does not transmogrify into a coarse and ugly partisan project. That is not our school, but it can happen.
It is so vitally important that we remember that love of country, while a good and beautiful thing, nonetheless, is not our first and highest love. It is not first and highest, because it is not eternal. For as C.S. Lewis reminds us in the Weight of Glory, “[t]here are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.” America is mortal; the souls of our scholars are not. So long as we don’t forget that, our love of country will remain virtuous and rightly ordered, and not become the vicious nationalism of which we’re accused.
Noonan concludes her piece:
“Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.
Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen.”
It reminded me of a note my father wrote to me in an old, 1879 edition of a McGuffey’s Reader that my parents gave me as a Christmas gift back in 2008, when I was a young lawyer and long before I ever had any visions of helping to start a classical school. He wrote to me:
“An old book that gives us a window on the past, the good roots of a good people. It’s hard in reading it not to mourn what we have lost. But perhaps there is a renewable spirit, a flame that can be rekindled. For you to consider.”
The good root of this good people has always been our virtue—our rightly ordered loves, first of God, then of our neighbor and our nation.
At Columbus Classical Academy, the flame is being rekindled. Have a wonderful summer.
