Richard M Gamble

Frustrated with the continuing educational crisis of our time, concerned parents, teachers, and students sense that true reform requires more than innovative classroom technology, standardized tests, or skills training. An older tradition-the Great Tradition-of education in the West is waiting to be heard. Since antiquity, the Great Tradition has defined education first and foremost as the hard work of rightly ordering the human soul, helping it to love what it ought to love, and helping it to know itself and its maker. In the classical and Christian tradition, the formation of the soul in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence took precedence over all else, including instrumental training aimed at the inculcation of "useful" knowledge. Edited by historian Richard Gamble, this anthology reconstructs a centuries-long conversation about the goals, conditions, and ultimate value of true education. Spanning more than two millennia, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary writers, it includes substantial excerpts from more than sixty seminal writings on education. Represented here are the wisdom and insight of such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Eric Voegelin. In an unbroken chain of giving and receiving, "The Great Tradition" embraced the accumulated wisdom of the past and understood education as the initiation of students into a body of truth. This unique collection is designed to help parents, students, and teachers reconnect with this noble legacy, to articulate a coherent defense of the liberal arts tradition, and to do battle with the modern utilitarians and vocationalists who dominate educational theory and practice.

[...]it was national leaders who most urgently needed the right kind of moral education to bring an ethical center back to a centrifugal world. The president and his circle came to embrace the war as the means to global transformation, the end of the old order and the beginning of the final, perfect, and universal reign of justice, peace, and harmony, the triumph of "service" over "selfishness"-the worst sin in the progressives' Decalogue. In seven thematic chapters, Smith covers Babbitt's conception of human nature, the naturalist presuppositions at the root of both modern science and sentimentalism, the dangers of democracy divorced from self-control, idealism as inherently revolutionary, imperialism as the inevitable consequence of false democracy, vague and lazy "brotherhood" as a sham form of cosmopolitanism, and Babbitt's continuing relevance to the foreign-policy alternatives offered by Francis Fukuyama, Henry Kissinger, and Samuel Huntington. Page by page, Smith led me to consider the sources of constraint (what Walter McDougall helpfully calls an ethic of "self-containment") that had defined U.S. foreign policy until removed in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and then most dramatically in World War I. How did America lose its fear of going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams called the temptation in a phrase once celebrated for its wisdom, especially by George Kennan during the Cold War. The conflicting visions of U.S. foreign policy-the answers to the question, "What does America owe the world?"-were on full display already in the 1820s as the House of Representatives debated even modest and largely symbolic aid to the Greek War for Independence against the Ottoman Empire.

[...]our panel at the Conference on Faith and History in October 2018, I doubt I had spent much time thinking about religious sources per se, that is, religious sources as a distinct category with their own peculiarities and problems that demand a distinct approach or at least a certain caution to handle them well. In America (not uniquely but perhaps especially) we have long experience with sermons that sound more like moral philosophy or political speeches than homilies, and we have long experience with "secular" speeches that not only sound like sermons and operate in the prophetic mode but quote a lot of scripture and mimic the rhetoric and cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. [...]I have also learned to take seriously Oakeshott's problem of "survivals." Consider James Byrd's widely praised book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution.4 Byrd undertook a massive project to assemble sermons from the late eighteenth century in order to understand how patriots (mostly preachers) used the Bible to justify the war, define the meaning of their cause, and characterize colonial resistance and the British enemy.