TOCQUEWHO?

The Good and the Beautiful and the True: A Tocquevillian Perspective on a Charter School’s First Graduating Class (Terrence Moore, June 2003, Ashbrook)

America began with a charter, in fact with a series of charters. These charters were rather dry legal documents (which, by the way, our students have read) documents that a king would grant to a small number of people who wanted a better chance or a greater challenge than they could find back home in England doing the same, run-of-the-mill, expected things. The charter was a contract, then, full of promise, but wholly without spirit and life. It took courageous men and women, sometimes children, to give the document spirit and life. Well, you know the story from here. After these first bold pioneers, the Puritans and early Virginians, went to the new world and worked hard to build a new life in a new place and met with success, then others saw the possibilities. And many more came, generation after generation, until the multitudes of immigrants outgrew the original charters. They formed themselves into one people and discarded the narrow confines of the old charters in order to make one great charter founded upon the highest ideas of human dignity and freedom. That charter, of course, was the American Constitution.

American principles of freedom and self-government became the model for how a people ought to live together. Yet it took a foreign visitor to understand the magnitude of what the Americans had accomplished. That foreign visitor was Alexis de Tocqueville. Not only did Tocqueville explain the greatness of what the Americans had done, he also warned them of how their great achievements might be lost and undone by future generations. Specifically, Tocqueville applauded the pioneering spirit and hardiness of the early settlers. He also applauded the vast learning and wisdom and prudence of the authors of the Constitution. These men, by the way, had received a classical education. They knew their Greek and Roman history cold; they also studied the latest modern sciences, both natural science and political science. Tocqueville, the classically educated European who admired American democracy, was convinced that Americans would best preserve their liberty if they somehow combined their pioneering, can-do spirit with a love of the good and the beautiful and the true that came with a classical education (an education that heretofore only aristocrats had had the leisure and wealth to pursue).

What Tocqueville most feared about Americans was that their similarity, their equality, their sameness, their potential uniformity, their sometimes attachment to the practical over the theoretical, their seeming indifference to higher things of the mind, that all these and many other aspects of their character might lead to a stultifying mediocrity in their thought, a growing ignorance of their founding principles, and eventually a tyranny of the majority in their politics. He feared that Americans, lacking an aristocracy, would lose their taste for the good and the beautiful and the true that aristocracies had always upheld. Tocqueville, writing in the early nineteenth century, left it as an open question. Would Americans preserve their daring, their enterprising spirit--governed by a sense of the right and the true--or would they succumb to narrow envy, pettiness, and a tyranny of mediocrity in their government and their lives?

The obvious mediocrity of things like television is perhaps inevitable, but the intentional dumbing down of the education system is truly lamentable. Far better to provide a classical education, in order to ground students in their culture and their history, thus, hopefully, making them better citizens. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2003 7:54 AM