Celebrating our shared humanity

According to a recent investigative report in my local newspaper, classical Christian education promotes white supremacy. The terms “Western” and “Western civilization” are “euphemisms for whiteness,” suggests one of the articles. “You hear Judeo-Christian or you hear Western,” a professor quoted in the investigative report declared, “and it is a very thinly veiled dog whistle term for white.”

Augustine of Hippo, whose works make appearances in almost every classical school, would be shocked by the news that classical education promotes white supremacy. Augustine, after all, was a North African Berber. He was also the towering theological influence of the Christian Church, even as Rome and its empire were in decline.

The news that classical texts are Trojan horses for whiteness would have surprised Frederick Douglass, as well. The orator studied the speeches of Cicero so he could speak more eloquently in defense of equality for African Americans.

Anna Julia Cooper would have been equally shocked to discover that classical education is a dog whistle for whiteness. Newly emancipated after the Civil War, this young African American woman received a classical Christian education at Saint Augustine’s Normal School. By the time she started college, Cooper had read works by Caesar, Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero in Latin, in addition to her studies in Greek. She went on to become the president of Frelinghuysen University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C. Cooper’s experiences reveal, in the words of professors Anika Prather and Angel Parham, that “classical Christian education is also part of Black history.”

Classical Christian education stands in a long tradition that emphasizes seeking truth, goodness, and beauty through the diverse corpus of texts that have shaped Western civilization. Classical education does not merely prepare students for professions; it equips them to live as free people who know the purpose of their labors. “The true college will ever have one goal,” W.E.B. DuBois declared, “not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of the life which meat nourishes.”

What the texts that form the framework of classical education promote is not ethnic supremacy but shared humanity. In his sophomore year of high school, Dominican immigrant Roosevelt Montás found a discarded Harvard Classics volume in the garbage near his apartment in Queens, N.Y. In those gilded pages, he read Plato’s dialogues with Socrates alongside works by Epictetus, a former slave who became a philosopher. “I found in Plato a genuine affirmation of my identity,” Montás reflected later. “It was not my identity as a Dominican immigrant that Socrates affirmed, but something more fundamental.” He went on to earn a doctorate in English at Columbia University where he now serves as a senior lecturer.

Montás is not alone in his experience of the great texts of Western civilization. Introducing children to these works consistently contributes to academic success in ethnically and economically diverse communities. The Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy Charter Schools in New York City, promoted by Barack Obama as models for inner-city educational reform, eliminated racial achievement gaps and enrolled nearly all of their graduates in college. One key component of the Promise Academy curriculum has been “early exposure to literary classics,” particularly the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Despite the proven value of classical schools, many children in low-income families have no access to such education. One way that some states have reduced this barrier is by allowing school tax dollars to follow students into the schools that their parents choose. According to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, the quality of all urban education could improve “if America allowed vouchers or charter schools that would foster more competition in urban school districts.” Another way to provide broader access to better education would be to follow the pattern of Hope Academy in Minneapolis, where income-adjusted tuition rates and private donors combine to make classical Christian education available to children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

I do not deny that some individuals have attempted to smuggle reprehensible ideologies into classical education. Yet, any attempt to tie classical Christian schooling to white supremacy reveals deep ignorance of the sources that sustain such education. The texts of classical antiquity emerged from diverse contexts around the Mediterranean Sea at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In the words of two African American university professors, “Have the classics and classical education at times been used to exclude and oppress? They certainly have. Is exclusion and oppression innate to an education steeped in the history and literature of the Mediterranean crossroads? Certainly not.”

Adoption has blessed our household with children from four different ethnic backgrounds. My wife and I have sent them to classical schools to prepare them to take their place in a perennial conversation that crosses cultural boundaries so each one of them might become “a citizen of the world” for the sake of the gospel. Training in classical texts is no dog whistle for white supremacy. Done well, classical Christian education can be a trumpet call of liberty, inviting students to see the common humanity in every ethnicity.