Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals,” wrote philosopher G.K. Chesterton in 1910. “They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” In reality, what gives worthwhile “old ideals” their value is not that they’re old — it’s that they’re eternal.
So many today exhibit chronological chauvinism: the belief that something new is better simply because it is new. Yet, as history shows, Covid-19 was new in 2019 and the Black Plague was new in 1347 Europe. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything new we can’t live without. However, necessary for life and health — both physical and spiritual — are many ancient things: water, food, shelter, Truth, and love.
This awareness is driving a movement back toward the eternal in American education. Parents are rejecting modern schooling, with its bells, whistles, and wokeness, in favor of “classical education.”
This isn’t your father’s schooling; it may not even be your grandfather’s. But it very well may be your great-grandfather’s. Classical schools in the U.S. focus on a traditional liberal-arts education: Western history and literature (often “Great Books”), phonics and grammar, Latin (sometimes Greek), math and science taught as coherent subjects, and training in the trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
The stated aim is forming intellect and character — truth, goodness, beauty, and civic virtue — rather than job skills or the latest pedagogical trends. Many classical schools are Christian; others, including some Hillsdale-affiliated charters, emphasize an American civic and Western tradition without being church schools.
Note that just as “stay-at-home moms” were once simply “moms,” “classical schooling” was once simply “schooling.” More Americans now realize this — the original purpose of education should return to its timeless roots.
Recent reports indicate that classical education now spans over 1,500 public, private and charter schools serving nearly 700,000 students, with Fordham reporting 264 new classical schools since 2019. Families across communities are crossing town, joining waitlists, and making sacrifices to choose models built around traditional educational methods. They seek uniforms, teacher-led instruction, and a clear answer to the question of what an educated child should know.
The difference is immediately apparent. In a classical school, order is the first thing you notice. A school leader stands at the front door, welcoming each child by name and shaking every hand before the day begins. As you walk toward a classroom, a student meets you at the threshold — looking you in the eye, shaking your hand, and saying, “Welcome to our classroom.” This class greeter role rotates among children.
Inside, the morning begins with habits older than modern education debates. Children stand and recite poems they’ve committed to memory, perhaps by Stevenson or Longfellow. They practice language sounds, arithmetic rules, and the names of states and rivers. None of this is filmed for a dashboard or scored by state accountability systems. It’s precisely this deliberate work of forming a mind that hundreds of thousands of American families are now seeking.
They’re seeking this because American education has fallen under the control of those who promote newness without substance. In chronological chauvinism’s grip, government schools spend millions yearly on pedagogies that are often outdated and occasionally new — but rarely timeless.
For example, the Pacific Educational Group has made millions teaching “white privilege” peppered with Marxist dogma to schoolteachers. It claims hard work and future planning are “white” cultural traits and promotes “collectivism.”
This error of bias toward the new is not new itself. As Chesterton wrote in 1910 (in What’s Wrong With the World):
“The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea.”
Prioritizing the “old” is common sense. It’s also reflected in everyday behavior: among the newest — kids — the most favored foods and sports are ancient (e.g., pizza and basketball). When ameliorating a child’s headache, we don’t administer new drugs with no track record; we give aspirin, invented in 1899. And when my mother was hospitalized years ago, medical staff visited her, curious about her “secret” to longevity — they asked what she ate and how she lived, not the habits of a 20-year-old.
Likewise, old ideas often outlast new ones because they were valuable enough to become timeless. This is always true when they’re eternal.
This brings us to chronological chauvinism: a prerequisite for believing in “eternal” ideas is understanding that Truth — which transcends time, place, and people — exists. Once you realize this, old ideas can be valuable because they transmit Truth. Yet most people today are moral relativists or nihilists; they see virtues as mere values. To such people, “old” ideas are just old — they cannot be eternal, only outdated. They can never transmit Truth, universally applicable, only fleeting tastes and provisional preferences.
Thus, classical education — with its greater basis in the eternal — doesn’t appear positive to these people but as yesterday’s news. Their feelings tell them they want the latest iPhone and the “latest” educational ideas.
If educational ideas don’t transmit Truth, they don’t belong in schools. And if educators don’t believe in Truth, neither do they.
