Beyond Skills: Why Democracy Needs the Classics
Teacher Robert C. Thornett makes a compelling case in Education Next for studying the classics: it’s not just an academic exercise, but a formative one, he says, particularly in shaping citizens who can sustain a healthy democracy. Thornett describes how, in a classroom discussion of Homer’s Iliad, students grappled with questions concerning leadership and the common good. Such conversations expose the heart of classical education: the pursuit of truth and goodness through dialogue with great texts.
Thornett also argues that democracy requires more than technical know-how. It requires citizens who are capable of partnership and moral judgment. Classical education—rooted in the Western liberal arts, and enriched by the stories of Homer, Plato, Augustine, and Shakespeare, among others—equips students with the examples and habits of thought that nurture this kind of civic virtue. Drawing on de Tocqueville, Thornett explains that free societies survive only when citizens resist radical individualism and cultivate shared responsibility.
Classical education, more generally, is rooted in the tradition of the seven liberal arts, which divided learning into the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). At its heart is the Great Books tradition: encountering foundational texts and engaging in Socratic dialogue in order to wrestle with life’s big questions. Classical education, therefore, isn’t stale or antiquarian by default; it seeks, fundamentally, to cultivate wisdom, and not merely impart knowledge.
In the context of the American school system, classical education was once the backbone of schooling. The Founding Fathers themselves were steeped in Greek, Roman, and biblical texts, and their political thought drew heavily from those sources. But as the 20th century elevated progressive and utilitarian models of schooling (focused more on training for jobs and social efficiency), the classics receded in favor of pragmatic curricula. In recent decades, however, there has been a revival of the classics, spurred by a few different movements: some charter networks, the growing popularity of homeschooling, and private institutions seeking an alternative to the politicized direction of much of modern education.
The revival of classical education offers something that many modern approaches neglect: a common cultural inheritance. In a time when public discourse feels fractured, the canon of Western thought provides a shared vocabulary and moral grounding. Liberty, in the American model, cannot be sustained without virtue, and virtue does not appear by accident; it must be taught and modeled. Reading The Iliad or Augustine’s Confessions isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about forming citizens who see beyond the immediate and cultivate a love for what is enduring.
And beyond that, classical education pushes back against a relativistic culture in which truth and morality are often seen as subjective. The great texts insist that there are standards of justice and beauty worth preserving and that human freedom is compatible with duty and order. These ideas reflect an essential value that we have historically shared: a republic requires citizens who can recognize not just their rights, but their responsibilities.
As teachers, we are not mere transmitters of information. We’re really in the business of shaping minds. Classical texts matter, because they provide a rich context for students to wrestle with timeless questions. What is courage? What is justice? What makes a leader honorable? In answering these questions, students are also forming their own moral compass. The study of classical works connects the young person’s imagination to an inheritance larger than himself.
Even in a pluralistic society, engaging deeply with the Western canon can give students the ability to converse meaningfully across differences. It promotes respect for reasoned disagreement, along with the ability to see the world not as a mere consumer, but as a participant in an ongoing civilizational story.
If democracy depends upon citizens who can think about the common good, what kind of education best prepares the next generation to live as responsible heirs of freedom—one that treats them merely as workers-in-training, or one that treats them as minds in need of wisdom?