Education, the cultivation of wisdom and virtue

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In 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence, the population of the 13 colonies in America was just over 2.148 million. For comparison, the metropolitan area population of St. Louis is 2.221 million.

In that population of a little over 2 million people, the 13 colonies produced some of the most outstanding leaders our country — and perhaps the world — has ever known. They are called our Founding Fathers.

“Historians are in general agreement,” according to Wikipedia, “that six of the most prominent leaders of the Revolutionary Era of 1765–1791 are Founding Fathers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.”

Our Founding Fathers came from different backgrounds. Some were born into wealth, others like Hamilton — an orphan — were not. They were not always in agreement. Jefferson and Adams were political rivals who fought bitterly. They eventually reconciled and became close friends before their deaths on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

What set these men apart was their wisdom and virtue.

“Americans view the Founding Fathers in vacuo, isolated from the soil that nurtured them,” says Tracy Lee Simmons in his book Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. For the founders, says Simmons, instruction in wisdom and virtue came principally from two places: “the pulpit and the schoolroom.”

They received what we call a classical education. This began around 8-years old — not four or five.

According to Martin Cothran, in an article posted on MemoriaPress.com, “Students who went to school (as our nation was formed) were required to learn Latin and Greek grammar and to read the Roman historians Tacitus and Livy, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and to translate the Latin poetry of Vergil and Horace. A formal education also stressed the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the trivium), as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium).”

Of course, not everyone could afford an education at that time. That’s what makes it so unique that education at that time produced so many great leaders.

In Cothran’s article, he sites these three examples: Thomas Jefferson received early training in Latin, Greek, and French and then continued his formal education at a classical academy in preparation for attending the College of William and Mary, where his classical education continued, along with his study of law.

When James Madison applied at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), he had already read Vergil, Horace, Justinian, Caesar, Tacitus, Lucretius, Phaedrus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato.

When Alexander Hamilton entered King’s College (now Columbia University) in 1773, he was expected to have a mastery of Greek and Latin grammar, be able to read three orations from Cicero and Vergil’s Aeneid in the original Latin, and be able to translate the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin.

At that time, colleges did not ask for your ACT or SAT score. Who of us could pass the test to be admitted into a college in the 1700s? 

Other key figures during America’s founding received similar educations.

This classical education gave students respect for the lessons of history. “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided,” said Patrick Henry, “and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

Much was expected of our Founding Fathers during their education — the bar was very high. Today the bar gets lower and lower every year.

One group of students is excelling today — Asian students. Asian Americans make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population, but their children make up 24 percent at Stanford and 18 percent at Harvard, and 25 percent at both Columbia and Cornell.

I submit that our education system will excel once again when parents expect more from their children and when our schools focus on wisdom and virtue as opposed to Climate Change, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory and Woke Ideology.

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You can find Cothran’s complete article at: www.MemoriaPress.com/Articles/Classical-Education-Founding-Fathers/