Customer Reviews

Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've owned this book since it was first published. I've also had the honor of meeting its author, who has followed the precepts he espouses throughout his life.

That life hasn't always been easy. Despite the harsh setbacks he has been dealt, David V. Hicks has modeled a life that champions valor and virtue, words that almost have disappeared from our civic discourse.

For parents and pupils alike, the question Hicks poses is fundamental: what is the chief purpose of education? Is it merely to build a skill set for a technological age, ignoring issues of honesty, integrity, courage, honor, duty, commitment, and personal sacrifice for the good of the larger community? Or do those fundamental virtues (an old-fashioned perspective, but a perspective central in the classical world) still have importance to modern education?

Bill Bennett has explored this territory, but Hicks was there first. For David V. Hicks, education always has been about paiedea, modeling the classical virtues both in the persons of the teachers and in the materials selected for instruction so as to teach them to pupils. And Hicks argues that stories about heroism, valor, and self-sacrifice are more compelling to pupils than "Dick, Jane, and Spot" in any event. So character-based education is inherently more interesting, and more effective, than more conventional "modern" fare in any event.

Hicks's careful scholarship teaches both the principles of classical (character-building) education, and offers a strategy for integrating the best aspects of that educational philosophy into the modern classroom.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remind us that our children will need more than familiarity with technology to prevail in this new type of warfare. They will need all the courage, tenacity, and valor they can learn, both in school, from their parents and other role models, and from their brothers and sisters in this struggle. These new "fair and foul" times demand revival of our ancient virtue and ancient valor.

Although the words "virtue" and "valor" almost have vanished from our collective vocabularies, we defeated the Nazis and fascists with these qualities of character. In this dangerous new age, our children will require more than technical skills. We must do what we can to teach them the classical virtues at the foundation of our civilization. Hicks's book is the classic primer in this important subject.

Having taught in two classical high schools (ACCS charter members), two homeschool consoria, a Big 12 university, and homeschooling my own kids I can say that the approach described by Hicks is the best. Now I'm a dedicated Adlerian (Mortimer, not Alfred) and I loves me my Great Books--so does Hicks, and he lays out his syllabus in great detail in this book. But he goes further in addressing the education of the *character* of students and--which is helpful for use in a traditional school setting--he focuses on the necessity of the right kind of *teachers*. The curriculum is actually less important than the teacher. Give a dunce of a teacher the best curriculum in the world and they'll make it boring. Give a great teacher the worst textbook in the world and they'll teach you all kinds of things. Get the curriculum in place, but for the love of God get some teachers that know what to do with it and don't churn out kids who can ace a classics exam, but aren't humble and courageous. Don't settle for anything less than the best of both worlds. If you dig that, you'll dig this book!

The other reviewers have given some excellent information about this book and its author, but they might give you the impression that this book is for the professional teacher in an institutional setting. That would be incorrect. I'm a homeschooling mom with no professional educational training, and this is the best book on education that I've read. Many homeschoolers have read Charlotte Mason (and he references her work in the bibliography), but Hicks gave me a better understanding of what CM was teaching. His work is also liberating. Classical education isn't a list of books to be read, it isn't stages of child development (ala Sayers) and it isn't tacking on Latin, Logic and Rhetoric classes to an already loaded schedule. The purpose of education is to lead children to be adults and to mold their character. The teacher's character and his or her method matters more than the content of the curriculum.

Hicks also makes a strong argument for classical education for everyone, not just for an elite highly intellectual group of students as one reviewer implied. All forms of government have a potential toward tyrrany, and classical education teaches the student in a democracy: 1)the balance between his obligations to society, state and Church and his need for them 2) to discriminate and judge soundly, 3) that freedom is good to the degree that it allows all the ability to develop their potential, but that freedom for its own sake leads to tyrrany, 4)to be more eager to fulfill their obligations than to demand their rights (an excess of democratic society that needs tempering.)

I reread this book every summer to refresh and refocus on my goals, and to be reminded of why I do this in the first place. I am following in the old paths, the proven paths. This is the only book on education that I recommend to homeschoolers anymore.

This book offers the most profound critique of contemporary education I have read, and it also offers the most hopeful vision for moving forward. That vision is classical studies, understood in democratic and Christian ways. What would be helpful now would be a thousand brief articles and essays introducing its many insights to a broader audience.

I work for a Principle Approach school that is considering combining Bible, History, and Literature into one discipline. We were assigned this book to read. In a nutshell:

1. Hicks does a great job describing Greek classical education. However, the manner in which he does often sounds prescriptive.

2. Thankfully, he later addresses how Christianity supplied the missing pieces. However, rather than describe Christianity as "crowning" classical education I would say Christianity provided the foundation upon which the honorable aspects of classical education was set. In any event, it was only upon reading this section that I realized Hicks was advocating a redeemed form of classical education.

3. His diagnosis of the modern education system is extraordinarily accurate. I will go a step further and argue that the government school system is beyond reform. It is fundamentally flawed.

4. The "Humane Letters" concept--combining disciplines into unit studies--is a fantastic idea and would give students the big picture necessary for mastery. My only concern is in finding qualified generalist teachers. There is something to be said about the specialized division of labor.

So, while I can say I am better off for having read this book, I found it rather redundant. In other words, the Principle Approach is classical in that it requires students to reason from cause to effect. We already engage in a dialectical pursuit of truth in our classrooms. The major difference is that Hicks uses pagan Greek language to describe Christian concepts, which concerns me.

Three stars (really three and a half but rounding up to four would seem like a rather ringing endorsement) but nevertheless worth the read.

Hicks' book is a sort of olde-style long essay on what it means to be educated and what values a classical education will instill in the young. It is laced with allusions taken from everyone from Halberstam to Heraclitus; in general it comes across as grecophilic lament at the newfangled tendencies to teach to the lowest common denominator.

I dare not argue with Hicks, for his knowledge of the philosophy of education surely trumps my own. But from a practical side, I do find fault in the program of study that he implies through most of the book and makes partially explicit toward the end. Unfortunately, only a very few young minds could withstand the pressures that Hicks advocates we place on them. If he hopes to educate the few, then those few will be very well served by his agenda.

I am heartily in favour of educating the few and pushing even the best beyond their limites, but I suspect a general implementation of Hicks' theories would be disasterous. This may be a weakness of our age, but I think it's probably just a weakness of Hicks' book.