Does Classical Education Ignore Ecclesiastes 7:10?

Last week I was invited to give an address to a group of donors for a classical Christian school that will open, Lord willing, next fall in Charlotte. This is the text of my talk.

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“Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

Ecclesiastes 7:10

Let’s address the awkward elephant in the room. I am here in part to convince you to support the formation and operation of a classical Christian school. And yet I have chosen a passage that, at least on the surface, seems to warn you not to part with your money in this way. After all, isn’t classical education a fancy way of saying, “The former days were better than these”?

We can be forgiven for thinking so. Classical education is, after all, constantly looking backward. It preoccupies itself with dead people and dead languages. It talks longingly of things like “western civilization” or “the great tradition.” The kind of school you are being asked to support is the kind of school where the past is never really past.

So, instead of listing out ten reasons why all of you should be eager to raise a generation molded in this spirit, I have decided to raise the uncomfortable reality of Ecclesiastes 7:10.

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We have here a passage that, by wisdom literature standards especially, is an unusually straightforward, bald statement. There is no Hebrew word study that flips the apparent meaning of the English. It’s exactly what it looks like. Solomon says, “You know those good old days you always talk about? They weren’t so good, and you shouldn’t keep saying they were.” Whoops! There goes Greco-Roman studies. There goes Latin. There go the biographies of famous men of world history. Right?

Well, I don’t quite think so. In fact, I think meditating on this passage actually gives us exactly what we need to learn from the past well. Solomon is not telling us that nothing good happened to human society a long time ago. He’s not telling us to never look backward. In fact, I think he’s warning us about what happens when we forget the past.

What I’d like to convince you in the short time I have with you tonight is that the peril of an education rooted in the past is also its power. This passage warns against something real, and those of us in this room, predisposed to classical and conservative thinking, are probably more prone to what it warns against than the average Joe. But this peril, if resisted, becomes a power, and it’s a power that a frantic, digital, “and now, this” world desperately needs.

C.S. Lewis once observed that the only people who know the true power of temptation are the ones who resist it. A person who surrenders to lust or anger at the first provocation knows less about it than the one who withstands them. In other words, to really know the allure of temptation, you have to stand above it, not underneath it. Something similar is true about our relationship to the past. In order to really understand it, to interpret it wisely and accurately, we can’t be trapped into a hapless nostalgia for it. We can’t be looking at the next generation, shaking our heads at them, and sighing, “Why were the former days better than these?”

That kind of knowledge of the past is foolish and ignorant. It paints the past with a fake gloss. Oftentimes, what we are thinking of the “good old days” is not really the days themselves, but the energy and happiness we felt when we were younger, back before self-consciousness, the pursuit of riches, and the frustrations of disappointed ambitions jaded us. What we are remembering is not history, but a state of mind. And Solomon warns us that this kind of truth-less nostalgia is not from wisdom.

There is real danger in this. One former pastor has written that in almost every instance of adultery that he counseled, the real motivation was not physical lust per se, but a lust for the feeling of youth and possibility. Casting a longing gaze back at one’s past is a habit that’s hard to stop once it gets going. Speaking frankly with you all tonight, I think this bad habit is gaining a particular steam in certain parts of conservative evangelicalism. There is a lot that passes for “political theology” or “cultural engagement” that amounts to little more than asking “why were the former days better than these.” Again, this pining for yesteryear not only misses the present, it gets the past wrong.

My hope and my confidence is that the Anselm School is not going to be a place for cultivating this kind of relationship with the past. Truthfully, it would be a lot easier for everyone in charge if it were. The kind of money, patronage, accolades, and kudos one can get for selling the dream of a time machine is serious. We get forceful reminders of this every time a lazy and ridiculous Star Wars or Harry Potter spinoff lights up the box office. Our family went to Disney World for the first time this past September. If empty nostalgia were a stock, I’d tell all of you to liquidate your retirement accounts and invest right now.

But what does it really accomplish? Very little. “Why were the former days better than these” is the mantra of every strained intergenerational relationship. It’s the doctrine behind divorce. It keeps the old cynical and the young paralyzed. My generation, the Millennial generation, has taken so much of the money, time, and soul that might have gone into marriage and family raising and given it to Disney and ComicCon. They are escaping the insecurity of the present through what they think is their past. It is not from wisdom that we do this.

Ok, now that we are all depressed, what is the answer? Here’s where I think the peril of classical education can become its power.

What we need is not nostalgia, but temporal bandwidth. Baylor professor Alan Jacobs was the first person I read use the term “temporal bandwidth.” It means cultivating an ability to see things not just the way they look right now, but the way they have been in the past. To do that, you have to have more than a sentimental attachment to the past. You have to really know it—know it truthfully.

Everybody these days wants to be a journalist. Everybody wants to be the freelance reporter or pundit who breaks the big story, blows the big whistle, or takes the brave stand. I’m glad there are journalists! But one of the things I think classical schools like the Anselm School can do to serve the church and the broader American republic is to make students want to be historians, too. A journalist tells you to look at your window at what’s happening. A historian tells you to look back through the past to see what’s already happened. And you know what happens many times? The journalist and the historian both see the same thing.

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Solomon knew this too. “There is nothing new under the sun.” When we look into the past out of wisdom rather than foolishness, we don’t ask, “Why are the former days better than these,” but, “How are the former days like these?” Classical education directs our attention to certain historical realities precisely because those realities clarify the foundational truths of human nature, human culture, human spirituality, and more. We look to the great books of the Western tradition not because those books were written in a golden age we seek to recreate, but because those books are great precisely because they said something that’s still true today.

Our digital lives work against temporal bandwidth every day. The news feed refreshes, and instantly, our attention spans are captive to the tyranny of the now. Every election is the most important election of our lifetimes. Every issue facing the church or the country is “unprecedented.” I’m not talking down the very real problems we face as people in the 21^st century. What I am saying is that we live in a culture that pushes us away from connection to the past.

Classical education is one way of fighting for that reconnection. It’s not the only way. But one reason I think many Christian families are opting for it these days is that classical education seems to rest on a surer foundation. When you take the providence of God over the city of man seriously, when you understand human beings not as helpless creations of politics but as image-bearing and fallen agents of cosmic spiritual significance, you can’t help but think in terms of what’s eternal, permanent, and proven. It turns out Shakespeare knew something about men and women that sictoms and podcasts hosts take credit for. It turns out Plato knew something about government. It’s not that these dead people are giving us new data. It’s that they looked deeply into human nature.

Being plugged into this received wisdom helps us not idolize the past. Nostalgia and good memory are inversely related.

After the Exodus, Israel did two things. One, they brought the bones of Joseph with them. This was a rootedness to the past that reflected their trust in God’s promises and their obligations to their forefathers. But the second thing they did was pine for Egypt when the water and the meat ran scarce. This was not a truthful connection to their past, but a dishonest nostalgia that twisted it. When we look truthfully into the past, by looking through the Word of God, we see it for what it is, and we are able to take it with us the way Israel took Joseph’s remains: With faith that, as songwriter Andrew Peterson writes, “the great God of our fathers will be the great God of our children still.”

So I commend to you the Bible-centered, Christ-exalting, truth-seeking exercise of classical education. I ask us all to consider how this might fortify our faith in an age of endless novelty. And I challenge us all to take the past seriously enough not to romanticize it, not to hide in its ruins, but to walk forward in faith toward the mission that the risen Christ has for us in his world today. Thank you.