We have to thank this form of education

Classical Education & Friendship

By Gregory Roper

A classical education has a particular view of the human as rational and free, capable of the truth, open to and longing for the beautiful, and able to choose and act toward the good. It is also the root of many virtuous friendships, encouraging students to see in one another the shared truth, freedom, and rationality they are taught to admire.

It was a Spring night, and I was in the Soccer-Mom Honda Odyssey, picking up a group of eighth graders, all of them classmates with my son at his classical charter school, after yet another Marvel Avengers film. Like any group of adolescent boys, they piled into the van with goofy physical energy, chatting about the special effects and their favorite characters. I did the parent thing, listening and yet trying not to impose, my role the dad, not the buddy.

And then something odd welled up from the back of the van. Someone started it, and the rest, barely missing a beat, chimed in:

Hwaet, we gardena        in geardagum

þeodcyniga                      þrym gefrunon,

hu ða aethelingas           ellen fremedon!

They kept going, with increasing enthusiasm. There were a couple of stumbles by one or two voices, but most of them had it cold, and they ended on the last half-line with a resounding roar:

Oft Scyld Scefyng            sceaþena þreatum,

Monegum mægþum       meodosetla ofteah,

Egsode eorlas,                  syþþan aerest wearð

Feasceaft funden;            he þæs frofre gebad,

Weox under wolcnum    weorþmyndum þah,

Oð þaet him aeghwylc     ymbsittendra

Ofer hronrade                   hyran scolde,

Gomban gyldan;               þæt waes god cyning!

Now, was there a bit of self-mocking irony in their performance of the opening lines of Beowulf? You bet; these were teenage boys, after all, laughing at themselves, sheepishly amazed that they were doing this.  They knew they were doing something that had been imposed on them by their teachers, and had caused many of them considerable effort and strain, and which had led to much whining and complaining at home during the process. In their voices was also the clear understanding that, outside of that van, anywhere in the rest of American culture—especially in the rest of American, suburban, adolescent culture—their recitation would mark them as, to use their own language, “turbo-Geeks.” But they did it. And they were, despite the irony and self-mockery, strangely proud of themselves. They had created a kind of fellowship over their turbo-Geek recitation. They called one another friends over, by, and through their recitation of these opening lines of Beowulf.

I want to emphasize that these were, in every other respect, pretty darned normal boys. They played soccer and baseball and participated in martial arts and went camping and hiking, and were about to be formed into a neophyte varsity rugby team by an ambitious pair of coach-brothers who love the sport. Just a year or so before, my son would get together for an evening-long “play date” with his public school seventh-grade friends, staring at a giant TV screen with game controllers in their hands, while the moms sat in the kitchen sipping chardonnay. But something had changed since we pulled him out of the upscale, well-funded suburban public district—we had bought our small house in this area precisely for that good—and put him in the start-up, underfunded, classical charter school. Now he had different kinds of fun, which led to different kinds of friends. At a birthday party, held under a picnic awning at a public park rather than in a vast bowling/gaming warehouse, I pulled up to find eighth graders playing on the swings, throwing around a football. At another, the birthday girl paused in a game of charades, asking me, “Dr. Roper, you study the Middle Ages, so you would know—is it GA wain or Ga WAIN? Please please let it be Ga WAIN!?” She rushed back to her friends, afire with my answer.

What had happened to my son? Who were these people with whom he was associating? Why did he, and his classmates, seem to be, well, kids again, more or less youthful and innocent in the way childhood and early adolescence should be, and yet in other ways older, more intellectual, wiser than the jaded, homo semper onlinicus adolescents in his public school? What had happened to their play? Why did it seem more youthful, more fun, happier, more energizing, than the play my son had engaged in before? Why did the quality of his friendships seem to be so much better?

I want to suggest that it was—is—this certain kind of education that has come to be called “classical” or, more historically, “liberal”[1] that is at the root of this, and that one of the great goods it produces is a kind of friendship that Aristotle and Cicero and C.S. Lewis would recognize. All teenagers are, in Aristotle’s term, gregarious, but these had become, to use his contrasting term, social. It is my contention that the very proponents of this kind of education—headmasters, teachers, scholars, and advocates—need to talk about this great good much more, for it could be the greatest good these schools achieve.

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