3/11/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Jack Miller Center President Hans Zeiger’s piece at City Journal, which discusses how the strategies of both red and blue states when it comes to the humanities fall short. “With a bit of legislative creativity,” he argues, “land-grant schools can lead a renaissance in the traditional liberal arts.” Zeiger notes how multiple “states across the country have created Schools of Civic Thought,” which are “independent academic programs devoted to interdisciplinary study of foundational political, economic, and philosophical ideas and their application in a free society.” These programs are geared toward what it “means to live full lives both as citizens and as human beings.” Among these various schools are the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the Institute for American Civics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, which is being established at The Ohio State University. Zeiger concludes by arguing that these “new schools represent an innovative approach to fulfilling the mission of public universities, which for too long has been forsaken.” After all, the founding fathers understood that “civics is foundational to a just society and a sustainable economic order.”

At RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski examines the biggest battles going on in the classical education movement today. He calls this growing movement, whose recent success was “prompted by the historic exodus of students during the pandemic,” as being “perhaps the biggest culture-war flashpoint in the current disruption of traditional public education.” Though many of these schools in the classical education network have links to the conservative movement or the political right more broadly, he says that “classical leaders reject the accusation that they are running a partisan enterprise." Instead, they are aiming “for something higher, in line with Aristotle’s teaching – to nurture in students a desire to find their own answers to the big question of what constitutes the good life.” Bielski cites a lecture that will be given by Columbia University senior lecturer Roosevelt Montás, who is a liberal, later this March as evidence of a movement that is broadening its horizons in the effort to make available to all students a solid education grounded in the Western canon.